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Courageand Fear is a meticulouslydocumented study of Lviv’s intelligentsia during the Second World War, as the Soviet and German occupationsobliterate the intricate social fabric of the city. This micro-history is told fromthe perspective of individuals, whose stories lost out to grand nationalnarratives.

Courage and Fear is a study of a multicultural city in times when all norms collapse. Ola Hnatiuk presents a meticulously documented portrait of Lviv’s ethnically diverse intelligentsia during World War Two. As the Soviet, Nazi, and once again Soviet occupations tear the city’s social fabric apart, groups of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish doctors, academics, and artists try to survive, struggling to manage complex relationships and to uphold their ethos. As their pre-war lives are violently upended, courage and fear shape their actions. Ola Hnatiuk employs diverse sources in several languages to tell the story of Lviv from a multi-ethnic perspective and to challenge the national narratives dominant in Central and Eastern Europe.

“Considering how painful and not talked-through questions from our very recent history remain for us, it is difﬁcult to overestimate the importance of Ola Hnatiuk’s work. It appears that we all, one way or another, will have to answer some very uncomfortable questions in the very near future. Books such as this one will make that a little easier.” —Serhiy Zhadan, author

“Thoughtful, insightful, exceptionally well researched and moving at the same time, Courage and Fear is the book that plunges the reader into the depth of the history in one of the most contested places on the European map. The city known in the twentieth century as Lemberg, Lwow, Lvov and Lviv, had more nationalities and states that claimed it than the multiplicity of its names might suggest. Ola Hnatiuk manages to weave the personal stories of the Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian citizens of the city with the stories of the powerful states and dictators that tried to control them in the tapestry that reveals the Europe’s tragedies of World War II era in a new scholarly and human dimension. A must read for anyone who wants to understand the past and grasp the essence of the present struggles of Ukraine and its citizens.” —Serhii Plokhy, Harvard University

“[Courage and Fear] is much more than a memoir. … What is novel here is the treatment of the sources as points of departure for the construction of individual lives and milieus, rather than for narratives about nations and institutions. The outcome is an image of Lwów that is, frankly, unsurpassed in its intellectual and emotional richness, in Polish or for that matter in any other language that I know. … [Hnatiuk’s] book is written at the literary level of the very best of the memoirs, but it is also as critical, and indeed more critical of the sources than academic monographs. She sees through the problems of individual perception as well as the problems of national historical narration.” —Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History, Yale University

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