From the Babylonian captivity to the Trail of Tears, the history of rulers forcibly removing or even annihilating subject peoples is a long and sordid one, but the scope and brutality of Nazism necessitated the creation of new terminology. “New conceptions require new terms” was the concise judgment of exiled lawyer Rafael Lemkin in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, one of the first attempts to describe the scale of Nazi atrocities during World War II. Lemkin’s book and eventual involvement in the Nuremberg Trials introduced key concepts to the nascent field of international law. Decades later, these ideas have germinated into an ambitious project that seeks to manage international affairs through decrees and edicts instead of tanks and bombs. 

Terms such as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” are deployed so frequently in modern political discourse that the casual observer might think they have some ancient, musty origin. In truth, both are recent inventions. In a strange twist of fate, the terms were invented by two Jewish jurists educated in what is now the Ukrainian city of Lviv. Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide,” and Hans Lauterpacht, who invented the phrase “crimes against humanity,” were both refugees from a region that endured the successive horrors of Nazi and Soviet occupations. The two figures were recently rescued from semi-obscurity by Philippe Sands, a prominent British writer and barrister who shares Lvivian roots with Lemkin and Lauterpacht and might fairly be described as their 21st-century successor. In East West Street, Sands weaves the origins of modern international law into a deeply personal tale that touches on his own family history and Lemkin’s and Lauterpacht’s stories of escape and exile. As the luckless citizens of Lviv endure yet another foreign invasion, Sands’s book — and the ideas that inspired it — are worth revisiting.