City of Lions by Josef Wittlin and Philippe Sands {Reviewed by THOMAS} The city known variously in history as Lviv, Lwow, Lemberg, לעמבערג and Leopolis in eastern central Europe was once a city where cultures and ethnicities (Jewish, Polish, Ukranian, Austrian) met and enriched each other, but, in the twentieth century, it became a city in which cultures and ethnicities obliterated each other. In the first half of this book, 'My Lwow', Josef Wittlin, looking back from exile in the 1940s, celebrates the rich texture of the city in which he grew up. Lying on the crossroads between East and West, North and South, Lwow was a melting-pot of buoyant and diverse traditions. Reading Wittlin's descriptions of the streets and life of the city reminds me of nothing so much as of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (who lived and was killed in Drohobycz, about an hour from Lwow). Although the shadows of the events of WW2 lie across Wittlin's text, his memories of the cosmopolitan city are all the more poignant for his saying little of them. “All memories lead to the graveyard,” he says, though. The second half of the book, 'My Lviv', is written by human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, who travelled to Lviv, now in the Ukraine, in the last several years, partly to learn more about his grandfather, who had lived there in the early twentieth century, but spoke little of that phase of his life, and partly to research his remarkable book, East West Street: On the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity – terms coined by Lvovians Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht  – which won the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction. His is a mission to connect history to its locations, but he finds that everywhere, although the old Lwow physically persists, the stories that should give those places meaning are forgotten or suppressed. “Wittlin believes that memory 'falsifies everything', but surely imagination of the unknown is an even greater falsifier,” Sands writes. History must be multivocal to avoid authoritarianism. Sands finds and visits the site of the mass grave which holds the remains of the majority of the Lvovian Jewish population, killed when the city came under Nazi control in WW2. The city now being almost entirely monocultural, Sands reports the unchallenged ease with which some Ukranian nationalists assume the trappings and ideologies once stamped on the city by Nazism. But what should be preserved, the rights of the individual or the identity of the group?