At the 2^nd Assembly of the Union of Composers of Soviet Ukraine, Borys Lyatoshynsky (Sprawozdanie przewodniczącego [President’s Report], Archive of the B. M. Lyatoshynsky Study-Museum) undertakes yet another attempt to defend some composers’ modernist tendencies against attacks by colleagues. About Koffler he writes:

[…] formalism is by no means the same as atonality, just as using the polytonal method is not a sign of a composer’s formalism. […] My review of Koffler’s Symphony No. 4 ought to be interpreted in the light of atonality’s right to existence. I do not consider this piece to be very accessible, but I do believe the composer was certainly sincere in that music. It is his very language and style. If we demand that he should suddenly change his direction, this will only deprive his output of its sincerity and have the opposite effect of making his works formalist.

Germany attacks the Soviet Union on 22 June. Lwów comes under German occupation, which lasts from 29 June 1941 to 23 July 1944. Pogroms of Jews start in the city and continue intermittently till 27 July.

The German authorities close down the State Music Conservatoire.

Karl Lasch, governor of Distrikt Galizien, issues an announcement concerning the establishment of a Jewish ghetto in Lwów’s northern part, north of the railway line from Lwów to Tarnopol. It is decreed that all Jews have to move to the ghetto by 15 December. The Koffler family nevertheless still reside in their flat in the city centre, at Chmielowskiego Street. 

Koffler writes a letter from Lwów to Prince Andrzej Lubomirski in Przeworsk, asking the prince to provide shelter for him and his family. Koffler invokes the fact that both he and Lubomirski had been members of the Polish Music Society in Lwów and that ‘I and my wife are Poles, believing and practising Catholics, albeit of “non-Aryan” descent’. He desperately seeks sanctuary for himself, his wife, and six-year-old son.