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ON THIS MONTH: LITERATURE<br />
Philippe Sands<br />
All roads lead to Lviv<br />
When the barrister<br />
Philippe Sands, a specialist<br />
in international<br />
law, was invited, in 2011,<br />
to give a lecture at the<br />
University of Lviv,<br />
in Western Ukraine,<br />
he thought the place<br />
sounded familiar.<br />
And so it might have:<br />
Lviv is the Ukrainian<br />
name for a city known as Lwow by the Russians,<br />
Lvov by the Poles, and Lemburg by the Germans,<br />
all of whom controlled the city at some<br />
point in the twentieth century. It turned out it<br />
was the home of his grandfather Leon before he<br />
escaped Nazism. Leon’s wife and child also managed<br />
to flee to England: all the rest of his of his<br />
relatives were murdered in the Holocaust.<br />
It was also where two brilliant lawyers, who<br />
spearheaded the prosecution cases in the<br />
Nuremburg Trials, were brought up: Hersch<br />
Lauterpacht, who put the indictment of ‘crimes<br />
against humanity’ into the trials, and Raphael<br />
Lemkin, who indicted, for the first time, against<br />
what he termed ‘genocide’.<br />
“I was having lunch with my editor after I came<br />
back [from Lviv],” I’m told, by Sands, down<br />
the phone, “and I was talking about these three<br />
men’s intertwining stories, and he said ‘that’s<br />
your next book!’ It wasn’t until later down the<br />
line that a fourth character walked into the book:<br />
Hans Frank.”<br />
“Frank is a totally fascinating figure,” he continues.<br />
“He was highly educated, intelligent and<br />
cultured. He was an outstanding pianist, and the<br />
friend of authors, and musicians, like Richard<br />
Strauss. And yet he became responsible for the<br />
murder of countless people.” Frank, Hitler’s<br />
Photo by John Reynolds<br />
personal lawyer, who<br />
became the Nazi<br />
regime’s chief jurist in<br />
occupied Poland (including<br />
Lviv) was tried<br />
at Nuremberg: he was<br />
found guilty of crimes<br />
against humanity, and<br />
executed.<br />
“The big question is,<br />
if a man as ordinary as<br />
Hans Frank can, swept up in a bigger moment,<br />
cross the line into mass murder, then why not<br />
someone like me?” A question, he suggests,<br />
which is ever more pertinent in our changing<br />
political climate.<br />
The book is called East West Street, and it’s a rare<br />
beast: a book on international law, crossed with a<br />
family memoir, which has the suspense and pace<br />
of a detective novel, building up to a climactic<br />
last quarter describing the Nuremburg Trials.<br />
For Sands, the Trials were a massive milestone<br />
in legal history: “This was the first time in which<br />
rules were created so that the power of the state<br />
was not absolute.” Again there’s a current pertinence:<br />
“[The aftermath of] Trump and Brexit are<br />
threatening to push that back.”<br />
The book has led to a film, My Nazi Legacy:<br />
What Our Fathers Did, “directed by my dear<br />
friend David Evans, who also happens to be<br />
the director of much of Downton Abbey,” says<br />
Philippe, who wrote the documentary's script.<br />
The film, being shown at Depot Cinema two<br />
days before his talk in the All Saints, also features<br />
the sons of two prominent Nazis, one of whom is<br />
Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank. Alex Leith<br />
A Personal Story of International Crimes, <strong>Lewes</strong><br />
Literary Society, All Saints, 20th <strong>March</strong>, 8pm; My<br />
Nazi Legacy, Depot Cinema, 18th <strong>March</strong>, 3pm<br />
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