East West Street - The Jewish Chronicle

By Philippe Sands
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20

Philippe Sands is a distinguished, international human-rights lawyer, but he may have missed his real vocation: he would have made a brilliant detective. In his latest book, Sands interweaves the stories of four men born around 1900 who came to work or study in what was then the historic Polish city of Lwów, which became Lemburg under Nazi occupation, Lvov under Soviet control, and is now Lviv in western Ukraine. Those name-changes speak volumes about its turbulent history in the 20th century and its effects on Sands's quartet.

Three of them profoundly influenced events in Europe during and after the Nazi occupation. They were Hans Frank, governor-general of German-occupied Poland; Hersch Lauterpacht, a Jewish law graduate of the University of Lwów who left Poland in 1923 for Cambridge, where he became a world-renowned professor of international law; and Rafael Lemkin, another Jewish law student who, Sands's diligent research established, was taught by the same professor of criminal law who taught Lauterpacht. Lemkin fled Poland in 1939 and, via Sweden, the trans-Siberian railway and Japan, eventually reached the US.

The fourth man was Sands's grandfather, Leon Buchholz, a Jewish liquor merchant who left Lwów for Vienna as a 10-year-old in 1914 with his mother and sister as Russian forces occupied the city. He settled in the Austrian capital but was expelled by the Nazis in 1938, escaping to Paris but leaving behind his wife Rita and baby daughter Ruth (Sands's mother). Sands delves into their subsequent story and uncovers a host of possibly unwelcome family secrets.

What the three Jews had in common was that most of their relatives who remained in Poland were murdered by the Nazis. The three exiles' slow realisation that their loved ones had not survived is movingly told, but Sands also came across some extraordinary survival stories, such as that of Lauterpacht's niece Inka, whose parents were taken away by the Germans but who was hidden in a Catholic convent outside Lwów for two years until the city was liberated.

The other theme of this gripping and beautifully written book is a legal one, for Lauterpacht and Lemkin became arguably the most creative and influential international lawyers of the 20th century. Lauterpacht was a solid, establishment figure whose passion was to protect the rights of the individual against an oppressive state and to embody those rights in international law.

Lemkin, a more erratic and obsessive outsider, tried to persuade the world to make the extermination of national and ethnic groups an international crime, in which he was ultimately successful. It was he who invented the word "genocide".

Sands painstakingly describes their key roles behind the scenes at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, where Hans Frank received the death penalty.

But Sands is much more than a dry lawyer. He turns up fascinating new material on the effect of war and tyranny on individual lives and the many unsung acts of courage and principle that restore one's faith in the human capacity to do good when confronted with unprecedented barbarity.