2025 Recipient

Waitman Wade Beorn

Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv

The Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies, established in 2019 and sponsored by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, recognizes a distinguished book in the field of Ukrainian studies that was published in the previous calendar year. Omeljan Pritsak was an esteemed scholar of Ukrainian history and the primary founder of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. 

Winner: Waitman Wade Beorn, Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (University of Nebraska Press, 2024)  

Waitman Wade Beorn’s Between the Wires makes a major contribution to Holocaust and Eastern European history by offering the first sustained, comprehensive study of one of the least-known Nazi camps—the Janowska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. Drawing on extensive archival research and employing the tools of microhistory, Beorn reconstructs the camp’s evolution and its entanglement with the city of Lviv, illuminating its shifting functions as a prison, slave labor camp, transit camp, and extermination site. By weaving together the perspectives of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders from the camp’s founding in 1941 through the postwar years, the book not only recovers the forgotten history of the third-largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe but also deepens our understanding of how urban spaces were shaped by genocide. Beorn’s study thus expands the geographical and conceptual boundaries of Holocaust scholarship while integrating Lviv more firmly into the wartime history of Eastern Europe. 

Honorable Mention: Eugene Finkel

Prize Committee: Yuliya Ilchuk (chair), Serhiy Bilenky, and Sarah Philips