In the spring of 2010, I received an unlikely invitation from a city in the western Ukraine. The law faculty from the university in Lviv (also know as Lwów, Lemberg and Leopolis) asked me to deliver a public lecture on my work on "crimes against humanity" and "genocide", including the cases in which I'd been involved at various international courts, my work as an academic at University College London on the Nuremberg trial, and the judgment's enduring consequences over time, right up to the present day.
I had long been fascinated by the proceedings, and myths, of Nuremberg, a moment that gave rise to our modern system of international justice. But there was also another reason for accepting the invitation: it offered a first opportunity to visit the city where my maternal grandfather, Leon Buchholz, was born in 1904. I knew that he had moved from Lviv to Vienna during the First World War, and that, in 1939, after the Nazis took power in Austria, that he moved to Paris, which is where I knew him.
In common with many others, that period was for him a time of darkness and pain of which he did not wish to speak. So I knew nothing of his early life in Lviv, or the circumstances of his and my mother's departure from Vienna.
The invitation from Lviv prompted a summer of research. For the first time, I opened doors that would shed light on family history - the circumstances of the family departure from Vienna, the identity and story of the remarkable woman who saved my mother's life, the circumstances that caused my grandmother to remain in Vienna until 1941, the fate of other family members. In the course of a search that lasted six years - an improbable family detective story - I scoured archives across cities far and wide, hired a genealogical detective in Vienna, and even learned that I had unknown family members.
What motivated the search? "What haunts are not the dead", wrote the psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham, "but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others".
In parallel with the uncovering of a personal story, the lecture I was invited to deliver also took me on a second path, one that explored the origins of two legal concepts that came into being as the Second World War drew to a close. I was surprised to discover that the origins of the terms "genocide" - which calls for the protection of groups - and "crimes against humanity" - which seeks the well-being of individuals - were closely connected to the same city of Lviv.
Rafael Lemkin, a Jewish Polish criminal prosecutor, fled Warsaw in September 1939 and made his way to America by the most tortuous of journeys, where he coined the word "genocide" in the autumn of 1944.
A year later, he managed to insert his invention into the indictment of Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, giving practical effect to his idea that "attacks upon national, religious and ethnic groups should be made international crimes". At the same time, Hersch Lauterpacht, an academic at Cambridge University who was born near Lviv, and spent many years living on Walm Lane in Cricklewood, came up with the idea of putting the term ''crimes against humanity'' into the Nuremberg Statute, giving effect to his idea that "the individual human being… is the ultimate unit of all law". Lauterpacht, who was also Jewish, is widely recognised as the greatest international lawyer of the 20th century, and credited with being one of the creators of our modern system of human rights.
Remarkably, both men had studied at the law faculty of Lviv university, although not at the same time - Lauterpacht was there from 1915 to 1919, and Lemkin from 1921 to 1926. They had the same teachers, I would discover from university records buried deep in the city archives, and would later play key roles in the Nuremberg trial and the development of international law. Curiously, those who invited me to deliver the lecture in Lviv were not aware of this shared background, or the fact that the origins of "genocide" and "crimes against humanity" were so closely connected to the city that marked my own origins.
As the coincidences piled up - I would learn that Malke Buchholz, my great grandmother, and Hersch Lauterpacht were born and lived on the same street (Lembergerstrasse) of the small town of Zolkiew, near Lviv, otherwise known as East West Street - I delved ever more deeply into the terrible events that descended upon Lviv after 1939, and came across the malign influence a third man. Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer and Governor General of occupied Poland, visited the city in August 1942, to deliver a speech that would unleash the murder of more than 100,000 Jews and Poles. Among them were the families, friends and teachers of Lemkin and Lauterpacht, and of my grandfather.
Three years later, Frank was defendant number 7 in the dock at Nuremberg. By a simple twist of fate, he would be prosecuted by Lemkin and Lauterpacht, who would only learn late in the trial that the man they had in their sights was responsible for the deaths of their entire families.
What started as a lecture turned into a book - East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity - about the interweaving lives of the three lawyers (and the uncovering of my grandfather's story). As Anthony Beevor has observed, it is hard to imagine any novel that could match such a work of non-fiction. Over seven years, I came across a multitude of facts and coincidences, including several that connected my family story to that of the three lawyers who stories and fate would so deeply influence my own work:
Hersch Lauterpacht's son Eli, born in Walm Lane, Cricklewood, 1,000 miles from Lviv, would become my first teacher of international law. Yet of all the material uncovered, none was more engaging than the lawyers' shared love of music. Their diaries, letters and notes referred to concerts attended and composers admired.
Of singular note was the finding that, in the summer of 1946, as the Nuremberg trial came to a close, Lauterpacht and Frank, prosecutor and defendant in the same case, found strength in the same piece of music, Johann Sebastian Bach's St Matthew Passion. How extraordinary, I thought, that two men, on opposite sides of the courtroom, might find solace in the same musical space.
Over these years, I kept a list of the various compositions identified by Lauterpacht, Lemkin and Frank and otherwise connected to the trial, from Beethoven and Rachmaninov to 1940s jazz. Later I would share them with my childhood friend Laurent Naouri, the renowned opera singer, along with the unlikely Leonard Cohen song that was playing on radio in a small restaurant near Treblinka, which I visited with my son.
Drawing from our backgrounds - Laurent's in music, mine in the law - we crafted a performance piece, melding words and music that offered insights into an unknown story of singular importance that evolved over several months in the Nuremberg courtroom, exactly 70 years ago: how individuals can effect great political and legal developments, how "genocide" and "crimes against humanity" became a part of our legal landscape, how monumental historical events and a trial of decades ago can touch our lives today.
The first performance of A Song of Good and Evil was at the Hay Festival in the spring of 2014, the tenth in Istanbul a week ago. Last November, we were invited to perform the work in Nuremberg's Courtroom 600, where the trial took place on the 70th anniversary of its opening day. The audience included the last living participants from the trial - Moritz Fuchs, who was Robert Jackson's bodyguard; Yves Beigbeder, assistant to the principal French judge; and George Sakheim, an interpreter - as well as Hans Frank's son and the grandson and great-granddaughter of Geoffrey Lawrence, the Court of Appeal judge who presided over the case.
To stand where Lemkin, Lauterpacht and Frank were seated, exactly 70 years earlier, and to recall the journeys they travelled through the music that entranced them, was to experience a rare and intimate connection with a legal history that has largely been forgotten but which, as current events make clear, should still reverberate.
The Nuremberg trial was the moment when "genocide" and "crimes against humanity" became a part of international law, although 50 more years would pass before anyone would be indicted before an international court or tribunal for these crimes. Events in Yugoslavia and Rwanda catalysed the change and allowed the International Criminal Court to come into being. In this way the ideas of Lauterpacht and Lemkin inform my daily work, in courts and classrooms. They also touch our political lives. But for their efforts, the recent resolution in the UK Parliament characterising the rape and enslavement by ISIS of Yazidi and other minority groups in northern Iraq and Syria as "genocide" would not have occurred. The right of individuals to be treated as individuals, rather than, say, half-Kenyan, Muslim or Jew, would be infinitely diminished, as would the rights of members of a group to obtain the fullest protection of the law to prevent the fact that they happen to be a member of a group to be used as a justification for discrimination, for being singled out, or for other forms of malign mistreatment.
"Genocide" and "crimes against humanity" have lived side by side as legal terms for seven decades. This double existence reflects our own double identities - as individuals and as members of groups - both of which have been deemed to be deserving of respect and protection under the law.
