Raphael Lemkin

Rafał Lemkin was born into a Polish-Jewish farming family in Bezwodne (now in Belarus). Fascinated by languages and history from an early age, Lemkin was haunted by historical mass atrocities, particularly the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians. While studying law and linguistics at the University of Lwów (Lviv), he questioned his professors why the murder of an individual was a crime, but the murder of an entire million-strong people had no legal name or sanction under international law.

As a public prosecutor in Warsaw in the 1930s, Lemkin proposed international treaties against 'barbarity' and 'vandalism' to the League of Nations. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Lemkin joined the Polish military resistance, survived in the forests, and escaped across Sweden to the United States. Tragically, forty-nine members of his immediate family, including his beloved parents, were murdered in the Holocaust.

In 1944, Lemkin published his masterwork, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, combining the Greek root genos (race, tribe) and the Latin caedere (to kill) to forge the term 'genocide.' Lemkin served as legal adviser to US Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg Trials, ensuring genocide was cited in the indictment. He then launched an exhausting one-man diplomatic crusade at the UN headquarters in Lake Success, buttonholing delegates from around the globe until the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the historic Genocide Convention on 9 December 1948.