Crimes against humanity
“East West Street” by Phillipe Sands, Vintage, 425 pages, paperback $25
I can thank Eleanor Wachtel’s Writers and Company CBC podcast for “selling” me on this book, released in 2016.
I listened twice to her interview from April 15, intrigued by Phillipe Sands’ search for his Jewish ancestors from eastern Ukraine, and the two unsung experts on international law who developed the concepts of “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” for the Nuremburg Trials. Sands’ search for his own family’s roots began with an invitation in 2010 to lecture at the university in Lviv, Ukraine. There he uncovered the overlapping journeys of these two giants whose work is still central to the International Criminal Court (ICC), where the author has worked.
Sands’ grandparents, and Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, both lived in the city of Lviv, a major cultural centre. Both studied law in the university there but never met til Nuremburg. Lauterpacht faced off with Goring, Hess and the other Nazi war criminals. These included Hans Frank, the man whose orders had killed his family, and Sands’ ancestors as well.
Lviv sits at the centre of Europe. From the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, up to July 1944, Lviv saw eight different regime changes (German, Russian, Polish), ending with Ukraine. In August 1942, Frank who had been Hitler’s lawyer was appointed Governor-General of occupied Poland, struck fear in the hearts of the hundred thousand Jewish residents of Lviv. Frank is the fourth major character in this history of the Holocaust.
Sands’ grandfather, Leon Bucholz, was born in 1904 in Lviv and became a distiller in Vienna where he married Rita in 1937 and had one daughter, Ruth, Phillipe’s mother. Leon escaped penniless to Paris in 1939 as The Reich took over Austria and began harassing Jews. Rita stayed behind to care for her mother; baby Ruth travelled to Paris in the care of an English missionary and was sheltered in a nursery. She and her parents did not live together until after the war. They would learn the fate of their relatives in Lviv and Vienna a year later.
Hersh Lauterpacht was born in 1897 near Lviv, to which his family moved in 1911. His law studies took him to Vienna and he married Rachel in 1923. Their one son was born in London where Lauterpacht studied at the London School of Economics, leading to a professorship at Cambridge. His career in international law resulted in him consulting for the leading UK jurists assigned to the Nuremberg Trials. His focus was always on the rights of the individual vs. the state, an unknown concept under the primacy of state sovereignty. If killing individuals was part of a systematic plan, he defined it as “a crime against humanity.” He had no patience for Lemkin’s notion of genocide, the mass murder of a group. Ultimately both concepts would be indictable in international courts.
Rafael Lemkin was born in 1900 in Ozerisko, Poland, moving to Lviv in 1921. He never married. He studied international law in response to the Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians during WWI. Lemkin escaped to Sweden in 1940 as the Germans invaded Poland. He went on to teach at Duke University. He tracked Germany’s anti-Semite decrees which lead to work in Washington once the USA entered the war. He strived but failed to have “genocide” included in the Nuremburg indictments, though “the destruction of groups” was included. Returning to New York in 1946, he was largely ignored the rest of his life. It would be 50 years before the ICC began to bring murderous dictators to trial for genocide.
East West Street is filled with coincidences and anecdotes, which helps lighten its dark details of the Holocaust. The author becomes friends with Hans Frank’s son, who last saw his father the night before his Nuremberg execution. He is absolute in his hatred for his father, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews and Poles. This contrasts with Horst von Wächter, who keeps looking for signs of redeeming character in his father Otto, who created the SS Division that carried out The Final Solution in Frank’s territory (which contained 20 per cent of Europe’s Jews).
Bernard-Levy, the French philosopher, said in his review of this book for the New York Times: “… it should not be ignored by anyone in the United States or elsewhere who would believe that there are irreparable crimes whose adjudication should not stop at the border.” In this era of alt-right and neo-Nazism, I couldn’t agree more.
Chuck Erion is the former co-owner of Words Worth Books in Waterloo.