East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"

by Philippe Sands

Overview

Winner of the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction

A profound and profoundly important book—a 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 Hitler’s 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, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. It is also a spellbinding family memoir, as the author traces the mysterious story of his grandfather, as he maneuvered through Europe in the face of Nazi atrocities.

East West Street is 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525433729
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/11/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	29,494
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

PHILIPPE SANDS is an international lawyer and a professor of law at University College London. He is the author of Lawless World and Torture Team and is a frequent commentator on CNN and the BBC World Service. Sands lectures around the world and has taught at New York University and been a visiting professor at the University of Toronto, the University of Melbourne, and the Université de Paris I (Sorbonne). In 2003 he was appointed a Queen’s Counsel. He lives in London, England.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue
An Invitation
Tuesday, October 1, 1946,
Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice
 
A little after three o’clock in the afternoon, the wooden door behind the defendant’s dock slid open and Hans Frank entered court- room 600. He wore a gray suit, a shade that was offset by the white helmets worn by the two somber-faced military guards, his escorts. The hearings had taken a toll on the man who had been Adolf Hitler’s personal lawyer and then personal representative in German-occupied Poland, with his pink cheeks, sharp little nose, and sleeked-back hair. Frank was no longer the slender and swank minister celebrated by his friend Richard Strauss. Indeed, he was in a considerable state of perturbation, so much so that as he entered the room, he turned and faced the wrong direction, showing his back to the judges.

Sitting in the packed courtroom that day was the professor of international law at Cambridge University. Balding and bespectacled, Hersch Lauterpacht perched at the end of a long wooden table, round as an owl, flanked by distinguished colleagues on the British prosecution team. Seated no more than a few feet from Frank, in a trademark black suit, Lauterpacht was the one who came up with the idea of putting the term “crimes against humanity” into the Nuremberg statute, three words to describe the murder of four million Jews and Poles on the territory of Poland. Lauterpacht would come to be recognized as the finest international legal mind of the twen- tieth century and a father of the modern human rights movement, yet his interest in Frank was not just professional. For five years, Frank had been governor of a territory that included the city of Lemberg, where Lauterpacht had a large family, including his parents, a brother and sister, their children. When the trial had opened a year earlier, their fate in the kingdom of Hans Frank was unknown.

Another man with an interest in the trial was not there that day. Rafael Lemkin listened to the judgment on a wireless, from a bed in an American military hospital in Paris. A public prosecutor and then a lawyer in Warsaw, he fled Poland in 1939, when the war broke out, and eventually reached America. There he worked with the trial’s American prosecution team, alongside the British. On that long journey, he carried a number of valises, each crammed with documents, among them many decrees signed by Frank. In studying these materials, Lemkin found a pattern of behavior, to which he gave a label, to describe the crime with which Frank could be charged. He called it “genocide.” Unlike Lauterpacht, with his focus on crimes against humanity, which aimed at the protection of individuals, he was more concerned with the protection of groups. He had worked tirelessly to get the crime of genocide into Frank’s trial, but on this last day of the trial he was too unwell to attend. He too had a personal interest in Frank: he had spent years in Lwów, and his parents and brother were caught up in the crimes said to have been committed on Frank’s territory.

“Defendant Hans Frank,” the president of the tribunal announced. Frank was about to learn whether he would still be alive at Christmas, in a position to honor the promise he had recently made to his seven-year-old son, that all was fine and he would be home for the holiday.
 
Thursday, October 16, 2014,
Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice
 
Sixty-eight years later I visited courtroom 600 in the company of Hans Frank’s son Niklas, who was a small boy when that promise was made.

Niklas and I began our visit in the desolate, empty wing of the disused prison at the rear of the Palace of Justice, the only one of the four wings that still stood. We sat together in a small cell, like the one in which his father spent the better part of a year. The last time Niklas had been in this part of the building was in September 1946. “It’s the only room in the world where I am a little bit nearer to my father,” he told me, “sitting here and thinking of being him, for about a year being in here, with an open toilet and a small table and a small bed and nothing else.” The cell was unforgiving, and so was Niklas on the subject of his father’s actions. “My father was a lawyer; he knew what he did.”

