East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” (Deckle Edge)

Winner of the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction Winner of the 2017 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize A monumental achievementa profoundly personal account of the origins of crimes against humanity and genocide told with love anger and precision. John le Carr A narrative to my knowledge unprecedented. It should not be ignored by anyone in the United States or elsewhere. Bernard-Henri Levy on the front cover of The New York Times Book Review Exceptionalhas the intrigue verve and material density of a first-rate thriller. The Guardian AstonishingAn outstanding bookA story of heroes and loss. The New Statesman A profound and profoundly important booka moving personal detective story an uncovering of secret pasts and a book that explores the creation and development of world-changing legal concepts that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitlers Third Reich. East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of genocide and crimes against humanity both of whom not knowing the other studied at the same university with the same professors in a city little known today that was a major cultural center of Europe the little Paris of Ukraine a city variously called Lemberg Lww Lvov or Lviv. The book opens with the author being invited to give a lecture on genocide and crimes against humanity at Lviv University. Sands accepted the invitation with the intent of learning about the extraordinary city with its rich cultural and intellectual life home to his maternal grandfather a Galician Jew who had been born there a century before and whod moved to Vienna at the outbreak of the First World War married had a child (the authors mother) and who then had moved to Paris after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. It was a life that had been shrouded in secrecy with many questions not to be asked and fewer answers offered if they were. As the author uncovered clue by clue the deliberately obscured story of his grandfathers mysterious life and of his mothers journey as a child surviving Nazi occupation Sands searched further into the history of the city of Lemberg and realized that his own field of humanitarian law had been forged by two menRafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpachteach of whom had studied law at Lviv University in the city of his grandfathers birth each considered to be the father of the modern human rights movement and each at parallel times forging diametrically opposite revolutionary concepts of humanitarian law that had changed the world. In this extraordinary and resonant book Sands looks at who these two very private men were and at how and why coming from similar Jewish backgrounds and the same city studying at the same university each developed the theory he did showing how each man dedicated this period of his life to having his legal conceptgenocide and crimes against humanityas a centerpiece for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. And the author writes of a third man Hans Frank Hitlers personal lawyer a Nazi from the earliest days who had destroyed so many lives friend of Richard Strauss collector of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. Frank oversaw the ghetto in Lemberg in Poland in August 1942 in which the entire large Jewish population of the area had been confined on penalty of death. Frank who was instrumental in the construction of concentration camps nearby and weeks after becoming governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland ordered the transfer of 133 000 men women and children to the death camps. Sands brilliantly writes of how all three men came together in October 1945 in NurembergRafael Lemkin; Hersch Lauterpacht; and in the dock at the Palace of Justice with the twenty other defendants of the Nazi high command prisoner number 7 Hans Frank who had overseen the extermination of more than a million Jews of Galicia and Lemberg among them the families of the authors grandfather as well as those of Lemkin and Lauterpacht. A book that changes the way we look at the world at our understanding of history and how civilization has tried to cope with mass murder. Powerful; moving; tender; a revelation.