PHILIPPE SANDS East West Street: On the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity. Reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
East West Street fuses biography, family memoir and journalism, culminating in an account of the Nuremberg trials told with the pace of a legal thriller.
The idea that a government shouldn’t have impunity to murder its own citizens because it finds them undesirable or inconvenient might seem like a given today. Yet this notion first arose less than a century ago and was only widely accepted even more recently. Its establishment in law consumed the lives of at least two men, Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, who came to opposite conclusions about how to protect people from crimes perpetrated by their own governments. Protect the group, Lemkin argued. Protect the individual, Lauterpacht countered.
The genesis of these two approaches to international law – and the foundations of international law itself – are at the heart of East West Street. Philippe Sands takes what could be dry legal history and weaves it into an engaging, deeply researched story told through the prism of the town of Lviv, in present-day Ukraine. As Sands describes, ‘The streets of Lviv are a microcosm of Europe’s turbulent 20th century, the focus of bloody conflicts that tore cultures apart.’
In an extraordinary coincidence, both Lemkin and Lauterpacht resided in Lviv early in their lives and took classes at the same university, though they didn’t know each other. Sands discovers that his Jewish grandfather Leon also lived in Lviv. While Leon escaped the Nazi invasion that engulfed the town of Lviv and much of Eastern Europe, most of his family members were trapped in the machinations of the Holocaust, overseen in that region by Hans Frank, one of the German leaders put on trial at Nuremberg.
Through the Lviv connections, Sands synthesises these strands of history – his Jewish family’s fate, Lauterpacht’s and Lemkin’s lives and contributions to international law, Hans Frank’s rule over what was then western Poland, and the groundbreaking Nuremberg trials. Nuremberg was a turning point in the history of civilisation, Sands notes:
This was the first time in human history that the leaders of a state were put on trial before an international court for crimes against humanity and genocide, two new crimes.
Thanks to the groundwork Lemkin had laid in the early 1940s and his tireless efforts – he devoted his entire life to the undertaking – the United Nations General Assembly would later adopt the Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Lauterpacht’s contribution to international law and relations also remains with us in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, although this declaration is not legally binding.
That Lemkin’s and Lauterpacht’s ideas would be embraced by a geopolitical organisation such as the UN was in no way certain. Sands summarises the international paradigm in the early 20th century:
Issues of group identity and autonomy, along with the rise of nationalism and the emergence of new states after the end of the First World War, combined to move the law to the centre of the political stage. This was a new development in scale and scope. How might the law protect minorities? it was asked. What languages could they speak? Would they be able to educate their children in special schools? Such questions continue to resonate today around the world, but back then no international rules offered guidance on how to address them. Each country, old or new, was free to treat those who lived within its borders as it wished. International law offered few constraints on the majority’s treatment of minorities and no rights for individuals.
Germany’s Nazi leaders were naturally opposed to any concept of individual rights or group protection, as Sands highlights in excerpts from one of Hans Frank’s speeches:
‘National Socialism has abandoned the false principle of humanity’ … [and is] against all ‘excessively humane’ behaviour. Suitable punishments were on their way, to be handed down to expiate violations of the duty of loyalty to community. The Nazis were waging a ‘war on crime for all time’.
Many other countries were also wary of concepts such as genocide and universal human rights, though less vehemently so. There was political opposition to genocide as a punishable crime in both the United States and Britain: the US didn’t want the concept applied to their treatment of African Americans, just as Britain didn’t want their colonial practices viewed through the lens of genocide.
The crime of genocide (a word first coined by Lemkin) was introduced into the Nuremberg trials, but in part because of these geopolitical hesitations, the new term was not mentioned even once in the final judgement. The prosecutors’ aims of punishing Nazi leaders for wrongdoing was further restricted – a single comma in the legalese of the proceedings restricted the crimes that could be considered in the trial. As Sands notes:
For an act to be a crime, it had to be connected to the war … the consequence [was] the carving-out from the trial of all the acts that occurred in Germany and Austria before September 1939. The acts of impoverishment and banishment taken against individuals like Leon, in November 1938, and against millions of others – of confiscation, expulsion, detention, killing – would be outside the jurisdiction of the tribunal.
A barrister who has argued cases of both crimes against humanity and genocide allegations in international courtrooms, Sands has considerable insight into trial proceedings. He successfully embeds the legalities of the Nuremberg trials within the individual stories of his principal characters, each caught up in the turbulence of the Second World War. In portraying Lemkin’s efforts to get members of his family out of Poland, for example, he captures the mindset that dissuaded many eastern Europeans from fleeing the Nazis when they had the chance. In Lemkin’s unpublished memoir (one of many archival sources Sands draws on), he describes an exchange with a Polish Jew who refused to believe Hitler intended to follow through on his anti-Semitic rhetoric: ‘How can Hitler destroy the Jews, if he must trade with them? People are needed to carry on a war.’ Lemkin’s parents had the same attitude, and later ended up at the Treblinka extermination camp.
To bring to life his subjects who died decades earlier, Sands seeks out and interviews surviving relatives and acquaintances. This is how he comes to speak to the son of Hans Frank, Niklas, who famously acknowledged his father’s crimes, and Horst, the son of SS-Grupenführer Otto von Wächter, who (more typically of the children of Nazi leaders) has never considered the actions of his father to be crimes at all.
The brushstrokes of Sand’s research are visible throughout, adding another dimension to the text. He visits not only Lviv, but many of the towns and cities his subjects lived and worked in, describing the streets and buildings as they were and as they are, layering past and present. Photos interspersed through the text add to the experience of accompanying Sands on his research journey.
In what is otherwise a focused and intricate work, Sands includes some research that seems to detract from his historical narrative. In uncovering the ways both his grandfather and grandmother were able to escape Eastern Europe – they left separately, years apart – he includes a considerable tangent on an affair his grandmother possibly had. Sands questions whether his grandfather was actually his mother’s father and goes so far as to have a DNA test, which indicates his suspicion is likely unfounded. Still, he includes all this in East West Street.
Sands also shares evidence that three of his four principal characters were homosexual, or at least had homosexual inclinations. This revelation about Hans Frank has some resonance with the text as a whole; it was explored by the US army psychologist who oversaw the indicted Nazi leaders’ welfare before and during the trials. But Sands includes excerpts of unpublished poems Lemkin wrote to add to his implication that Lemkin may have been gay (Lemkin never indicated literary aspirations; the handful of poems were likely meant to remain private) and strongly implies that his own grandfather, Leon, had a homosexual relationship. These suppositions about Lemkin and particularly about Sands’s grandfather strike a discord in an otherwise focused and incisive synthesis of international law and personal history.
In the debate over the two approaches to international law, protection of groups or individuals, Sands acknowledges the difficulties still present, what he describes as an ‘intellectual limbo’. Genocide is a distinct and particularly malevolent crime, but its legislation poses a challenge summarised by Sands:
On the one hand, people are killed because they happen to be members of a certain group; on the other, the recognition of that fact by law tends to make more likely the possibility of conflict between groups, by reinforcing the sense of group identity. Perhaps Leopold Kohr got it right … that the crime of genocide will end up giving rise to the very conditions it seeks to ameliorate.
East West Street successfully explores these important debates through a compelling and personal historical narrative.
Philippe Sands East West Street: On the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2016 PB 464pp $32.99
Ashley Kalagian Blunt has written for Griffith Review, McSweeney’s and Right Now. She teaches writing and public speaking, performs stand-up and has written two memoirs. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter: @AKalagianBlunt.
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