<i>Rafał Lemkin: Biografia intelektualna</i> [Rafał Lemkin: An intellectual biography]

In the more theoretical part of his Trust: A History, Geoffrey Hosking drew upon sociologists who developed a particular approach to their subject in no small part on account of their having confronted a society governed by distrust. As he put it, “Three modern Central European sociologists who began their lives under Soviet-style socialism were especially sensitive to the high levels of generalized social distrust it generated, and were hence concerned to specify conditions conducive to its opposite: generalized social trust.”1 These sociologists, two of them from Poland, were obviously not the first scholars to respond to their personal historical context to develop the conceptual tools of their disciplines. Some earlier Central European scholars even developed conceptual tools that went far beyond their own disciplines, reaching out to universal concerns, and were recognized as such. Such was the case of Raphael Lemkin: born in 1900 in the Russian partition of Poland, and who invented the word “genocide”—the term for the intention to exterminate a group—and also helped in drafting the Genocide Convention of the United Nations.Lemkin, forgotten shortly after his death in 1959, regained his reputation as an acclaimed thinker, international and criminal lawyer at the onset of the twenty-first century. At that time, among other things, the book Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin was published posthumously by Yale University Press in 2013. Finally, Ryszard Szawłowski's Rafał Lemkin: Biografia intelektualna [Rafał Lemkin: An intellectual biography] was published in Poland in 2020, not that long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which brought up the topic of crimes against humanity—although that was more the field of Hersch Lauterpacht, also connected with interwar Lviv—but also genocide as a current matter of discussion and potentially even legal accusations at the International Court of Justice.The book, as its author claims, is an intellectual biography rather than regular biography, placing it more in the field of the history of ideas, which to no small degree it belongs. But it also says something about its author. Szawłowski is a scholar who specialized in both international law and economics. After criticizing the finances of communist Poland he was forced to leave the country. From the mid-1960s he taught political science in Canada for a time. Eventually, back in postcommunist Poland he became a member of the national audit office. Szawłowski was one of those engaged in reviving the memory of Lemkin both in Poland and abroad, partly because of his own interest in genocide, with the biography under review published the same year he died. Worth adding, the background of the author in law is quite manifest in the book, as even minor errors in different accounts of Lemkin's life are pointed out and set straight in a virtually legalistic manner. Szawłowski's engagement in his subject is also evident in the numerous bulky substantive notes at the bottom of many of the pages, providing something of a parallel narrative.The above doesn't mean the author lacks critical distance to his subject. Among the errors Szawłowski deals with are Lemkin's own misrepresentations of his life. For instance, the biographer points out that in his autobiography the author does not mention his short period at the Jagiellonian University before transferring to the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv, even though one of the events presented could only have occurred at the former university. It is naturally the task of a diligent biographer to uncover such misleading information their subjects offer. But as a biographer of Lemkin's intellectual life that resulted in his major accomplishments in international criminal law, Szawłowski also deals with what he considers his more significant omissions or errors of judgment. For instance, quite early in the biography he discusses the influence on Lemkin of the news of the assassination in Berlin in 1921 of Talaat Pasha, former Ottoman Minister of the Interior who was heavily involved in the extermination of Armenians during World War I—it is fairly well known that this historical event had a lasting impact on Lemkin. The detained Armenian assassin was eventually released pleading to the court in Berlin that the death of close family members during the ethnic cleansing of his people had motivated his deed. The court accepted the excuse as “psychological compulsion” justifying his action. Later evidence turned up that the assassin was likely connected with an Armenian terrorist group and had even received payment for the deed, ostensibly to enable him to escape afterwards. Szawłowski points out that Lemkin accepted this early explanation of the assassin and did not change his opinion of the deed in his autobiography, claiming the man had “upheld the moral order of humanity.” As the author summarizes this assessment, “What is interesting, is that in his unfinished autobiography, Lemkin, writing from the perspective of several decades, does not in the least disassociate himself from his youthful moral radicalism” (p. 63).All the milestones of Lemkin's intellectual biography are covered in depth. The reader receives a detailed account of his rise in international law during the interwar period; his writing of the seminal Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in 1944—already in the United States—the book which included an extensive legal analysis of German rule in countries occupied by Nazi Germany during the course of World War II, and crucially introduced the definition of the term genocide; the inclusion—in October of 1945—of “genocide” in the indictment of German war criminals at Nuremburg; his efforts as initiator and chief architect of the UN convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide in 1948; and his subsequent declining academic career and death in penury in the United States. The book concludes with the afterlife of Lemkin's accomplishment and its renewed recognition in the first decades of the current century.If the intellectual accomplishment of Lemkin in international criminal law is the core of the biography, Szawłowski does not ignore the human side of the story. A brief episode has particular weight. During the course of his dramatic escape from Warsaw at the outbreak of the war and eventual successful arrival in the haven of Sweden, from where he departed for the United States, Lemkin briefly visits his parents and family in his hometown of Wołkowysk. According to the author he likely tried to convince them to accompany him, although this is not mentioned in the autobiography; however, Lemkin does note he could tell they would not budge from their homestead. What was so dramatic is that they were orthodox Jews, but at this juncture at the onset of the Soviet occupation in this part of Poland it was not possible to foresee what would follow and what awaited them in the not so distant future when the Germans would come. The parents did not survive.Although his intellectual heritage is alive in Poland, there is only one small physical presence of Lemkin that Szawłowski naturally notes. It was reported by some authors that the house he lived in while working in Warsaw was destroyed during the war. Szawłowski typically relates their error and that the house indeed survived, adding that in 2008 it was marked with a plaque informing all and sundry in Polish and English that Lemkin had lived there in the interwar period. It is a small presence, but for this miniscule trace of his life in their country Poles can be grateful.

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