This superb book is a complex, multifaceted story that is part history, part legal analysis and part family memoir. The author is a noted British legal scholar. The unifying theme of the book is a city called Lemberg, Lvov, Lwow, and now, Lviv, in Ukraine. It saw a multitude of sovereignty and name changes in the last century. (Austro-Hungarian Empire; Russian Empire; Ukrainian Peoples Republic; Poland; German General Government of Poland; USSR; Ukraine). It was home to two legal theorists, Hersch Lauterpracht and Rafael Lempkin, who established the concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide. It was the city from which Hans Frank, Hitler's lawyer and leader of the General Government, made a speech about ridding Galicia of Jews; it also was the author's grandfather's place of birth and the city to which Sands was invited to lecture in 2010, prompting the journey that led to this book.
Leon Bucholtz, the author's grandfather, was born in Lemberg, Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1904. Within days of the start of WWI, his older brother was killed and his father died soon thereafter. He, his mother and younger sister moved to Vienna where his older, married sister was raising a family. Although Leon lived into his 90's and Sands knew his grandfather reasonably well, Leon had never mentioned anything about his family life in Vienna. Leon married Rita in 1937 and they had a daughter a year later. Austria expelled the young family and they moved to Paris. They survived the war with papers forged by the underground. In Vienna, their remaining relatives were sent to Auschwitz and Lemberg's 3500 Jews were taken to the woods and shot in March, 1943.
Hersch Lauterpracht was born in Zolkiew, just outside Lemberg, in 1897. He attended Lemberg University, where he studied law. He was finishing his education as WWI ended and Galicia, along with much of what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, disintegrated. He began to study the rights of individuals within a state. He moved to Vienna and continued his education, before marrying and moving to London. He received multiple Doctorates from LSE and was appointed to a professorship at Cambridge just before the start of WWII. He was an internationally recognized legal theorist. He travelled to America, where he met with Attorney-General Robert Jackson and Associate Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. He authored The Bill of Rights of Man and worked on the British War Crimes Committee. Lauterpracht's special area of interest was the individual as a victim and when Jackson was struggling to establish the framework for Nuremberg, Lauterpracht suggested the phrase 'crimes against humanity' as the basis of prosecuting Nazi atrocities. It was adopted, became part of the indictment and a precept of international law.
Rafael Lemkin was born in what is now Belarus in 1900. He also studied law at the same University in Lemberg. He became fascinated by the murder of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915-16. Upon graduation, he became a public prosecutor in Warsaw. When the war began, he fled north and east into the USSR, from which he managed to obtain a visa for Sweden. There he had access to and studied the legal documents, decrees and actions of the orderly Germans as they dehumanized the Jews and other untermenschen throughout Europe. He received an offer from Duke University and travelled to America via the USSR and the Pacific. He achieved some notoriety in Washington and coined the word 'genocide' in a 1943 publication. Both crimes against humanity and genocide were terms used in the final indictments at Nuremberg.
Hans Frank was born in 1900, met Hitler in 1925 and was appointed Bavarian Minister of Justice in 1933. He was part of the German legal system's relentless deprivation of human rights imposed upon many, but primarily the Jews. When Germany occupied Poland in 1939, the western areas were incorporated into the Reich and most of the country became part of Frank's General Government, which he described as a colony and its 11.5 million citizens as slaves. The governed territory expanded east after Barbarossa and 2.5 million of Europe's Jews were in his hands. After the Wannsee Conference, he welcomed the opportunity to host the final solution. Most of the major killing camps were in the General Government. When the Russians came in 1945, Frank fled to Bavaria, where he was captured by the Americans in May.
At Nuremberg, Lauterpracht was part of the British prosecution team. Frank was one of the men in the dock and declared himself not guilty. "The judges were presented with novel legal arguments and unparalleled, ghastly evidence." During the presentation of his defense, Hans Frank acknowledged a collective responsibility among the Reich's leadership. He and many of his colleagues were hung on Oct. 16, 1946.
The Nuremberg Trial led to the General Assembly of the UN taking action and furthering the creation of new international laws. It adopted The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It also affirmed that crimes against humanity were part of international law. Two young men from an obscure school deep in eastern Europe became scholars and refugees in the west, where they had a lasting impact on the laws that govern mankind. Today, there is an International Court of Justice in the Hague and the ideas of Lauterpracht and Lemkin are acknowledged as universal standards of conduct.
The title refers to the street in Zolkiev where Lauterpracht grew up on one end and Sands' great-grandmother on the other.
No comments:
Post a Comment