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I TURNED TO Professor Roman Shust, dean of the history faculty at Lviv University, a man who was said to know “everything” about the institution’s past. We met on the same day that the European Court of Human Rights revisited the issue that so exercised Lemkin, ruling that Turkey could not criminalize references to the Armenian killings as a “genocide,” a word that had not been invented when the killings occurred in 1915.
Dean Shust occupied a small office in the old Austro-Hungarian parliament building, now part of the university. A large man with ample gray hair and a friendly, inviting smile, he sprawled across a chair, apparently amused that a distant London academic might be interested in old stories about his city. He’d heard of Lemkin but not Lauterpacht and expressed much interest in the archival material Ivan and I had uncovered.
“Did you know that when the Nazis were here in 1941 they went through the student files to find the Jews?” Dean Shust mused. He pointed to the line in a form where Lemkin wrote “Mosaic” to identify his nationality. Students came to the archives to get rid of their papers; so did the teachers, like Professor Allerhand, who taught both men.
“Do you know what happened to Professor Allerhand?” the dean asked. I nodded.
“Murdered in the Janowska camp,” he continued, right here, at the center of this town. “A German police officer was killing a Jewish man,” he continued. “Professor Allerhand wanted to get his attention, so he went up to him and asked a simple question: ‘Have you no soul?’ The officer turned to Allerhand, took out his gun, and shot him dead. The account was given in the memoir of another prisoner.”
He sighed.
“We will try to help you find the professor who spoke with Lemkin.” He went on to explain that professors held a range of political views in the 1920s, as they did today. “Some never accepted Jewish or Ukrainian students in their classes; others made the Jewish people sit at the back of the teaching rooms.” Dean Shust peered at Lemkin’s forms. “Poor grades,” he exclaimed, probably due to his “nationality,” which would have engendered a “negative attitude” from some professors, likely supporters of the National Democratic Party. He explained that the party’s leader, Roman Dmowski, was an arch-nationalist with “ambivalent” feelings toward minorities. I recalled Henry Morgenthau’s conversation with Dmowski in Lwów in August 1919. Poland is for the Poles alone, the American diplomat recorded Dmowski as saying, along with an explanation that his “anti-Semitism isn’t religious: it is political.” Dmowski claimed to feel no prejudice, political or otherwise, toward any Jew who wasn’t Polish.
The dean brought the conversation back to the events of November 1918, the Jewish “eliminations,” as he referred to them. Students were exposed to the “negative views” of some professors, mainly the younger ones, less tolerant than professors from the Austrian era. “When Lemkin was here, Lwów was a multilingual and multicultural society, a third of the population of the city were Jews.” Remember this, the dean said, always.
Together we admired a photograph of the Lemberg professors, taken in 1912.
The dean homed in on Juliusz Makarewicz, in the middle of the group, the longest beard. It was likely he was the unnamed professor quoted at length by Lemkin, the dean said, because he taught criminal law to Lauterpacht and Lemkin. The dean made a quick telephone call, and a few minutes later a colleague entered the room. Zoya Baran, an associate professor, was the resident expert on Makarewicz. Elegant, authoritative, interested, she summarized a long article she had recently written on Makarewicz in Ukrainian.
Faculty of Law, Lemberg, 1912; Juliusz Makarewicz, bearded, is in the middle, one up from the bottom row
She couldn’t say “for certain” that Makarewicz was the unnamed professor, Professor Baran explained, but it was “likely.” “Makarewicz was born Jewish, then baptized a Catholic. He published works on national minorities, and these became the ideological platform for the political party he supported, the Polish Christian Democratic Party, known as Chadecja.”
What were his views on minorities, the Jews and the Ukrainians?
“National minorities who never intended to rule the country were tolerated,” she said bluntly. “The Slavonic minority? Hated. The Jews? Emigration.” She waved a hand in the air dismissively.
Makarewicz believed national minorities to be “dangerous,” she continued, especially when they were the “biggest part” of the population in a specific region, and all the more so “when they lived on the borders of the state.” Lwów was treated as a border city, so Makarewicz would have considered Jews and Ukrainians in Lwów to pose a particular “danger” to newly independent Poland. She offered another thought: Makarewicz “had right-wing politics”; he detested the 1919 Polish Minorities Treaty because it discriminated against Poles. Minorities could complain to the League of Nations if their rights were violated, but Poles couldn’t.
Makarewicz was a nationalist and a survivor. In 1945, the KGB arrested him and banished him to Siberia. Freed following the intervention of a group of Polish professors, he returned to Soviet-controlled Lvov to continue teaching at the law faculty. He died in 1955.
“Would you like to see the classrooms where Lauterpacht and Lemkin studied?” the dean inquired. Yes, I replied, very much.