Sokal (, romanized: Sokal) is a city located on the Bug River in Chervonohrad Raion, Lviv Oblast of western Ukraine. It hosts the administration of Sokal urban hromada, one of the hromadas of Ukraine. The population is approximately History The first written mention of Sokal dates from 1377. In 1424, it received Magdeburg rights from Siemowit IV, Duke of Masovia, and in 1462, the town became part of Belz Voivodeship, Lesser Poland Province of the Polish Crown. On August 2, 1519, following the defeat of a Polish-Lithuanian army under Hetman Konstanty Ostrogski by Crimean Tatars, the town was razed by the invaders. Mikolaj Sep-Szarzynski later dedicated one of his poems to this battle. The town remained part of Poland until the first partition of Poland, when it was annexed by the Habsburg Empire, as part of Galicia. It was the capital of the Sokal district, one of the 78 Bezirkshauptmannschaften in the Austrian Galicia province (Crown land) in 1900. After World War I, possession of this province was disputed between Poland and Soviet Russia, until the 1921 Peace of Riga, which attributed Eastern Galicia to Poland. In the Second Polish Republic, Sokal was the seat of a county in Lwow Voivodeship. Sokal was in Polish territory until the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. From September 1939 until June 1941 (see Operation Barbarossa), it was part of Soviet-held territory. Before the Holocaust, Sokal had a Jewish population of 5,200; in addition, thousands of refugees from other parts of Poland arrived in Sokal. On September 17, 1942, 2,000 Jews from Sokal were deported to Bełżec extermination camp. There was a severe water shortage in the Sokal ghetto. On October 24, 1942, a further 2,500 Jews from the town were deported to the Bełżec gas chambers. On May 27, 1943, the ghetto was liquidated and the town declared 'judenrein'. Only 30 Jews from the town survived the war, including 15 members of 3 families rescued by the Halamajowa family, consisting of the Polish Catholic grandmother Franciszka, her daughter and son (see No.4 Street of Our Lady). The Soviet army recaptured the town in July 1944, though the western part of the town (the former village of Zhvirka) remained part of Poland between 1944 and 1951 (see 1951 Polish–Soviet territorial exchange). In the early 17th century, a large Baroque monastery of the Bernardine monks, together with the Roman Catholic church of the