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BOOK: THE PROPHET OF GENOCIDE: LEGAL SCHOLAR RAPHAEL LEMKIN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY ARRIVES NEARLY 50 YEARS AFTER HE WROTE IT
The Forward
August 2, 2013
Gabriel Sanders is director of public programs at the Museum of
Jewish Heritage.
TOTALLY UNOFFICIAL: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RAPHAEL LEMKIN
Edited by Donna-Lee Frieze Yale University Press, 328 pages, $35
Ten years ago, Samantha Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her book A
Problem From Hell, a history of American inaction in the face of
genocide. As she awaits Senate confirmation to be the country's next
ambassador to the United Nations, the book offers a glimpse into
Power's political philosophy and a sense of whom she might want to
emulate as
America's voice at the world body.
The hero of Power's book insofar as a book on genocide can be said
to have a hero is Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish legal scholar who
coined the term genocide and fought to have the concept recognized by
the U. N. In Power's telling, Lemkin emerges as a tireless crusader
who gives both form and name to the ultimate crime. And yet, Power's
portrait is not entirely sympathetic. Her Lemkin is humorless,
arrogant, serious to a fault a longwinded nag whom correspondents on
deadline would avoid like the plague.
A decade after Power's book, Lemkin is being given the chance to
speak for himself. When he died, in 1959 bitter, penniless and alone
Lemkin was nearly finished writing an autobiograstands phy. More than a
half-century later, Yale University Press, in an edition painstakingly
assembled from a variety of drafts, is now publishing the book.
By 21st-century standards, this is an unusual memoir light on
introspection, heavy on historical detail. As the book's editor,
Donna-Lee Frieze, astutely points out, it is an autobiography that
ultimately gives way to a biography of the Genocide Convention that
Lemkin conceived and championed.
Born in 1900, Lemkin was raised on a farm in eastern Poland (now
Belarus) where he, his siblings and his cousins spent their days
running around as part of a happy gang. Lemkin's idyllic perhaps
idealized portrait of farm life
in stark contrast with the solitary, urban life he later came to lead.
Lemkin describes as a formative experience the 1921 trial of Soghomon
Tehlirian, an Armenian accused of murdering a Turkish minister
identified as one of the architects of what later became known
as the Armenian Genocide. Tehlirian was acquitted; he had acted,
a Berlin court said, under psychological compulsion. For Lemkin,
there was deep irony in the verdict and a cautionary tale. Tehlirian,
who upheld the moral order of mankind, was classified as insane,
he writes. But can a man appoint himself to mete out justice? After
earning a law degree in Lvov, Lemkin became a public prosecutor in
Warsaw and an active figure on the international legal scene.
Among the notable features of Lemkin's legal thinking is that he begins
talking about the destruction of groups as early as 1927. (He doesn't
use the term genocide a combination of the Greek genos, meaning race,
and the Latin cide, for murder until 1944.) And though the Holocaust
clearly played a role in the evolution of his concept to say nothing
of the urgency with which he fought to have it enshrined into law
genocide, for Lemkin, was meant not as shorthand for the murder
of the Jews, but as a comparative term with deep, indeed ancient,
historical roots.
On September 6, 1939, Lemkin fled Warsaw and, with Nazi tanks blocking
the highways and the Luftwaffe targeting train stations, headed into
Poland's forests. After the Soviets invaded from the East, he decided
to flee to then-neutral Lithuania. While there, he contacted a Duke
University professor who ultimately secured a position for him there.
But to get to North Carolina, Lemkin went the long way, traveling
through Latvia, then Sweden, where he briefly taught international
law, then to Moscow and on to the Pacific via the trans-Siberian
railway. From Vladivostok he traveled to Japan and then across the
ocean to Seattle. He topped things off with a cross-country train
ride. But while Lemkin found his way to freedom, the bulk of his
family did not. Close to 50 of his relatives perished.
Lemkin's career in the 1940s and '50s was animated by a kind of
survivor's guilt. At certain moments, he addresses this directly: I was
ashamed of my helplessness in dealing with the murderers of humanity,
he writes, a shame that has not left me to this day. At other points,
his expressions of guilt are more oblique. Before leaving Poland,
he paid a final visit to his parents. His mother's parting words
as reported by Lemkin seem more the product of wish fulfillment
than reality:
You realize, Raphael, that it is you, not we, who needs protection
now . [O]f all of us only you do not live the life of love. You
are the lonely and the loveless one. Still, you have been carrying
the burden of your idea, which is based on love . We know you will
continue your work, for the protection of peoples. Unfortunately,
it is needed now more than ever before.
