east west street (phillipe sands)

We went to Krakow last year. It’s a fetching city. This was in the last days of open borders and the streets teemed with happy tourists snapping away. Sands’ book focuses on the city of Lwow, which is in neighbouring Ukraine, but as the book makes clear (and perhaps the title alludes to), the borders in this region in the first half of the twentieth century changed frequently. Krakow was the seat of government for Hans Frank, the Nazi overlord of this region, and one of four key characters in the book. Ironically Frank is the only one who loses his own life as a result of the war. The other three principle characters, Leon, the author’s uncle, Lauterpact and Lemkin are all Jewish, and all lost their families in the holocaust. Sands interweaves the stories of the four men’s lives, in the course of which he investigates various mysteries related to his family history. The author is a human rights lawyer, (there were moments when I might have liked more observations from his work, drawing out the way in which the work of Lauterpact and Lemkin has impacted our understanding of more contemporary issues), and the book builds towards the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals, including Frank. Lauterpacht’s and Lemkin, though obviously driven by the same agenda, had competing views on the basis of how the trial should be prosecuted. Lempkin was a pioneer of the idea of genocide, a concept which Lauterpacht rejected, choosing to emphasise the transcendence of individual human rights. East West Street traces the way these two schools of thought emerged from the shared root of Lwow. The terrible history of this part of the world, which experienced the second world war with a psychotic ferocity, and whose history of pogroms and racial discrimination existed long before the arrival of the Nazis, is in stark contrast to the elegance of its architecture and its culture. This contradiction haunts history. The trappings of civilisation are no guarantee against the triumph of the most venal barbarism. Watching interviews this past week with young Israelis talking about the need to exterminate the Palestinians, using the very language that was used against their grandparents during the events the book documents, is a terrible reminder that the cruelty of history is endemic, that ‘civilisation’ is nothing more than a word.