LEMKIN’S ACCOUNT SKIPPED lightly over the period that followed the end of World War I. There was a passing mention of studies in Lwów, and various biographical sketches written by others suggested he studied philology, but they offered no detail. I returned to the archives in Lviv with the help of Ivan and Ihor, my two Ukrainian assistants, to see what might be found, but we left empty-handed. Could the accounts of Lemkin’s life have been wrong? Was he a fantasist? Over a full summer, we drew a blank, until I chanced across a reference in a university yearbook that mentioned a doctoral degree in law being bestowed on him in the summer of 1926. It offered the name of a supervisor, Professor Dr. Juliusz Makarewicz, the man who taught criminal law to Lauterpacht. This was curious, remarkable even: the two men who brought genocide and crimes against humanity into the Nuremberg trial and international law happened to share a common teacher.
We returned to the city archive to search again. Ivan systematically examined every single volume that related to students at the law faculty from 1918 to 1928, a painstaking task. On an autumn day, Ivan led me to a table loaded with piles of books, thirty-two bound volumes, each containing hundreds of pages of student records.
In search of Lemkin, we worked our way through thousands of pages. Many volumes hadn’t been opened for years; others bore the mark of a recent researcher, a tiny shred of paper inserted as a place marker. After several hours, we reached volume 207, the decanal catalog for the academic year 1923–24, H to M. Ivan turned a page and yelped; he had a signature, “R. Lemkin.”
The confident black scribble confirmed the studies in Lwów. Ivan and I hugged; an elderly lady in a pink blouse smiled. He signed in 1923, writing out the date and place of birth (June 24, 1900, Bezwodne), the names of his parents (Josef and Bella), their hometown (Wołkowysk), an address in Lwów, and a complete list of courses taken that academic year.
We soon gathered a complete academic record, from enrollment in October 1921 to graduation in 1926. A 1924 document—the Absolutorjum—listed all the courses he took, and a 1926 Protokol egzaminu (certificate of examination) confirmed the award of a doctoral degree in law on May 20. The documents included other new information: a high school diploma obtained from the Białystok Gymnasium on June 30, 1919; enrollment three months later at the law faculty of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków; arrival at the law faculty in Lwów on October 12, 1921.
Yet a whole year was missing from his life, from the summer of 1920 onward. Lemkin made no mention of Kraków in his memoir or, apparently, anywhere else. There he studied legal history and various Polish subjects but not criminal law or international law. One Polish scholar claimed that he fought as a soldier in the Polish-Soviet war, and Lemkin himself once suggested he was wounded in 1920, as Marshal Piłsudski pushed Bolshevik forces out of eastern Poland. Yet of such matters his memoir was silent. Professor Marek Kornat, a Polish historian, told me that Lemkin was expelled from the Kraków university when it emerged that his account of service in the Polish military in 1919 was inaccurate (he only served as a volunteer assistant to a military judge). Confronted by this fact, the Kraków university authorities expelled him (a “very conservative place” compared with liberal Lwów, Professor Kornat suggested).