Philippe Sands - East West Street

Genocide in the handwriting of Rafael Lemkin, ca. 1945, and Crimes against humanity, Hersch Lauterpacht, July 1946.

The city of Lviv occupies an important place in this story. Through the nineteenth century, it was generally known as Lemberg, located on the eastern outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Soon after World War I, it became part of newly independent Poland, called Lww, until the outbreak of World War II, when it was occupied by the Soviets, who knew it as Lvov. In July 1941, the Germans unexpectedly conquered the city and made it the capital of Distrikt Galizien in the General Government, known once more as Lemberg. After the Red Army vanquished the Nazis in the summer of 1944, it became part of Ukraine and was called Lviv, the name that is generally used today. Exceptionally, if you fly to the city from Munich, the airport screens identify the destination as Lemberg.

Lemberg, Lviv, Lvov, and Lww are the same place. The name has changed, as has the composition and nationality of its inhabitants, but the location and the buildings have remained. This is even as the city changed hands, no fewer than eight times in the years between 1914 and 1945. What to call the city in the pages of this book posed a number of difficulties, so I have used the name by which it was referred to by those who controlled it at the time of which I am writing. (I generally adopt the same approach for other places: nearby kiew is now Zhovkva, after an interregnum from 1951 to 1991, when it was called Nesterov in honor of a Russian World War I hero, the first pilot to fly a loop.)

I thought of calling it Lemberg throughout, because the word evokes a gentle sense of history, as well as being the city of my grandfathers childhood. Yet such a choice could be taken as sending a signal, which might cause offense to others, all the more unfortunate at a time when the territory of Ukraine is being fought over with Russia. The same went for the name Lww, which it was called for two decades, and also for Lviv, which had been the name of the city for just a few tumultuous days in November 1918. Italy never controlled the city, but if it had, it would be called Leopolis, the City of Lions.

Principal Characters

Hersch Lauterpacht, professor of international law, was born in August 1897 in the small town of kiew, a few miles from Lemberg, to which the family moved in 1911. The son of Aron and Deborah (ne Turkenkopf), he was the second of three children, between his brother, David, and his sister, Sabina. In 1923, he married Rachel Steinberg in Vienna, and they had one son, Elihu, who was born in Cricklewood, London.

Hans Frank, a lawyer and government minister, was born in Karlsruhe in May 1900. He had two brothers, one older and one younger. In 1925, he married Brigitte (ne Herbst), and they had two daughters and three sons, the last of whom was named Niklas. In August 1942, he spent two days in Lemberg, where he delivered several speeches.

Rafael Lemkin, a prosecutor and lawyer, was born in Ozerisko near Biaystok, in June 1900. The son of Josef and Bella, he had two brothers (the older, Elias, and the younger, Samuel). In 1921, he moved to Lww. He never married and had no children.

My grandfather Leon Buchholz was born in Lemberg in May 1904. The son of Pinkas, educated as a distiller of spirits and later an innkeeper, and Malke (ne Flaschner), he was the youngest of four children, after his older brother, Emil, and two sisters, Gusta and Laura. He married Regina Rita Landes in Vienna in 1937, and a year later their daughter, Ruth, who is my mother, was born there.

PROLOGUE

An Invitation

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1946,

NUREMBERGS PALACE OF JUSTICE

A LITTLE AFTER three oclock in the afternoon, the wooden door behind the defendants dock slid open and Hans Frank entered courtroom 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 Hitlers 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 twentieth 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.