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LEMKIN REMAINED FRUSTRATED in Washington, D.C., purposely kept away from the action, an outsider. Only now did he try once more to find a way to get back to Europe, as “genocide” fell out of the trial, his word unspoken. He believed that only he could bring genocide back into the case, and for that he needed to be in Nuremberg.
Working part-time as an adviser in the U.S. War Department (on a daily fee of twenty-five dollars), he lived alone, worried about the fate of his family—still no news—and followed the trial through the news reports and transcripts. He had access to some of the evidence and was attentive to the details set out in Frank’s diaries. They were “minute records,” he wrote, offering an account of “every ‘official’ word uttered or deed performed.” Sometimes they read “like a bad Hollywood script,” the words of a cold-blooded, cynical, arrogant man with no pity in his heart or any sense of the immensity of his crimes. The diaries brought Frank into his sights.
Yet life was not all work and worry. Lemkin socialized—more actively than Lauterpacht—and became something of a man-about-town. So much so, in fact, that The Washington Post included him in a feature about the capital’s “foreign-born” men and their views on American women. Among the seven who agreed to participate, Dr. Rafael Lemkin was identified as a “scholar,” the “serious-minded” Polish international lawyer who wrote Axis Rule.
Lemkin didn’t forgo the chance to share his views about American women. A confirmed bachelor, he found the ladies of Washington, D.C., to be “too frank, too honest” to allure themselves to him, lacking what he thought of as the “tempting, subtle qualities of the European coquette.” Yes, in America “practically all women” were “attractive” because beauty was “so democratized.” European women were, by contrast, usually “shapeless and often ugly,” which meant one had to visit the “upper strata of society” to find real beauties. There was another difference: unlike Americans, European women used their intellect to captivate men, to play “the role of intellectual ‘geisha girls.’ ” Still, he told the interviewer, whatever the faults of American women he would happily “settle for one.”
He never did. When I raised matters of the heart with Nancy Ackerly, the “Druid princess” Lemkin met in New York’s Riverside Park, she recalled him telling her that he had “no time for married life, or the funds to support it.” A few weeks later, the post delivered a few pages of Lemkin’s poetry, thirty poems that Lemkin wrote and shared with Nancy. Most focused on the events that touched on his life’s work and did so in fortunate obscurity, yet a number dealt with matters of the heart. None were obviously addressed to a woman, but two appeared to be addressed to men. In “Frightened Love,” he wrote,
Will he love me more
If I lock the door
When he knocks tonight?
Another, which was untitled, opened with the following lines:
Sir, don’t fight
Let my kiss quite
Your breast with love.
Quite what these words referred to is a matter of speculation. Yet it was clear that Lemkin experienced a solitary, lonely existence, and there were few people around with whom he could share the frustration at the progress of the trial. Perhaps he was fortified by hope in the spring of 1946, when national criminal trials opened in Poland under the guidance of his old mentor Emil Rappaport, cases in which the German defendants would be charged with genocide. At Nuremberg, however, the word simply disappeared, and after the early salvo of the opening days, 130 days of hearings passed with not one mention of genocide.
So in May he began a new campaign of intensive letter writing, to influence key individuals who might help change the direction of the trial. The letters I found were wordy and rather desperate, infused with a naive, almost fawning quality. There was nevertheless something endearing about them, a vulnerable but genuine tone. A three-page letter went to Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of a new United Nations committee on human rights, whom Lemkin identified as sympathetic because she understood “the needs of under-privileged groups.” He thanked Mrs. Roosevelt for taking up his ideas with her husband—“our great war leader,” he called Roosevelt—and informed her that Justice Jackson had accepted “my idea of formulating genocide as a crime,” a claim that was only partly accurate. The law was “not the answer to all the world’s troubles,” he recognized, but it offered a means to develop key principles. Would she help to create a new machinery to prevent and punish genocide? He enclosed a few articles he’d written.
A similar letter went to Anne O’Hare McCormick of the New York Times editorial board, and another to the newly elected secretary-general of the United Nations, Trygve Lie, a Norwegian lawyer. More letters went to those with whom he found a point of connection, however tenuous: Gifford Pinchot, for example, a former governor of Pennsylvania whom he had met years earlier through the Littells but with whom he lost touch (“I missed both of you very much,” Lemkin wrote). The head of international organizations at the State Department got a letter that included an apology (“a sudden call to Nuremberg and Berlin” had intervened to prevent continued conversation). Lemkin, the consummate networker, was laying the foundations for a renewed campaign.
Lemkin’s War Department ID card, May 1946
The “sudden call” to Nuremberg was unexplained. He left for Europe at the end of May, armed with an identity card freshly minted by the War Department, one that might open doors in Germany even if it was stamped with the words “Not a Pass.”
The photograph presents Lemkin as an official man, in white shirt and tie, first seen in the Washington Post article published two months earlier. Lemkin stares intently into the camera, lips pursed, brows furrowed, purposeful, distracted. The pass recorded him as having blue eyes and “black/gray” hair, weighing 176 pounds, and standing exactly five feet nine and a half inches tall.