My quest to find a forgotten history

One of our most renowned human rights lawyers on the roots of genocide

IN THE spring of 2010, I received an unlikely invitation from a city in the western Ukraine. The law faculty from the university in Lviv (also know as Lwów, Lemberg and Leopolis) asked me to deliver a public lecture on my work on ‘‘crimes against humanity’’ and ‘‘genocide”, including the cases in which I’d been involved at various international courts, my work as an academic at University College London on the Nuremberg trial, and the judgment’s enduring consequences over time, right up to the present day.

I had long been fascinated by the proceedings, and myths, of Nuremberg, a moment that gave rise to our modern system of international justice. But there was also another reason for accepting the invitation: it offered a first opportunity to visit the city where my maternal grandfather, Leon Buchholz, was born in 1904. I knew that he had moved from Lviv to Vienna during the First World War, and that, in 1939, after the Nazis took power in Austria, that he moved to Paris, which is where I knew him.

In common with many others, that period was for him a time of darkness and pain of which he did not wish to speak. So I knew nothing of his early life in Lviv, or the circumstances of his and my mother’s departure from Vienna.

The invitation from Lviv prompted a summer of research. For the first time, I opened doors that would shed light on family history — the circumstances of the family departure from Vienna, the identity and story of the remarkable woman who saved my mother’s life, the circumstances that caused my grandmother to remain in Vienna until 1941, the fate of other family members. In the course of a search that lasted six years — an improbable family detective story — I scoured archives across cities far and wide, hired a genealogical detective in Vienna, and even learned that I had unknown family members.

What motivated the search? “What haunts are not the dead”, wrote the psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham, “but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others”.

In parallel with the uncovering of a personal story, the lecture I was invited to deliver also took me on a second path, one that explored the origins of two legal concepts that came into being as the Second World War drew to a close. I was surprised to discover that the origins of the terms ‘‘genocide’’ — which calls for the protection of groups — and ‘‘crimes against humanity’’ — which seeks the well-being Discovery: Philippe Sands and a pre-war image of his family of individuals — were closely connected to the same city of Lviv. Rafael Lemkin, a Jewish Polish criminal prosecutor, fled Warsaw in September 1939 and made his way to America by the most tortuous of journeys, where he coined the word ‘‘genocide’’ in the autumn of 1944. A year later, he managed to insert his invention into the indictment of Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, giving practical effect to his idea that “attacks upon national, religious and ethnic groups should be made international crimes”. At the same time, Hersch Lauterpacht, an academic at Cambridge University who was born near Lviv, and spent many years living on Walm Lane in Cricklewood, came up with the idea of putting the term ‘‘crimes against humanity’’ into the Nuremberg Statute, giving effect to his idea that “the individual human being… is the ultimate unit of all law”. Lauterpacht, who was also Jewish, is widely recognised as the greatest international lawyer of the 20th century, and credited with being one of the creators of our modern system of human rights.

Remarkably, both men had studied at the law faculty of Lviv university, although not at the same time — Lauterpacht was there from 1915 to 1919, and Lemkin from 1921 to 1926. They had the same teachers, I would discover from university records buried deep in the city archives, and would later play key roles in the Nuremberg trial and the development of international law. Curiously, those who invited me to deliver the lecture in Lviv were not aware of this shared background, or the fact that the origins of ‘‘genocide’’ and ‘‘crimes against humanity’’ were so closely connected to the city that marked my own origins.

As the coincidences piled up — I would learn that Malke Buchholz, my great grandmother, and Hersch Lauterpacht were born and lived on the same street (Lembergerstrasse) of the small town of Zolkiew, near Lviv, otherwise known as East West Street — I delved ever more deeply into the terrible events that descended upon Lviv after 1939, and came across the malign influence a third man. Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer and Governor General of occupied Poland, visited the city in August 1942, to deliver a speech that would unleash the murder of more than 100,000 Jews and Poles. Among them were the families, friends and teachers of Lemkin and Lauterpacht, and of my grandfather.

Three years later, Frank was defendant number 7 in the dock at Nuremberg. By a simple twist of fate, he would be prosecuted by Lemkin and Lauterpacht, who would only learn late in the trial that the man they had in their sights was responsible for the deaths of their entire families.

What started as a lecture turned into a book — East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity — about the interweaving lives of the three lawyers (and the uncovering of my grandfather’s story). As Anthony Beevor has observed, it is hard to imagine any novel that could match such a work of non-fiction. Over seven years, I came across a multitude of facts and coincidences, including several that connected my family story to that of the three lawyers who stories and fate would so deeply influence my own work:

Hersch Lauterpacht’s son Eli,

I found the origins of the words in the city of Lviv