Courtroom 600, still a working courtroom, was not greatly changed since the time of the trial. Back in 1946, the route from the cells required each of the twenty-one defendants to travel up a small elevator that led directly to the courtroom, a contraption that Niklas and I were keen to see. It remained, behind the dock at which the defendants sat, entered through the same wooden door, which slid open as noiselessly as ever. “Open, shut, open, shut,” wrote R. W. Cooper of The Times of London, the former lawn tennis correspondent who reported each day on the trial. Niklas slid the door open and entered the small space, then closed the door behind him.

When he came back out, he made his way to the place where his father sat during the trial, charged with crimes against humanity and genocide. Niklas sat down and leaned forward on the wooden rail. He looked at me, then around the room, and then he sighed. I had often wondered about the last time his father passed through the elevator’s sliding door and made his way to the defendant’s dock. It was something to be imagined and not seen, because cameras were not allowed to film the last afternoon of the trial, on Tuesday, October 1, 1946. This was done to protect the dignity of the defendants.

Niklas interrupted my thoughts. He spoke gently and firmly. “This is a happy room, for me, and for the world.”

From the book EAST WEST STREET by Philippe Sands, copyright © 2016 by Philippe Sands. Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Table of Contents

Note to the Reader xix

Principal Characters xxi

Maps xxii

Prologue: An Invitation 3

Part I Leon 13

Part II Lauterpacht 63

Part III Miss Tilney of Norwich 119

Part IV Lemkin 141

Part V The Man in a Bow Tie 191

Part VI Frank 205

Part VII The Child Who Stands Alone 257

Part VIII Nuremberg 267

Part IX The Girl Who Chose Not to Remember 303

Part X Judgment 315

Epilogue: To the Woods 361

Acknowledgments 375

Sources 381

Notes 385

Index 411

Editorial Reviews

A monumental achievement . . . a profoundly personal account of the origins of crimes against humanity and genocide, told with love, anger and precision.” —John le Carré

“Sands proceeds in the manner of certain historians . . . he also works in the manner of the author of thrillers. . . . In Sands’s history, as in all great novels, we encounter characters who, though seemingly secondary, are essential to the plot . . . And all the while Sands works in the way of artists like Filippo Lippi, who painted himself into the corner of his ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ and ‘The Funeral of Saint Stephen.’ . . . The result is a narrative, to my knowledge unprecedented. . . . We have in Sands’s East West Street a machine of power and beauty that 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. . . . Barack Obama and his successors would be well advised to move to the top of their reading lists this account of the birth, amid the darkest conceivable shadows, of an unprecedented body of rights-based law, whose application has scarcely begun.” —Bernard-Henri Lévy, New York Times Book Review (cover review)

“Sands is a fine writer and sets his scenes so compellingly and earnestly that his enterprise succeeds. . . . Engrossing, luminous and moving.” —Samuel Moyn, The Wall Street Journal
 
“Remarkable sleuthing.” —Christopher R. Browning, The New York Review of Books
 
“An intimate and important tale . . . vivid . . . engaging. . . . A kind of mystery-solving journey . . . remarkable.” —John Tirman, The Washington Post
 
“A tour de force . . . penetrating. . . . A pillar of the emerging genre of third-generation investigation into the legacy of the European Jewish apocalypse . . . This is a history that is both personal and universal. . . . Equal parts legal scholarship, memoir and multitude of mysteries, told with admirable suspense and elocution. . . . Here we find both the detail of concepts and the detail of personal lives and geographies. . . . Sands acts as archivist and archaeologist, traveler and historian—but also as horrified observer.” —Sarah Wildman, Jewish Daily Forward

“Supremely gripping. . . . Sands has produced something extraordinary. . . . Sands tells it not just as history but as a family memoir, a detective thriller and a meditation on the power of memory . . . Written with novelistic skill, its prose effortlessly poised, its tone perfectly judged, the book teems with life and high drama . . . One of the most gripping and powerful books imaginable.” —Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times
 