It is the book's falsest-sounding note and its most heartbreaking.
In Washington, D. C., Lemkin served as a consultant to the Board of
Economic Warfare and, later, as an adviser to the War Department. He
tried to draw attention to the fact that the Axis powers planned
nothing less than the destruction of the peoples under their control.
He sent a memo to FDR, encouraging a treaty banning genocide. The
president responded by urging patience. Lemkin worked with the
prosecution team at Nuremberg but was unhappy with the result. The
Allies decided their case against a past Hitler, he writes, but
refused to envisage future Hitlers.
The problem with Nuremberg, in Lemkin's eyes, was that it linked
the destruction of groups with wars of aggression. According to
international law as it stood in 1945, Germany really became culpable
only when it crossed into Poland. Had the Nazis killed only German
Jews, they would not have been liable. Lemkin's aim was to undo this
absurdity and uncouple genocide from war, and he ultimately succeeded.
In December 1946, the U. N. passed a resolution condemning genocide.
In December 1948, the General Assembly passed a law banning it,
and in January 1951, the Genocide Convention went into force.
Lemkin's single-mindedness did not come without costs. He alienated
friends, made enemies and burned bridges. His work on the convention
kept him from teaching and earning. His health suffered. The final
pages of his book offer a chilling picture of hand-to-mouth living:
borrowing from one friend to repay another, mounting bills, moth-eaten
clothes. By book's end, he is a humbled, dying man looking to lay
claim to the honor he felt was his due.
Lemkin has been called a prophet, and the term is not inapt. He
understood humankind's capacity for destruction earlier and more fully
than any of his contemporaries. But prophets don't always come in
appealing packages or say what you want to hear even from beyond the
grave. Critics can argue that Lemkin accomplished nothing. Genocide
marches on. But Rwanda and Srebrenica are not refutations of his
legacy; they are affirmations of his prescience. Without Lemkin, they
would have been atrocities. In the light of his Genocide Convention,
they were crimes.
The Forward
August 2, 2013
Gabriel Sanders is director of public programs at the Museum of
Jewish Heritage.
TOTALLY UNOFFICIAL: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RAPHAEL LEMKIN
Edited by Donna-Lee Frieze Yale University Press, 328 pages, $35
Ten years ago, Samantha Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her book A
Problem From Hell, a history of American inaction in the face of
genocide. As she awaits Senate confirmation to be the country's next
ambassador to the United Nations, the book offers a glimpse into
Power's political philosophy and a sense of whom she might want to
emulate as
America's voice at the world body.
The hero of Power's book insofar as a book on genocide can be said
to have a hero is Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish legal scholar who
coined the term genocide and fought to have the concept recognized by
the U. N. In Power's telling, Lemkin emerges as a tireless crusader
who gives both form and name to the ultimate crime. And yet, Power's
portrait is not entirely sympathetic. Her Lemkin is humorless,
arrogant, serious to a fault a longwinded nag whom correspondents on
deadline would avoid like the plague.
A decade after Power's book, Lemkin is being given the chance to
speak for himself. When he died, in 1959 bitter, penniless and alone
Lemkin was nearly finished writing an autobiograstands phy. More than a
half-century later, Yale University Press, in an edition painstakingly
assembled from a variety of drafts, is now publishing the book.
By 21st-century standards, this is an unusual memoir light on
introspection, heavy on historical detail. As the book's editor,
Donna-Lee Frieze, astutely points out, it is an autobiography that
ultimately gives way to a biography of the Genocide Convention that
Lemkin conceived and championed.
Born in 1900, Lemkin was raised on a farm in eastern Poland (now
Belarus) where he, his siblings and his cousins spent their days
running around as part of a happy gang. Lemkin's idyllic perhaps
idealized portrait of farm life
in stark contrast with the solitary, urban life he later came to lead.
