Viva Lewes Issue #138 March 2018

ON THIS MONTH: LITERATURE
Philippe Sands
All roads lead to Lviv
When the barrister
Philippe Sands, a specialist
in international
law, was invited, in 2011,
to give a lecture at the
University of Lviv,
in Western Ukraine,
he thought the place
sounded familiar.
And so it might have:
Lviv is the Ukrainian
name for a city known as Lwow by the Russians,
Lvov by the Poles, and Lemburg by the Germans,
all of whom controlled the city at some
point in the twentieth century. It turned out it
was the home of his grandfather Leon before he
escaped Nazism. Leon’s wife and child also managed
to flee to England: all the rest of his of his
relatives were murdered in the Holocaust.
It was also where two brilliant lawyers, who
spearheaded the prosecution cases in the
Nuremburg Trials, were brought up: Hersch
Lauterpacht, who put the indictment of ‘crimes
against humanity’ into the trials, and Raphael
Lemkin, who indicted, for the first time, against
what he termed ‘genocide’.
“I was having lunch with my editor after I came
back [from Lviv],” I’m told, by Sands, down
the phone, “and I was talking about these three
men’s intertwining stories, and he said ‘that’s
your next book!’ It wasn’t until later down the
line that a fourth character walked into the book:
Hans Frank.”
“Frank is a totally fascinating figure,” he continues.
“He was highly educated, intelligent and
cultured. He was an outstanding pianist, and the
friend of authors, and musicians, like Richard
Strauss. And yet he became responsible for the
murder of countless people.” Frank, Hitler’s
Photo by John Reynolds
personal lawyer, who
became the Nazi
regime’s chief jurist in
occupied Poland (including
Lviv) was tried
at Nuremberg: he was
found guilty of crimes
against humanity, and
executed.
“The big question is,
if a man as ordinary as
Hans Frank can, swept up in a bigger moment,
cross the line into mass murder, then why not
someone like me?” A question, he suggests,
which is ever more pertinent in our changing
political climate.
The book is called East West Street, and it’s a rare
beast: a book on international law, crossed with a
family memoir, which has the suspense and pace
of a detective novel, building up to a climactic
last quarter describing the Nuremburg Trials.
For Sands, the Trials were a massive milestone
in legal history: “This was the first time in which
rules were created so that the power of the state
was not absolute.” Again there’s a current pertinence:
“[The aftermath of] Trump and Brexit are
threatening to push that back.”
The book has led to a film, My Nazi Legacy:
What Our Fathers Did, “directed by my dear
friend David Evans, who also happens to be
the director of much of Downton Abbey,” says
Philippe, who wrote the documentary's script.
The film, being shown at Depot Cinema two
days before his talk in the All Saints, also features
the sons of two prominent Nazis, one of whom is
Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank. Alex Leith
A Personal Story of International Crimes, Lewes
Literary Society, All Saints, 20th March, 8pm; My
Nazi Legacy, Depot Cinema, 18th March, 3pm
37