A farm near Wolkowysk
Rafał Lemkin was born on 24 June 1900 at Bezwodne, a farm near the town of Wolkowysk in what was then the Russian Empire and is now Belarus. He was one of three sons of Józef Lemkin, a farmer, and Bella Pomeranz, a woman of wide learning, a painter, linguist and student of philosophy with a large library of her own. She schooled her boys at home, and young Rafał grew up surrounded by books in a Polish-Jewish household that was rooted in the land but hungry for ideas.
He was an unusual child, drawn early to the darkest pages of history. He questioned his mother about the sack of Carthage, the Mongol invasions and the persecution of the Huguenots. At twelve he read Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis and was haunted by its scene of Christians thrown to the lions. Much later he wrote that he could trace a line, red with blood, from the Roman arena through the gallows of France to the pogrom of Białystok, a sense, already forming in boyhood, that the slaughter of whole groups was a recurring pattern rather than a series of accidents.
The First World War arrived on the family’s doorstep. Fighting between Russian and German armies reached the farm; artillery destroyed the house, soldiers seized the crops and livestock, and the family sheltered in a forest, where Lemkin’s brother Samuel died of pneumonia and malnutrition.
“But the Armenians are not chickens”
After schooling in Białystok, Lemkin went to the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów (today Lviv) to study linguistics, then philosophy at Heidelberg, before returning to Lwów to read law in 1926. He was a formidable linguist, said to speak nine languages and read fourteen, and in 1926 he published a Polish translation of a Hebrew novella by the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik.
It was as a student that he found the question that would consume his life. In 1921 a young Armenian, Soghomon Tehlirian, was tried in Berlin for assassinating Talaat Pasha, a principal organiser of the mass murder of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Lemkin asked one of his professors why Talaat himself could never have been put on trial for killing a people. The professor replied that sovereignty protected a state’s treatment of its own subjects, comparing it to a farmer who may do as he likes with his chickens. Lemkin’s reply became famous: “But the Armenians are not chickens.” Sovereignty, he concluded, could not be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people.
A prosecutor with an idea
In interwar Poland Lemkin built a solid legal career. He served as a prosecutor, including as public prosecutor for the Warsaw district court, acted as secretary of the committee codifying Poland’s criminal law, taught at the religious-Zionist Tachkemoni College in Warsaw, and with the Duke University law professor Malcolm McDermott translated the Polish Penal Code of 1932 into English. In the 1920s he also wrote a column for a Warsaw Yiddish Zionist newspaper; he remained a Zionist all his life.
In 1933, the year Hitler came to power and the year Iraqi forces massacred Assyrians at Simele, Lemkin prepared a proposal for a League of Nations-related conference on international criminal law in Madrid. He argued that the destruction of national, religious and ethnic groups (“barbarity”) and of their culture (“vandalism”) should be crimes under international law, punishable wherever the perpetrators were caught. The idea went nowhere, and under pressure from Poland’s foreign minister, who disliked his remarks, Lemkin left public service in 1934 for private practice in Warsaw.
Flight, and a book of decrees
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Lemkin left Warsaw on 6 September and made his way east, caught between German and Soviet forces, then north through Lithuania. By the spring of 1940 he had reached neutral Sweden, where he lectured at Stockholm University and did something no one else was doing: he gathered the decrees the Nazis were issuing in every occupied country and read them as a lawyer reads a statute, as evidence of intent.
With McDermott’s help he reached the United States in 1941 and joined the law faculty at Duke University. In the summer of 1942 he moved to Washington, working as an analyst and adviser for the War Department and the Board of Economic Warfare. All the while he kept assembling his dossier. The result, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in November 1944, was a long, dry, meticulously documented book called Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
Naming the crime
In chapter nine of that book Lemkin introduced a new word. Joining the Greek genos (race, tribe or family) to the Latin -cide (killing), he coined “genocide”, defining it as the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. Crucially, he did not mean only mass killing. Genocide, he wrote, does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation; it can be a coordinated plan to destroy the essential foundations of a group’s life, its political institutions, culture, language, religion, economy, and the security and dignity of its members.
