Reviewing East West Street (August 2025)

Philippe Sands, highly regarded as an academic, public intellectual and litigator before international courts, published East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" in 2016.(1) International criminal law is the central theme of the book, and Sands situates the arguments for including crimes against humanity and genocide in the new post-World War II international order in time, place and its early advocates. However, by no means is the book a legal text with extensive case notes and references. It is a story, a sort of detective story, as one man, Sands, tries to piece together his family's past starting from Lviv, a city in western Ukraine where he had been invited to give a lecture on international law in 2010. As he investigates the history of his family, he makes connections between his family and two of the most famous international jurists of the 20^th century. For Sands, discovery culminates in the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946.

The four main characters in the book are Hersch Lauterpacht, Rafael Lemkin, Leon Buchholz and Hans Frank, and because of its place in the history of Sands’ family and the development of post-World War II international law, he suggests that Lviv (Lwów in independent Poland between the world wars, Lemberg under the Austrians and Nazis and Lviv since Ukrainian independence in 1991) could be added as a fifth character.

Lviv is a medium-sized city in Central Europe whose name has changed multiple times as its ‘ownership’ has changed hands many times, with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, Germany, the U.S.S.R. and currently Ukraine each laying claim to it at one time or another. It is the common geographic point of contact for the author and his four principal characters. Leon, his maternal grandfather, and for Sands, the smiling boy with big ears in one of the family photos, is the only person from his extended family of 70 or more in Lemberg and Żółkiew (now Zhovkva in Ukraine) to survive the Nazi murders. Lauterpacht and Lemkin studied law at the university in Lemberg and Lwów, respectively, under some of the same professors though not at the same time. Hans Frank was the Nazi governor of the General Government (Nazi-occupied Poland). At the Nuremberg trials, Frank is the target of the new laws on mass murder. In reality, he is but one of the targets, although a very important one.

Lauterpacht and Lemkin are credited with advancing the body of international law to recognize and incorporate the definition and punishment of mass killing. At the time, their views were contrary. For Lauterpacht, the individual not the group must be the focus. As Sands writes,

[H]e saw firsthand how the law’s desire to protect some groups—as reflected in the Polish Minorities Treaty—could create a sharp backlash. Poorly crafted laws could have unintended consequences, provoking the very wrongs they sought to prevent. I was instinctively sympathetic to Lauterpacht’s view, which was motivated by a desire to reinforce the protection of each individual, irrespective of which group he or she happened to belong to, to limit the potent force of tribalism, not reinforce it. By focusing on the individual, not the group, Lauterpacht wanted to diminish the force of intergroup conflict. It was a rational, enlightened view, and also an idealistic one.

And then presenting Lemkin’s argument,(2) Sands writes

The counterargument was put most strongly by Lemkin. Not opposed to individual rights, he nevertheless believed that an excessive focus on individuals was naive, that it ignored the reality of conflict and violence: individuals were targeted because they were members of a particular group, not because of their individual qualities. For Lemkin, the law must reflect true motive and real intent, the forces that explained why certain individuals—from certain targeted groups—were killed. For Lemkin, the focus on groups was the practical approach.

In brief, according to Sands,

Lauterpacht and Lemkin were sharply divided as to the solutions they proposed to a big question: How could the law help to prevent mass killing? Protect the individual, says Lauterpacht. Protect the group, says Lemkin.

Today, both crimes against humanity and genocide are part of international law.

In hindsight, it seems unlikely that these new laws regarding mass killing would have been adopted but for the Holocaust. The enormity of the crimes demanded a commensurate and international response, and the four Allied powers—the U.S., Great Britain, France and the U.S.S.R.—were, at the end of the war, still united and determined to prosecute and punish the Nazi leadership. Similarly, the magnitude of death and destruction of World War I and World War II compelled the victors of those wars to establish the League of Nations and the United Nations, respectively, as part of a new international order. That effort to prevent a second world war failed miserably after World War I. Thus far, the great powers have not plunged World War III.

