East West Street

I tore through East West Street–it may be the most gripping book I’ve ever read, not just in the past year but in my entire life.

Although it deals with events and concepts of the biggest, most disturbing kind–the Holocaust and the struggle for legal recognition of the crime of genocide–it does so by exploring the most minute details of the lives of several people during the extraordinary, terrifying period of Nazi rule over much of Eastern Europe.

We follow the author through his absorbing search for the past of his own grandfather, and this profoundly personal detective story… show more.

This book relates the suspenseful and twisted path through which two of the world’s worst human rights abuses finally came to be recognized following World War II and the Holocaust. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust, led the campaign for genocide to be recognized as a crime under international law. The banner for crimes against humanity was carried by Hersch Lauterpacht. Although both men lobbied the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal to recognize the particular form of human rights that they espoused, they never actually met. But Sands makes it clear that… show more.

I loved this book. Legal concepts were clearly explained. Personal stories carried the book to its end. Sands shows how two men created laws to name and punish unimaginable crimes, and another who developed a system giving those crimes the patina of legality through the personal lives of four people born in Ukraine around the same time: Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, who conceived of “Crimes Against Humanity” and “Genocide” respectively; Hans Frank oversaw the mass extermination of the Jews in the Polish territories; Leon Buchholz, the author’s grandfather, whose entire family was murdered according to those laws. The author's… show more.

Among many books on the Holocaust, this one stands out. The story focuses on three people, the author’s grandfather and two lawyers who all hailed from the same city, Lviv (Lemberg). The lawyers were Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, who respectively introduced the concepts of genocide and crime against humanity. All three lives are inextricably connected to the fate of Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 40s. The author is a well-known professor of international law who writes with extraordinary precision and elegance. The book is remarkably well researched, and it is often through small and little-known episodes that one… show more.

A remarkably broad and detailed examination into the lives of men who established the legal definitions of genocide and crimes against humanity, as well as a detective story into the author’s own family.