Memorable World History/Authors

Raphael Lemkin and the Genocide Convention

Raphael Lemkin, Polish: Rafał Lemkin (June 24, 1900 – August 28, 1959) was a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent who is best known for coining the word genocide and initiating the Genocide Convention. Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1943 or 1944 from genos (Greek for family, tribe, or race) and -cide (Latin for killing).

Life

Early years

Lemkin was born Rafał Lemkin on 24 June 1900 in Bezwodne, a village near the town of Wolkowysk in the Russian Empire. He grew up in a Polish Jewish family on a large farm near Wolkowysk and was one of three children born to Joseph Lemkin and Bella née Pomeranz. His father was a farmer and his mother an intellectual, a painter, linguist, and philosophy student with a large collection of books on literature and history. Lemkin and his two brothers (Elias and Samuel) were homeschooled by their mother. As a youth, Lemkin was fascinated by the subject of atrocities and would often question his mother about such events as the Sack of Carthage, Mongol invasions and conquests and the persecution of Huguenots. Lemkin apparently came across the concept of mass atrocities while, at the age of 12, reading Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz, in particular the passage where Nero threw Christians to the lions. During World War I, the Lemkin family farm was located in an area of fighting between Russian and German troops. The family buried their books and valuables before taking shelter in a nearby forest. During the fighting, artillery fire destroyed their home and German troops seized their crops, horses and livestock. Lemkin's brother Samuel eventually died of pneumonia and malnutrition while the family remained in the forest.

After graduating from a local trade school in Białystok he began the study of linguistics at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine). He was a polyglot, fluent in nine languages and reading fourteen. His first published book was a 1926 translation of the Hayim Nahman Bialik novella Noach i Marynka from Hebrew into Polish. It was in Bialystok that Lemkin became interested in the concept of crime, later developing the concept of genocide, based on the Armenian experience at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, failed verification] then later the experience of Assyrians massacred in Iraq during the 1933 Simele massacre. Lemkin then moved on to Heidelberg University in Germany to study philosophy, returned to Lwów to study law in 1926, becoming a prosecutor in Warsaw at graduation.

His subsequent career as assistant prosecutor in the District Court of Brzeżany (since 1945 Berezhany, Ukraine) and Warsaw, followed by a private legal practice in Warsaw, did not divert Lemkin from elaborating rudiments of international law dealing with group exterminations.

Career in interwar Poland

From 1929 to 1934, Lemkin was the Public Prosecutor for the district court of Warsaw. In 1930 he was promoted to Deputy Prosecutor in a local court in Brzeżany. While Public Prosecutor, Lemkin was also secretary of the Committee on Codification of the Laws of the Republic of Poland, which codified the penal codes of Poland, and taught law at Tachkemoni College in Warsaw. Lemkin, working with Duke University law professor Malcolm McDermott, translated The Polish Penal Code of 1932 from Polish to English.

In 1933 Lemkin made a presentation to the Legal Council of the League of Nations conference on international criminal law in Madrid, for which he prepared an essay on the Crime of Barbarity as a crime against international law. The concept of the crime, which later evolved into the idea of genocide, was based on the Armenian Genocide and prompted by the experience of Assyrians massacred in Iraq during the 1933 Simele massacre. In 1934 Lemkin, under pressure from the Polish Foreign Minister for comments made at the Madrid conference, resigned his position and became a private solicitor in Warsaw. While in Warsaw, Lemkin attended numerous lectures organized by the Free Polish University, including the classes of Emil Stanisław Rappaport and Wacław Makowski.