This meditation on memory, family, crime, guilt, loss and law is a masterpiece
Lviv is one of one of the many villages, towns and cities in eastern Europe that had the misfortune to be in the way in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Over the course of only five years, Russian tanks rumbled in from one direction; two years later German tanks came from the west and kicked out the Soviets during Operation Barbarossa; and then the Soviets trundled back into town as the German army fell back in its long retreat that ended eventually in the streets around the ruins of Berlin’s Reich Chancellery.
Now, as Lviv, the city is in the Ukraine. In the 19th century it was Lemberg on the eastern end of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Then it was renamed as Lwow in independent Poland after the First World War and under Soviet occupation it became Lvow. The Nazis called it Lemberg again and made it the capital of the Galician department in the occupying General Government.
Caught in the middle of a nightmarish landscape during the Second World War were a large Jewish population, or at least those who had failed to make their escape or who could not move, or who stayed not imagining the horrors that were to come during the Nazi occupation. After all, their city and region had changed hands so many times, and been the scene of outbreaks of anti-Semitism and periodic explosions of political violence, that it might have been possible to imagine without hindsight that the latest round of turmoil should not be any different. It was another moment to keep one’s head down and hope that the trouble passed.
Anyone who understandably made that calculation had bargained without the determination of the Nazis, who fused the Germanic capacity for organisation with crackpot racial theorising and the evil application of industrial techniques to transport and kill millions of human beings.
There is not a shortage of books about these events which we term the Holocaust (a word – I think – that the author does not use in this book, or if he does I missed it.) The crimes of the Nazis have produced several libraries worth of testimonies that underpin an international effort to ensure that the stories and lessons are not forgotten. Yet too many of these books and documentaries rely on glib but well-meaning cliches rather than finding fresh ways to make us think about why it happened and what it means for how we live now.
But if you think you have read enough on this subject, or know enough, then think again. In East West Street: on the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity, the London-based international lawyer Philippe Sands has produced a masterpiece that is part detective story and part exploration of family history, memory, crime, guilt, loss and law.
We have this exceptionally gripping and moving book only because Sands was invited to make a speech at Lviv University. Incidentally, when he lectured, the local students were interested in questions of group identity. Did, they ask, these lost people who lived in their city consider themselves Jews, or Poles or Ukrainians? Sands’ response is perfect: Does it matter?
Sands goes off in search not only of his own family’s story. Lviv also links two Nuremberg prosecutors whose families were wiped out in the carnage. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War they were on opposite sides of an Allied argument about how justice might best be done, an unwinnable argument that remains a subject of dispute to this day in modern trials of despots and murderous dictators.
Hersch Lauterpacht, born near Lemberg/Lviv, and Rafael Lemkin, who studied there, had contrasting views about how the criminals responsible should be charged, tried and convicted at Nuremberg. Both lawyers had, in different ways, managed to make it abroad before the worst of the Nazi’s crimes. They acted as advisors at Nuremberg, although Lemkin had a more difficult time being taken seriously and had to plead for a chance to be there.
Based in Cambridge, England, Lauterpacht was the greater scholar and seems to have looked down on the efforts of Lemkin, who in the US was one of the first to alert the Roosevelt government to the horrors in occupied Europe.
Lemkin’s life’s work was the invention of the term genocide, to describe the targeting for extermination of groups of people.
Lauterpacht was convinced that the focus should instead be on protecting the rights and status of individuals. At Nuremberg the Lauterpacht analysis won out, but shortly afterwards Lemkin’s group-based word genocide began to be enshrined in international law. It is to the credit of the author that he explores the resulting ambiguity but does not definitively declare for either theory.
The risk with the focus on genocide as the “crime of all crimes”, as Lemkin’s friends warned, is that it may sometimes create the conditions for precisely what it is intended to deter. It may have an unintended consequence, perpetuating an “us” v “them” mentality, allowing perpetrators to hide behind behind the grievance of their own group and blame others if caught.
In contrast, Lauterpacht’s concentration on crimes against humanity and specific crimes carried out against individuals, albeit within larger groups, does not carry that risk, although perhaps it does not encapsulate the full horror of an attempt, as made by the Nazis, to eliminate an entire race.
Sands also traces the coincidences and chilling historical intersections that include the life story of a brave missionary who took his mother, Ruth, as a baby to join her father Leon in Paris, thus saving the infant’s life. Leon, Sands’ grandfather, was joined later, and just in time, by his wife. They survived the war in Paris and Leon thereafter was reluctant to talk about Lviv, Vienna, or his murdered wider family.
The author also encounters and befriends the German journalist Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank, the Nazi minister, lawyer to Hitler and governor of the occupied territories. Hans Frank visited Lemberg/Lviv in August 1942 and made several racially-charged speeches.
In another of his speeches, in 1941, Hans Frank is quoted elsewhere as saying: “Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feelings of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and whenever it is possible.” The highly detailed volumes of diaries kept by the phoney Frank – art lover, looter, show-off, coward and criminal – helped do for him at Nuremberg. His decision to leave a historical record, perhaps a product of a need to testify to his presence and importance, led Frank to the hangman’s rope.
Niklas still carries in his wallet a black and white photo of his father stretched out minutes after he was hung at Nuremberg. “Everyday I look at this. To remind me, to make sure, that he is dead.”
In the final section, Sands goes on a walk on the outskirts of the town near Lviv where he and a local historian sit by the ponds, two great sandpits filled with water and marked by a single white stone. They watch the sun go down, next to ponds where the remains of 3,500 people lie. “Among the bones that lay beneath was a commingling, Leon’s uncle Leibus, Lauterpacht’s uncle David, resting near each other in this place because they happened to be a member of the wrong group. The sun warmed the water; the trees lifted me upwards and away from the reeds, towards an indigo sky. Right there, for a brief moment, I understood.”
East West Street is described by John Le Carré as “a monumental achievement” and he is right. It is work of the highest order and it deserves to be as widely read as possible. It is, I reiterate, a masterpiece.