East West Street
by Philippe Sands
Summary
Invited to lecture in Lviv, the western Ukrainian city that has been Lemberg, Lwów and Lvov inside a single lifetime, the human rights barrister Philippe Sands went looking for the house of his grandfather Leon, who left in 1914 and never spoke of what happened to the family that stayed. What Sands found was a coincidence that reorganises the history of human rights law: the two men who invented its central concepts studied law in that same city, streets apart.
The book braids four lives toward one courtroom. Hersch Lauterpacht, the Cambridge professor who forged crimes against humanity, protecting individuals from their own states. Rafael Lemkin, the obsessive, unclubbable Polish prosecutor who coined genocide, the crime of destroying groups, and lobbied it into law almost alone. Hans Frank, Hitler's lawyer and Governor General of occupied Poland, on whose territory the families of all the others were murdered. And Leon, whose secrets, a daughter sent alone to Paris as a baby, a marriage full of silences, Sands unpicks with a family memoirist's tact and an advocate's persistence. Everything converges at Nuremberg, where Lauterpacht and Lemkin, each unaware of the other's Lviv, put their rival words into the indictment of Frank, each having lost his family to the man in the dock.
The genocide against humanity argument, groups or individuals, still structures international law, and Sands makes its stakes felt as biography.
Around four hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the origins of modern human rights law told as detective story and family memoir at once.
Historical Context & Significance
East West Street won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2016, the first year the Samuel Johnson carried its new sponsor's name, and swept on to the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize and the British Book Award for narrative nonfiction; le Carré called it a monumental achievement, and the reviews generally agreed.
Sands wrote from an insider's double authority, a leading international lawyer who has argued genocide cases in the very frameworks whose birth the book narrates, and its portrait of the Lauterpacht Lemkin rivalry has become the standard telling, taught in law schools as origin story.
The book seeded a body of connected work, the film My Nazi Legacy, the podcast and book The Ratline about the fugitive Nazi governor Otto Wächter, and its afterlife darkened with events: Lviv's streets, and the legal words coined there, returned to the news with the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and Sands's book became current affairs twice over.