East West Street

Summary

A book that traces the origins of two concepts central to international criminal law — "genocide" and "crimes against humanity" — through the overlapping stories of the two Jewish lawyers, Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, who coined them, and the Nazi official, Hans Frank, who was prosecuted under them at Nuremberg. Sands discovers that all three men had connections to the same small Galician city, and weaves their stories together with his own family history to show how the Holocaust destroyed a world and simultaneously forced the creation of the legal language to name what had happened. The book is both a work of legal history and a deeply personal meditation on memory, family, and the limits of justice.