East West Street, by the leading human rights lawyer, Philippe Sands, is about the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, Sands’ family history and the law. But this remarkable book weaves its many threads into a powerful meditation on interconnectedness and what that means for our lives and our ethics
You could say that East West Street is about the Nuremberg trials and the origins of the legal notion of Crimes against Humanity and Genocide. But doesn’t really gets you anywhere close to this passionate, intensely compelling book, which is really Philippe Sands’ explanation of why he devotes his life to fighting human rights cases, especially those involving governments. It reclaims the lives of the men who developed the laws he uses, especially Hersch Lauterpacht, an important figure in the idea of Crimes against Humanity, Rafael Lemkin, the champion of the idea of genocide, and Leon Bucholz, Sands’ grandfather, who wasn’t a lawyer but fled the Nazis. All three were born or lived in and around the city of Lemberg/Lviv and al suffered in one way or another the hands of the Nazis. The fourth character is Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor of Poland, who was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to death.
I won’t summarise the book’s account of the lives and work of these men, or recount the important and moving events in which they were involved; for me, what’s most striking is the meaning that emerges from this complex, interwoven narratives.
History affects groups, but it also impacts individuals. Crimes against Humanity are always crimes against individual people. The court at Nuremberg recognised the and also instituted the principle that individuals should be held responsible for their actions, even when these are undertaken in the service of a party or state.
However, we are also members of a group, and an ideology such as Nazism may define us solely in terms of the group to which we belong. For that reason, we cannot fully comprehend racially inspired actions by looking only at one individual’s actions against another individual, and this is why genocide has become an important legal and moral concept, alongside human rights, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The balance is difficult, however, and there’s a danger that recognising genocide as a crime feeds the collective thinking that also inspires racism.
The point of East West Street is not to resolve these issues but to show their interconnections – and the title itself takes a road in Lemberg/Lviv as an emblem of connections. These are focused by the intertwined lives of the three Jewish men from the same city or region and the ideological and historical forces connected them to each other and to Hans Frank. At Nuremberg the Allied powers, advised by Lauterpacht and to a lesser extent Lemkin, used the universal principles they had developed to prosecute leaders in the regime that killed their families. These principles capture our interconnectedness in law and the responsibilities to other human beings, that follow from it.
None of us can stand apart. This is a very personal book that tells family as well as legal history, and Sands’ life is shaped by olives of the Nazis, both individually and collectively. Sands’ mother survived thanks to brave individuals including a remarkable English missionary. His work, and international justice more generally, depend on the principles hammered out by Lauterpacht and Lemkin for reasons that are partly concerned with universal ethical principles, but were also inspired by their own experiences. All these come together in East West Street, which he structures as a personal quest to understand what happened and why.
The book ends rather enigmatically with an account of a visit to the mass grave at Lviv where thousands of the town’s Jewish victims are buried, including the families of the men he has described, their bodies decomposing together.
“Among the bones that lay beneath was a commingling, Leon’s uncle Leibus, Lauterpacht’s uncle David, resting near each other because they happened to be members of the wrong group.
The sun warmed the waters; the trees lifted me upwards and away from the reeds, towards an indigo sky. Right there, for a brief moment, I understood.”
I have my own connections to these events – to the Jews, the Nazis and the survivors. And I have my own reflections on them. My interpretation of what Sands’ understood in that moment is that he sensed the interconnectedness all the things he has been describing: the characters he focuses on, the human race and his own life and work. These connections are the heart of ethics; the law should reflect that; and humanity needs ways to assert justice through a law that transcends national boundaries.
East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and Crimes Against Humanity, Philip Sands, Orion, 2016, ISBN 9780385350716
