Philippe Sands. “East West street. On the origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity

Abstract

"A ... personal detective story, an uncovering of secret pasts, and a book that explores the creation and development of world-changing legal concepts that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler's Third Reich. East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of 'genocide' and 'crimes against humanity,' both of whom not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professor, in a city little known today that was a major cultural center of Europe, 'the little Paris of Ukraine,' a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv ... Sands ... realized that his own field of international law had been forged by two men--Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht--each of whom had studied law at Lviv University in the city of his grandfather's birth, each of whom had come to be considered the finest international legal mind of the twentieth century, each considered to be the father of the modern human rights movement, and each, at parallel times, forging diametrically opposite, revolutionary concepts of humanitarian law that had changed the world"--Dust jacket flap