Courage and Fear – Ola Hniatuk

“Dr. Hnatiuk’s work stands at the intersection of history, memoir, and literary criticism. She presents the testimony of ordinary people—though those from the Polish aristocracy and intelligentsia dominate—as they experienced the Soviet invasion in 1939 following the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. … In telling the stories of people who didn’t change the course of history and whose lives show the range of choices people made under duress—the good, the bad, and the ugly—Dr. Hnatiuk calls for empathy and understanding of how they suffered. She defines the Non-Heroic Narrative as the untold story: personal, displaying many shades of gray, calling on us to empathize with the Other rather than othering, looking beyond the master narrative of world-changing action or heroic martyrdom, and identifying ways that people were forcibly marginalized or oppressed.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The biography of Lviv during this time period is an exceptional and beautifully written story, one that is available in both Ukrainian and Polish. Hnatiuk presents the story free from academic jargon and does not overbear with the amount of material. A simple description has never been enough for Lviv, the topic of so many academic and non-academic works. Yet Hnatiuk, master of words that she is, rooted in both Ukrainian and Polish culture, has succeeded in presenting it as completely as possible.”

“[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.”

“Hnatiuk evokes rather than argues; and she avoids exploiting the advantages of hindsight to justify a tone of superiority towards her protagonists. As a researcher, she is impeccable in her commitment to thoroughness, her respect for truthfulness, her attention to nuance and her resistance to whitewashing moral ambiguity.”