The tag line on the
cover of this book is:
‘On the Origins of
GENOCIDE and CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.’
Now, I have a friend
who gets restless when talk turns to the two world wars. ‘Why must
people keep re-living the past?’ she wonders. ‘Isn’t it time to
let it go?’ And my father, who was a prisoner of war from Dunkirk
right the way through to 1945, had a similar attitude. When there
were programmes around Remembrance Day, he too would ask: ‘Why
must we keep remembering? Why can’t we just forget it all?’
(Dad actually did throw
some light on this, when I asked him why it was that a contemporary
and good friend of his, in contrast, regularly went to regimental
reunions and loved reminiscing about his days in North Africa and
then in Italy. ‘Ah,’ said Dad. ‘Well, Harold had a good war.
Me, you see, I just had an ordinary war.’)
When I was a child, the
Second World War was only a few years in the past. But to me then, it
could have been centuries ago. It was gone, over: it belonged to my
parents’ generation, not mine – just as the First World War was
to do with my grandparents’ generation. To be sure, I thought that
when I grew up, there would be probably be another war – that must
just be what happened – but being grown-up was a very, very long
way off so it wasn’t something I needed to worry about then.
But in recent years
I’ve become more and more drawn to books about the Second World War
and the lead-up to it, and I’m clearly not alone – there are
masses of them, both fiction and non-fiction: what we think we know
and understand is being constantly re-evaluated. I think the two big
questions that draw me are:
- How did ordinary people cope with the terrible things that happened to them – with all the loss and destruction?
- In the particular context of the Holocaust - how on earth did human beings find it within themselves to treat other human beings with such unimaginable cruelty?
So when I saw the tag
line on the front of East West Street, I thought it would be
addressing the second of these questions. Well, it doesn’t - or at least, that's not its main purpose. It sets out to do something much more specific. Philippe Sands is an international lawyer, and what he
seeks to do is to explore the origins of these two legal concepts:
genocide, and crimes against humanity.
He does this by tracing
the lives and careers of two of the prosecutors at Nuremberg, where Nazi war criminals were put on trial after the war: Hersch
Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin. Another significant figure is Hans
Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer and the Governor-General of
Nazi-occupied Poland; he was one of the men on trial at Nuremberg in
1946.
There are several
strange twists of fate in this story. One is that both prosecutors –
who were far from being friends, and seem in fact to have had as
little to do with each other as they could manage – came from the
same city, which is now known as Lviv and is in the Ukraine, but has
changed hands and names several times: in the war it was known as
Lemberg. Further, near the end of the trial, the two men – both
Jewish – discovered that most of their family members who had
remained in the city were dead; and the man who had given the orders
which led to their deaths was Frank.
And yet another twist,
another thread that binds together the different elements of the
story: the author’s own grandfather, Léon Buchholz, was also born
in Lemberg/Lviv, at roughly the same time as the two lawyers. Sands
knew little of his family’s history. His interest was aroused when,
as a human rights lawyer with expertise in cases of mass killings in
far too many places, he was asked to deliver a lecture in Lviv. While
there, he saw the chance to find out more about his own family. His
researches also led him to explore the origins of these new and
terrible concepts which had formed the basis for his own career –
and the lives of his grandfather’s two compatriots. (Another intriguing twist is that during his research for this book, Sands became good friends with Frank's son.)
It’s an
extraordinarily complex narrative, and I found that there were times
when I lost the thread and became confused as to which family I was
reading about. But it’s fascinating – if challenging – to try
to grasp the legal framework which allowed Germany in the thirties to
treat (or mistreat) its minorities in whatever way it liked with
apparent impunity; part, after all, of one of those questions I asked
at the beginning. It doesn’t explain how sane men from a country
with a great culture and civilisation could come up with the
hideousness of the Final Solution, or how so many others could find it within themselves to carry it out: but it does go some way to
explaining how the circumstances arose which made such a thing
possible.
I like stories, and I
like to look at history through the lives of ordinary people –
that’s why I particularly enjoyed Thomas Harding’s book, The House by the Lake. For me, this book followed too many stories
and demanded too much close reading: it’s a truly remarkable achievement,
but you’ll need to be able to rise to the challenge and be prepared
for some serious concentration (or, if you’re a lightweight like
me, to be prepared to skip bits!).