Lauterpacht and Lemkin had very different responses to the Nuremburg tribunal’s judgment on October 1, 1946. The tribunal agreed with Lauterpacht’s arguments on crimes against humanity. Individual criminal responsibility for the worst crimes during wartime were no longer automatically precluded by the sovereignty claims of the state. However, there was no mention in the judgment of genocide despite Lemkin’s best efforts to have it included. “Lemkin was equally horrified that the crimes committed before the war were entirely ignored,” because this ignored the genocidal acts of the 1930s as if to say that genocide can only be committed during wartime.

But Lemkin, ever the nuisance for many, never capitulated, and he continued to lobby to have the crime of genocide integrated into international law. Two years after the Nuremberg judgment, there was movement. The U.N. General Assembly took up the question of genocide and passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. One day later, the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Lemkin’s and Lauterpacht’s visions for an improved international humanitarian law were being realized after many years of hard work.

In a victory both Lauterpacht and Lemkin could be pleased to have participated in, the Nuremberg tribunal tried, convicted and sentenced twelve defendants to death. Ten of them were executed by hanging. Martin Bormann was tried, convicted and sentenced in absentia and Hermann Göring committed suicide just before his scheduled execution. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler had already committed suicide before the trials. This was a singular moment for the international community (albeit as represented only by the four nations prosecuting the Nuremberg cases) in holding a state and its principals accountable for wartime atrocities.

In the Epilogue, Sands cites a number of cases where the new international laws on crimes against humanity and genocide have been applied. However, unaddressed is the fact that none of the indictments or convictions Sands mentions were made against powerful states and/or their citizens. The victors of World War II (U.S., U.K., France, U.S.S.R./Russia and China), now ensconced as permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, with absolute veto powers, are effectively beyond the jurisdiction of international courts.

Here, Sands brings the reader back to the mystery of his family’s disappearance. East-west street in Żółkiew, about 30 km north of Lwów in Ukraine, is the geographic point of connection between Sands and Lauterpacht. Lauterpacht and Sands’s great-grandmother lived at opposite ends of the town, on east-west street. Żółkiew is also significant, because it is the location of the book’s final scene, where Sands visits a nearby forest just outside the town. On March 25, 1943, the Germans executed 3,500 civilians (Jews) in a clearing of oaks and birches where the children of Żółkiew used to play.

Among the bones that lay beneath [the dark ponds] was a commingling, Leon’s uncle Leibus, Lauterpacht’s uncle David, resting near each other in this place because they happened to be a member of the wrong group.

Earlier, Sands seems inclined towards Lauterpacht’s insistence that the individual be the focus of the law. But what he sees in the woods of Żółkiew is visceral, and he then intellectualizes as follows,

[The sense of group identity] poses a serious challenge for our system of international law confronted with a tangible tension: on the one hand, people are killed because they happen to be members of a certain group; on the other, the recognition of that fact by the law tends to make more likely the possibility of conflict between groups, by reinforcing the sense of group identity. Perhaps Leopold Kohr got it right, in the strong but private letter he wrote to his friend Lemkin, that the crime of genocide will end up giving rise to the very conditions it seeks to ameliorate.

By the end of the book, the Sands retains his preference for the human rights approach of the ‘crimes of humanity’ label, but he also seems more inclined to accept Lemkin’s concept of ‘genocide.’ At this point, the reader is encouraged to listen to Ezra Klein’s interview(3) with Philippe Sands on the question, ‘When Is It Genocide?’ Sands shares his views on crimes against humanity and genocide nine years after East West Street. In addition, there are sufficient references from which the reader can get a synopsis of the book. Even so, the reader may still wish to read the book. It is a worthwhile and engrossing read.

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Endnotes

The following excerpt from Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) encapsulates Lemkin’s view on this new concept of ‘genocide.’

New conceptions require new terms. By "genocide" we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin tide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homocide[sic], infanticide, etc. Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.