“Remarkable . . . a voyage of discovery . . . a riveting odyssey. . . . Sands elicits the most extraordinary revelations from his subjects.” —Isabel Hull, London Review of Books
 
“A rare and unusual event: a book about international law that makes you want to keep reading.” —Cullen Murphy, Vanity Fair
 
“Outstanding. . . . Consistently intriguing. . . . A fusion of personal and professional interest, with Sands delving into his family’s cordoned-off past to unearth concealed truths and trace the circumstances that led to the birth of his chosen field of humanitarian law. . . . Powerful and poignant, but also original . . . Ultimately, Sands’s multifaceted book stands triumphantly alone. It even-handedly charts four separate lives and skillfully explores a beleaguered city with blurred borders. . . . It amplifies the roar of history, dramatizes the depravity of, and the moral struggle against, what Primo Levi called the “infernal order” that is Nazism. . . . It is a fact-finding mission, a gripping courtroom drama, a tale, ultimately and cathartically, of good triumphing over evil. In Sands’s pages, many beautifully adorned with photos, maps, letters—evidence—we see the piece-by-piece reconstruction of a lost world, and the development of ideas that would help safeguard a new one.” —Malcolm Forbes, New Republic
 
“A compelling family memoir intersects with the story of the Jewish legal minds who sowed the seeds for human rights law at the Nuremberg trials . . . important and engrossing. . . . The surprise is that even when charting the complexities of law, Sands’s writing has the intrigue, verve and material density of a first-rate thriller. . . . He can magic whole histories of wartime heroism out of addresses eight decades old. Or, chasing the lead of a faded photograph, he can unearth possible alternate grandparents and illicit liaisons to be verified only by DNA tests. . . . Exceptional.” —Lisa Appignanesi, The Guardian
 
“Vivid and readable. . . . East West Street weaves lives together in a kind of collective biography of a generation . . . remarkable . . . compelling . . . moving and powerful.” —Mark Mazower, Financial Times
 
“A story of heroes and loss. . . . An outstanding book; a moving history [that] at times, reads like a detective story . . . Sands’s greatest achievement is the way he moves between his family story and the lives of Lauterpacht and Lemkin and how he brings their complex work to life. . . . This is the best kind of intellectual history . . . a clear, astonishing story.” —David Herman, New Statesman
 
“Gripping, profound and deeply personal. . . . Excellent.” —Mark Harrison, Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
 
“Remarkable . . . vivid . . . complex and gripping . . . East West Street is a fascinating and revealing book, for the things it explains: the origins of laws that changed our world, no less. Thoughtful, and compassionate, and important.” —Daniel Hahn, The Spectator
 
“In East West Street, Philippe Sands brings all the power of his formidable intellect, his inquisitive spirit and his emotional imagination to bear on a complicated tangle of personal, legal and European history. In a gripping narrative that is tender yet dispassionate, intensely felt and meticulously researched, Sands uncovers the surprising affinities and divergences among the parallel lives of three men, two celebrated, one unknown, whose struggles, sorrows, accomplishments and defeats, large and small, help us to understand and, more, to feel the mittel-European civilization their lives embodied, a whole world that was destroyed and reinvented within the span of a single lifetime.”
—Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
 
“In a triumph of astonishing research, Sands has brilliantly woven together several family stories which lead to the great denouement at the Nuremberg tribunal. No novel could possibly match such an important work of truth.” —Antony Beevor (English Military Historian)
 

From the Publisher

…a narrative, to my knowledge unprecedented, in which the reader observes the life and work of two ordinary men drawn by unwavering passion and driven very nearly insane by the griefs and the hopes bequeathed to each of them by the tumult of an unreasonable time. But that very madness and their thirst for truth and justice gives them access to the universal, enabling them to lay the cornerstones of the cosmopolitan justice that the world had been waiting for since Kant…We have in Sands's East West Street a machine of power and beauty that 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…Barack Obama and his successors would be well advised to move to the top of their reading lists this account of the birth, amid the darkest conceivable shadows, of an unprecedented body of rights-based law, whose application has scarcely begun.

