East West Street On the origins of "genocide" and "crimes against humanity"

Review by New York Times Review

THE UNSEEN WORLD, by Liz Moore. (Norton, $15.95.) The daughter of a brilliant computer scientist deciphers the mysteries of his life in Moore's novel. Ada was home-schooled by her father, joining him in his laboratory as he worked to develop natural language processing for computers. When he begins to exhibit signs of dementia, she spends the next decades of her life deciphering the coded message he gave to her, revealing secrets about his history. THE WAY TO THE SPRING: Life and Death in Palestine, by Ben Ehrenreich. (Penguin, $18.) Over three years in the West Bank, Ehrenreich lived with Palestinian families and reported on daily life for publications including The New York Times Magazine. In a series of character sketches of the people he encountered from Hebron to Ramallah, his book offers particular insight into life under occupation. HOT MILK, by Deborah Levy. (Bloomsbury, $16.) Sofia - a deeply unreliable, underemployed anthropologist and the heroine of this novel - follows her hypochondriac mother to a dubious health center in Spain. "The book exerts a seductive, arcane power, rather like a deck of tarot cards, every page seething with lavish, cryptic innuendo," our reviewer, Leah Hager Cohen, wrote. "Levy has spun a web of violent beauty and poetical ennui." EAST WEST STREET: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity," by Philippe Sands. (Vintage, $19.) These concepts form the core of the international justice system, and Sands investigates the two men responsible for bringing them to light. Our reviewer, Bernard-Henri Levy, called the account a narrative "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." LONER, by Teddy Wayne. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) At Harvard, David Federman, a painfully unpopular and anonymous freshman, becomes obsessed with a beautiful, wealthy classmate whose indifference seems only to spur him further. Class, power and privilege are at the forefront of Wayne's novel, as David pursues his love interest with increasing, unsettling urgency. I'M SUPPOSED TO PROTECT YOU FROM ALL THIS: A Memoir, by Nadja Spiegelman. (Riverhead, $16.) Spiegelman explores four generations of women in her family in this account, which grew out of interviews she conducted with her mother, Françoise Mouly, the art director of The New Yorker. She borrows tactics from her father, Art Spiegelman, who documented his family's experience with the Holocaust in his graphic novel "Maus."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 29, 2018]

---

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* There is growing suspicion that there are no stories left to tell of the Holocaust; all the pain and horror has been revealed to the point of repetition. But human-rights lawyer Sands proves that there is still room for thoughtful writers to educate, engage, even beguile readers on this terribly important subject. His riveting history of the terms genocide and crimes against humanity, the men who invented them, the manner in which they were first used (at Nuremberg), and how they have forever changed international law and relations revitalizes the subject. Most impressively, he interweaves his grandparents' powerful story into the larger narrative, including an enduring family mystery. Thus, in this expertly organized and passionately researched title, readers will learn of rapidly changing borders, rushes to escape violence, and people who stood on the right side of history versus those who sank to the depths of depravity. An unexpected page-turner, East West Street is a book for the twenty-first century that reminds us that the cruel lessons of the twentieth still have much to impart and must not be ignored.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

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. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

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. Excerpted from East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity by Philippe Sands All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---