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.