Lemkin describes as a formative experience the 1921 trial of Soghomon
Tehlirian, an Armenian accused of murdering a Turkish minister
identified as one of the architects of what later became known
as the Armenian Genocide. Tehlirian was acquitted; he had acted,
a Berlin court said, under psychological compulsion. For Lemkin,
there was deep irony in the verdict and a cautionary tale. Tehlirian,
who upheld the moral order of mankind, was classified as insane,
he writes. But can a man appoint himself to mete out justice? After
earning a law degree in Lvov, Lemkin became a public prosecutor in
Warsaw and an active figure on the international legal scene.
Among the notable features of Lemkin's legal thinking is that he begins
talking about the destruction of groups as early as 1927. (He doesn't
use the term genocide a combination of the Greek genos, meaning race,
and the Latin cide, for murder until 1944.) And though the Holocaust
clearly played a role in the evolution of his concept to say nothing
of the urgency with which he fought to have it enshrined into law
genocide, for Lemkin, was meant not as shorthand for the murder
of the Jews, but as a comparative term with deep, indeed ancient,
historical roots.
On September 6, 1939, Lemkin fled Warsaw and, with Nazi tanks blocking
the highways and the Luftwaffe targeting train stations, headed into
Poland's forests. After the Soviets invaded from the East, he decided
to flee to then-neutral Lithuania. While there, he contacted a Duke
University professor who ultimately secured a position for him there.
But to get to North Carolina, Lemkin went the long way, traveling
through Latvia, then Sweden, where he briefly taught international
law, then to Moscow and on to the Pacific via the trans-Siberian
railway. From Vladivostok he traveled to Japan and then across the
ocean to Seattle. He topped things off with a cross-country train
ride. But while Lemkin found his way to freedom, the bulk of his
family did not. Close to 50 of his relatives perished.
Lemkin's career in the 1940s and '50s was animated by a kind of
survivor's guilt. At certain moments, he addresses this directly: I was
ashamed of my helplessness in dealing with the murderers of humanity,
he writes, a shame that has not left me to this day. At other points,
his expressions of guilt are more oblique. Before leaving Poland,
he paid a final visit to his parents. His mother's parting words
as reported by Lemkin seem more the product of wish fulfillment
than reality:
You realize, Raphael, that it is you, not we, who needs protection
now . [O]f all of us only you do not live the life of love. You
are the lonely and the loveless one. Still, you have been carrying
the burden of your idea, which is based on love . We know you will
continue your work, for the protection of peoples. Unfortunately,
it is needed now more than ever before.
It is the book's falsest-sounding note and its most heartbreaking.
In Washington, D. C., Lemkin served as a consultant to the Board of
Economic Warfare and, later, as an adviser to the War Department. He
tried to draw attention to the fact that the Axis powers planned
nothing less than the destruction of the peoples under their control.
He sent a memo to FDR, encouraging a treaty banning genocide. The
president responded by urging patience. Lemkin worked with the
prosecution team at Nuremberg but was unhappy with the result. The
Allies decided their case against a past Hitler, he writes, but
refused to envisage future Hitlers.
The problem with Nuremberg, in Lemkin's eyes, was that it linked
the destruction of groups with wars of aggression. According to
international law as it stood in 1945, Germany really became culpable
only when it crossed into Poland. Had the Nazis killed only German
Jews, they would not have been liable. Lemkin's aim was to undo this
absurdity and uncouple genocide from war, and he ultimately succeeded.
In December 1946, the U. N. passed a resolution condemning genocide.
In December 1948, the General Assembly passed a law banning it,
and in January 1951, the Genocide Convention went into force.
Lemkin's single-mindedness did not come without costs. He alienated
friends, made enemies and burned bridges. His work on the convention
kept him from teaching and earning. His health suffered. The final
pages of his book offer a chilling picture of hand-to-mouth living:
borrowing from one friend to repay another, mounting bills, moth-eaten
clothes. By book's end, he is a humbled, dying man looking to lay
claim to the honor he felt was his due.
Lemkin has been called a prophet, and the term is not inapt. He
understood humankind's capacity for destruction earlier and more fully
than any of his contemporaries. But prophets don't always come in
appealing packages or say what you want to hear even from beyond the
grave. Critics can argue that Lemkin accomplished nothing. Genocide
marches on. But Rwanda and Srebrenica are not refutations of his
legacy; they are affirmations of his prescience. Without Lemkin, they
would have been atrocities. In the light of his Genocide Convention,
they were crimes.