Hardback, Orion Books, £20, out now
International human rights barrister Philippe Sands opens his remarkable new book with a quote from Nicolas Abraham: “What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others”. Sands tries to fill some of these gaps in the stories of both his family and two lawyers who developed the legal concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity that featured for the first time in the Nuremberg tribunal – Hersch Lauerpacht and Rafael Lemkin. Remarkably, there turn out to be connections between all of these people and the (now Ukrainian) city of Lviv, a site of mass murder of Jewish residents during the Second World War.
The best thing I’ve read this year, East West Street is both personal and international in scope. Sands undertakes remarkable archival and other research and succeeds in uncovering surprising and illuminating stories, which help to explain both how international law developed as it did and why it was important that it did so. In this he echoes the approach of Hartley Shawcross, British prosecutor at Nuremberg, who in his closing trial address used a single devastating case study to force home the inhumanity of Nazi war crimes (Sands recounts this at p. 346-7). It takes a skilful and confident writer to manage the risks involved in bringing the huge themes of history back, over and over again, to real individuals. He does so seamlessly, creating a book that reads as compulsively as a detective story. The photos of people and original documents scattered throughout the text make it even more engaging. The related film, My Nazi Legacy: What our Fathers Did, is also well worth watching (http://www.wildgazefilms.co.uk/my-nazi-legacy-2015/) .
Sands’ perspective as a lawyer involved with the International Criminal Court and war crimes tribunals from Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia makes the work highly relevant when thinking about human rights now. 70 years after Nuremberg, how do we deal with crimes against humanity? Do we have the courage required to remember that real individuals are caught up in these huge convulsions, and the greater courage not to look away?
Review by Bethan
Leave a Reply