The word was a weapon as much as a description. Before it, statesmen spoke of “a crime without a name”, Churchill’s phrase in 1941 for the German atrocities in the Soviet Union. Lemkin believed that a crime without a name could not be prosecuted, prevented or even clearly seen. Within a year his coinage was being used by prosecutors. He worked with the American team of Robert H. Jackson preparing the Nuremberg trials, and the word “genocide” appeared in the indictment against the major Nazi war criminals, though the tribunal’s judgment did not treat it as a separate crime, and addressed only atrocities linked to aggressive war.
A one-man lobby
Lemkin concluded that only a binding treaty could close the gap Nuremberg had left. He became, in effect, a one-man lobby at the newborn United Nations, haunting corridors and delegates’ lounges with drafts and memoranda, writing letters by the thousand, buttonholing diplomats from every continent. He courted Latin American and Arab delegates as assiduously as European ones, and even played down his own Zionism to avoid alienating potential supporters.
In December 1946 the General Assembly declared genocide a crime under international law. Two years later, on 9 December 1948, the day before it adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Assembly unanimously approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The treaty’s definition, which covers acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, bore Lemkin’s stamp throughout, even if states had stripped out much of the cultural dimension he cared about. It came into force in 1951 once twenty countries had ratified it.
Forty-nine names
Lemkin’s campaign was never abstract. Of his family who stayed behind in Poland, forty-nine relatives, his parents among them, were murdered in the Holocaust, in killing centres, concentration camps, the Warsaw ghetto and on death marches. His brother Elias, Elias’s wife and their two sons survived after being deported to a Soviet labour camp; in 1948 Lemkin helped them emigrate to Montreal.
He rarely wrote at length about that grief, but it is hard to read his work without feeling it. The crime he had spent his youth trying to define had swallowed his own family while he was documenting it. His Jewishness shaped both his vision and his strategy: he had studied the pogroms, wrote in Yiddish, taught at a Zionist school and saw the destruction of European Jewry as the most extreme instance of a pattern that had also struck Armenians, Assyrians and many others.
Poverty and late recognition
After 1948 Lemkin lectured at Yale and, from 1955, at Rutgers School of Law in Newark, but he never secured a stable, well-paid position. He spent his last years lobbying governments to ratify the Convention and write it into their own laws, studying cases from the Soviet famine in Ukraine, which he described in a 1953 speech as genocide, to French conduct in Algeria, and labouring on an ambitious multi-volume history of genocide that he never finished. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize many times without success, and lived alone in a modest New York apartment, often short of money and in poor health.
He died of a heart attack in New York on 28 August 1959, aged fifty-nine. Only a handful of people attended his funeral, and he was buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens. His autobiography, Totally Unofficial, written in his final years, was not published until 2013. Looking back on his campaign, he wrote that the rain of his work had fallen on a fallow plain, a rain made of the blood and tears of millions of innocent people.
The word that outlived him
For decades after his death Lemkin was largely forgotten, and the Convention seemed a dead letter. The United States did not ratify it until 1988. Then, in the 1990s, the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda brought his word into courtrooms at last. In 1998 the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda handed down the first conviction for genocide by an international court, and the crime was later built into the statute of the permanent International Criminal Court.
Today “genocide” is part of the vocabulary of every language and every human-rights organisation, invoked in courts, parliaments and newspapers around the world. More than 150 states are parties to the Convention he drafted and fought for. Few individuals have ever given the world a new legal category; fewer still did it out of private grief, without an institution behind them, and lived to see it written into international law. Lemkin’s monument is a single word, and the stubborn conviction behind it that no people should ever again be destroyed without the world having a name for what was done.
Sources & further reading
Raphael Lemkin, Wikipedia · Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael Lemkin, USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia · Raphael Lemkin, Jewish Virtual Library · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.