MOVING INTO private practice as a commercial lawyer, Lemkin took an office on Jerozolimskie (Jerusalem) Avenue in Warsaw. He was successful enough to buy a small house in the country, build up an art collection, and move to an apartment in a modernist block at 6 Kredytowa Street, closer to the city center. From here, he ran his law office. (In 2008, when a plaque was placed there to celebrate the “outstanding Polish jurist and scholar of international repute,” the building housed an office of the National Rebirth of Poland party—Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski—a minor neo-fascist political party.)
Lemkin tried to publish a book a year, honing his interest in law reform and terrorism, a topical concern in the face of numerous high-profile political killings (the 1934 murder of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, whose son Crown Prince Peter would be tutored at Cambridge by Lauterpacht, was the first to be captured on film). Lemkin’s connections widened and included visitors from distant lands who arrived with inducements. Professor Malcolm McDermott, of Duke University in North Carolina, came to Warsaw to translate one of Lemkin’s books into English, bringing an offer of a teaching position at Duke. Lemkin declined, because his mother wanted her son in Poland.
Bella was a frequent visitor to Warsaw, nursing her son when he fell ill with double pneumonia in the summer of 1938. On returning to Wołkowysk, she shared stories with her grandson Saul about Uncle Rafael’s apartment and its fabulous modern elevator, Lemkin’s reputation with the Warsaw intelligentsia, his impressive circle of friends. Lemkin bent the ears of important men, she told the young boy, with his campaign against “barbarity” and “vandalism.” According to Saul, some listened, but his uncle faced stiff opposition: his ideas belonged “to the past,” he was told, and Hitler was only using hatred for political purposes and didn’t really intend to destroy the Jews. He should rein in his “fantastic predictions.”
In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria. Six months later, as the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, accepted Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be ceded to Germany from Czechoslovakia, Lemkin traveled to London for work. On Friday, September 23, he dined at the Reform Club on Pall Mall with Herbert du Parcq, a court of appeals judge, and they were joined by Lord Simon, the chancellor of the Exchequer. Simon told them about Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler, explaining that the British negotiated because they weren’t ready for war.
A week later, Chamberlain stood outside the famous black door of 10 Downing Street after another rendezvous with Hitler. “Peace for our time,” he declared, the people of Britain could sleep quietly in their beds. Within a year, Germany was at war with Poland. A million and a half German Wehrmacht troops entered the country alongside the SS and the Gestapo, as the Luftwaffe brought fear and bombs to Warsaw, Kraków, and other Polish cities in the east, including Lwów and Żółkiew. Lemkin remained in Warsaw for five days, then left on September 6 as the Germans approached the city.
He made his way toward Wołkowysk, northeast of Lwów, in the swampy district of Polesie, when the skies fell silent. Lemkin was caught between the Germans in the west and the Soviets, who were now approaching from the east. Poland’s independence was extinguished as the country was carved in two by the pact between Stalin’s and Hitler’s foreign ministers, Molotov and Ribbentrop. As Britain and France entered the war, Lemkin continued northward; in city clothes and glasses with expensive rims, he feared the Soviets would identify him as a Polish intellectual and a “big city dweller.” He was detained by a Russian soldier but managed to talk himself out of harm.
In the province of Wolynia, he rested near the small town of Dubno, taking refuge with the family of a Jewish baker. Why would the Jews want to escape from the Nazis? the baker asked. Lemkin told him about Mein Kampf and the intention to destroy the Jews “like flies.” The baker scoffed; he knew nothing of such a book, couldn’t believe the words to be true.
“How can Hitler destroy the Jews, if he must trade with them? People are needed to carry on a war.”
This wasn’t like other wars, Lemkin told him. It was a war “to destroy whole peoples” and replace them with Germans. The baker wasn’t persuaded. He lived under the Germans for three years during World War I; not good, but “somehow we survived.” The baker’s son, a boy in his twenties with a bright face, enthusiastic and anxious, disagreed. “I do not understand this attitude of my father and of all the people like him in the town.”
Lemkin spent two weeks with the baker’s family. On October 26, Hans Frank was appointed governor-general of German-occupied Poland, to the west of a new boundary line that left Żółkiew, Lwów, and Wołkowysk under Soviet control. Stranded on the Soviet side, Lemkin took a train to Wołkowysk packed with fearful travelers. The train arrived during curfew, so Lemkin spent the night in the station toilets to avoid arrest. Early in the morning, he walked to his brother Elias’s house, at 15 Kosciuszko Street, avoiding the main streets. He knocked quietly on the window, put his lips to the glass, and whispered, “Rafael, Rafael.”
Bella expressed a joy that Lemkin wouldn’t forget. He was put to bed, drifting off to sleep in a familiar old blanket, worrying about the disaster that had befallen Poland. He awoke to the smell of pancakes, devoured with soured cream. Bella and Josef felt safe in Wołkowysk; they didn’t want to leave with him. I’m retired, Josef explained, not a capitalist. Elias was a mere employee; he gave up ownership of the store, and the Soviets would leave them alone. Only Lemkin would leave, to head for America, where Josef’s brother Isidor lived.
Bella agreed he should go but had another concern. Why wasn’t he married? This was a touchy subject. Years later, Lemkin would tell Nancy Ackerly that he was so fully absorbed in his work that he had “no time for married life, or the funds to support it.” It was a striking feature of all the material I found on Lemkin that none contained any hint of an intimate relationship, although a number of women seem to have expressed interest. Bella persisted, telling her son that marriage was a means of protection, that a “lonely and loveless” man would need a woman after his mother’s support was “cut off.” Lemkin offered no encouragement. A line from Goethe’s poem Hermann and Dorothea entered his mind, as it always did when Bella raised the subject: “Take a wife so that the night might become the more beautiful part of your life.” I read the poem, unable to discern any immediate clue that might explain his solitary state or the poem’s relevance. He responded to Bella’s effort with affection, placed his hands on the back of her head, stroked her hair, kissed each eye, yet offered no promise. “You are right.” That was all he could muster, with the hope that the coming life of a nomad might bring more fortune.
He left Wołkowysk in the evening. The moment of parting lingered, a casual kiss, a meeting of eyes, silence, finality denied.