“East West Street” by Philippe Sands: This Book Will Leave You in Awe
My first story on Medium got to be about “East West Street”, a book I read back in 2020 that captivates my thoughts until today:
Its author Philippe Sands is a British human rights lawyer.
His grandfather was Polish Jewish originating from the city of Lviv (now located in the Western Ukraine).
In “East West Street”, Sands explores the family story of his grandfather’s fleeing Lviv amid WWII, and how his family as a whole was affected by Nazi atrocities.
The insane coincidence, though, is this one:
Two other protagonists of this book, Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin also come from the same city of Lviv (both of them also of Jewish origin).
Both men are from Lviv, both tied their career with law.
Lauterpacht ended up in the UK and shaped the concept of crimes against humanity in the international law.
Lemkin ended up in the US and developed the concept of genocide.
In a nutshell, two men from the same place in the middle of Europe played a major role in how the Nuremberg process played out.
They also influenced how the international law as a whole developed in the subsequent decades — completely independently from each other.
The book is captivating not because of the technicalities of law though. Sands is a great family storyteller who spent years researching in the city archives all over the world and talking to Holocaust survivors, and the results are stunning.
I will just say that sometimes (or maybe often?) family stories hide secrets that none of the ancestors would even think of (hint at Sands’ grandfather and grandmother).
Sands also explores the stories of prominent Nazis, notably Hans Frank (the “Butcher of Poland” who was one of the defendants in the Nuremberg process). Even here, the author takes a personal approach and explores Frank’s family story piece by piece, much of it in conversations with Frank’s elderly son (Sands and Frank’s son are also featured in a documentary “What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy”).
In the chapter on the Nuremberg process, Sands points out that before WWII, there was no concept of the international tribunal against a state, and no international protection of an individual (which is the core of Lauterpacht’s term “crimes against humanity”) or of a group (protection of the groups, e.g. Jewish or Polish, being the core of Lemkin’s term “genocide”).
Before Nuremberg, the general understanding was that a sovereign state can do whatever “it” wanted with its citizens. Lauterpacht and Lemkin, from the same small place in the middle of Europe, changed the international law’s view on it.
Do not think that this book is full of technicalities of law or military reports. It is primarily about people and their stories, and it truly is a fascinating read.