The New York Times Book Review - Bernard-Henri Lévy

04/04/2016
Sands (Torture Team), a human rights lawyer and professor of international law at University College London, takes readers on a labyrinthine journey into the personal histories of three men whose lives were forever altered by the Nuremberg trials of October 1946. Two of them—Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht—were founding luminaries of the new field of international human rights law; the third, Hans Frank, was Hitler’s personal legal counsel. Sands intertwines their stories with his own tragic family history, and seeks to illuminate the guiding principles of humanitarian law while unearthing the forgotten stories of the men who fought for its establishment in the wake of Nazi devastation. Part detective story and part heart-wrenching family history, the teeming narrative is anchored in the Ukrainian city of L’viv (alternately Lwów, L’vov, or Lemberg), hometown of Lemkin and Lauterpacht, and an emblem of the changing face of 20th-century Europe. Yet despite this attention to place, the book feels curiously unmoored, with the personalities and ambitions of its three main characters getting lost under a glut of biographical detail. Sands clearly revels in discovering long-lost family secrets; unfortunately, he also loses sight of the innovations in legal theory that Lemkin and Lauterpacht helped usher in, the ostensible focus on which is arguably the book’s most original aspect. (June)

Publishers Weekly

03/01/2016
The Holocaust was a tragedy for whole cities and towns as well as individuals and their families. The contrast among these levels of devastation underpins this gripping book, which centers on the lives of Leon Buchholz, the author's maternal grandfather; Hersch Lauterpacht; and Raphael Lemkin—the latter two experts in international law and important figures in the Nuremberg Trials. All three once resided in what is today the Ukrainian city of Lviv. Their experiences and Sands's (Torture Team) efforts to uncover the secrets and half-truths in their family stories form this fascinating account of forgetting, forgiving, and moving on. Lauterpacht, a key figure in the British prosecuting team, worked to indict the Nazis for "crimes against humanity." U.S.-based Lemkin championed the term genocide, which he invented. Both helped build the structure under which future war crimes could be adjudicated internationally. Neither strictly memoir nor history, Sands's study achieves a balance between the individual and the political that brings the events of the Holocaust into new focus. VERDICT Readers interested in history, political science, and/or religion shouldn't miss this compelling work with unforgettable characters.—Margaret Heller, Loyola Univ. Chicago Libs.

Library Journal

★ 2016-03-01
An engrossing tale of family secrets and groundbreaking legal precedents. In a tense, riveting melding of memoir and history, international human rights lawyer Sands (Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, 2008, etc.) focuses on a subtle, and critical, debate that emerged from the Nuremberg trials: whether the Nazi defendants were guilty of crimes against humanity or of genocide. Two Polish-born lawyers, with influence on trial strategy, had strong opposing views. Hersch Lauterpacht, a professor of international law at Cambridge University, maintained that calling Nazi atrocities "crimes against humanity" would lead to protection of individual, fundamental human rights. Rafael Lemkin, who had fled Poland to a position at Duke University Law School, felt, with equal passion, that the murder of whole peoples must be called genocide, a word he coined to describe acts "directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of national groups." The two men's positions became pieces of a larger conversation among Soviet, American, French, and British prosecutors, each with his or her own particular stake. The lawyers' own stakes became intensified when they discovered, during the trial, that many of their family members had been sent to their deaths by Hans Frank, one of the Nuremberg defendants. Interweaving the biographies of the scholarly Lauterpacht, tirelessly persistent Lemkin, and arrogant, self-aggrandizing Frank, Sands engages in a search for his own Polish ancestors, especially his grandfather, who was born in the city where Lauterpacht and Lemkin studied law and never spoke of his past. From letters, photographs, and deeply revealing interviews, the author portrays Nazi persecutions in shattering detail. He discusses his viewing of family albums with the son of a Nazi officer who could not bear to condemn his father, and he visited an elderly relative whose emotionless affect puzzled him. But she had not forgotten the past; rather, "I have chosen not to remember." For the future of humanity, forgetting, Sands insists in this vastly important book, is not an option.

Kirkus Reviews