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LAUTERPACHT WAS BORN in Żółkiew on August 16, 1897. A birth certificate, unearthed in an archive in Warsaw, declared that his parents were Aron Lauterpacht, a businessman, and Deborah Turkenkopf. The birth was witnessed by Barich Orlander, an innkeeper who happened to be a distant relation of Leon’s mother.
Aron worked in the oil business and managed a sawmill. Deborah attended to the family, Hersch’s older brother, David (Dunek), and a younger sister, Sabina (Sabka), born three years after Hersch. A fourth child had been stillborn. Lauterpacht’s family was large, middle-class, literate, and devoutly Jewish (Deborah maintained a kosher home and modest appearance, following the tradition of wearing a wig). A photograph of the family showed Lauterpacht aged five, his feet pointing in different directions, holding on to the arm of a father with a solid appearance.
Lauterpacht’s sister, the little girl perched on the stool, would eventually produce a daughter of her own called Inka. When I met Inka, she described Aron and Deborah as “wonderful” grandparents, “kind and loving” people who were hardworking, generous, and “very ambitious” for their children. Inka recalled a lively home, filled with music and books, talk of ideas and politics, an optimistic future. The family spoke Yiddish, but the parents switched to Polish if they didn’t want the children to understand.
Lauterpacht family, Żółkiew, 1902; Hersch is far left
The cadastral records of Żółkiew disclosed that the Lauterpacht family lived at house No. 158 on parcel 488. This turned out to be the eastern end of the same east–west street on which my great-grandmother Malke Buchholz (Flaschner) had lived, the other end of town.
Lyudmyla, Żółkiew’s fine and friendly historian, identified the precise spot, now covered in tarmac on the eastern edge of the town, on the road by which I’d arrived from Lviv.
“A fine place to put a statue,” Lyudmyla observed wryly, and we agreed it would happen one day. The spot was close to the Alte Friedhof (the old cemetery) and the old wooden church of the Holy Trinity, to which Lyudmyla took me. With its worn brown-shingle exterior, the church interior was infused with cozy smells of wood and spice. There was a striking altar of painted icons; it was a warm place of gold embellishments, with deep reds and blues, a place of safety, unchanged in a hundred years. Lauterpacht’s uncle David lived right opposite, Lyudmyla added, a house long gone. Nearby she pointed out another house, which we should visit. She knocked vigorously on the front door, eventually opened by the owner, a round and jolly man with a big smile. Come in, he said, before leading us to the front bedroom, overlooking the wooden church, then to a small area between bed and wall. On his knees, he pried up a section of the parquet, revealing an irregular hole in the floor, just large enough for an adult to pass. In this space, in the darkness, Clara Kramer and seventeen other Jews hid for nearly two years. Among them were various members of the Lauterpacht family, not more than a stone’s throw from where Lauterpacht was born.