East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" by Philippe Sands (review)

What is the difference between genocide and crimes against humanity? And does the difference matter? East West Street addresses the evolution and implementation of these legal concepts in an unusual hybrid form: a multiple biography of four men who never formally met although their lives were deeply entwined.¹ They were Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer and Governor General of Poland during the Nazi occupation; Hersch Lauterpacht, professor of international law at Cambridge and judge at the International Court of Justice; Rafael Lemkin, who coined the word genocide and initiated the Genocide Convention; and Leon Buchholz, Philippe Sands' own grandfather. East West Street is also a kind of scholarly whodunit that traces the author's circuitous pursuit of legal and personal history through archives and registry offices, trial transcripts, family documents, interviews, site visits, and meetings with family members of the protagonists.

This quest begins in 2010 when Philippe Sands, Professor of Laws and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London, accepted an invitation to lecture to the law faculty of the university in Lviv. He was motivated, in part, because he wanted to know more about his grandfather, Leon Buchholz, who had been born in Lviv and whose life before World War II had always been locked "into a crypt."² Only in preparing his address on the origins of international law did Sands discover the coincidence that, in fact, the city itself was intimately connected to those origins: the two men who did more than any others to create the modern system of international justice, Lauterpacht and Lemkin, both had their roots in Lviv and had had the same teachers at the law school there. The East West Street of the title refers to a major street in Lviv (also known as Lemberg, Lvov, and Lwow), now part of Poland, where the families of Lauterpacht, Lemkin, and Grandfather Buchholz had all lived at one time.

Separate sections of the book focus on the lives of each of these men, with particular attention given to Leon Buchholz, who comes to epitomize the plight of Jews living in what Timothy D. Snyder has graphically depicted as "the Bloodlands," that region of what is now Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and the Baltic States where an estimated 14 million non-combatants were killed between 1933 and 1945 during invasions by both Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Nazi Germany.³ Leon was one of the fortunate few; although he lost most of his family, he, his wife, and his infant daughter managed to flee to Paris, where they somehow survived the war and lived for the rest of Leon's life. The chapters that deal with Buchholz are necessarily the most subjective as the author seeks to document his grandparents' lives and understand his own: "Why had I chosen the path of law? And why law of the kind that seemed connected to an unspoken family history?"⁴

The chapters on Hans Frank, who as Governor General of the "Occupied Polish Territories" implemented Nazi policy of colonization and extermination, put Leon Buchholz's individual story into a dark historical context. After 1939, Frank declared all Poles "slaves of the Greater German World Empire,"⁵ and as Operation Barbarossa overran the Soviet-controlled territories of Poland and the former Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, he ultimately had the lives of more than three million Jews under his control. Frank enthusiastically oversaw the implementation of the Final Solution with its main death camps in the territory under his authority. The all-too-familiar account of the fate of Polish Jewry is given a unique perspective by Niklas Frank, Hans Frank's youngest child, whom the author befriends and with whom he visits both Poland and the courtroom of the Nuremberg Trials, where Frank was condemned to death in 1946. "This is a happy room, for me, and for the world,"^6...