BACK IN NORTH CAROLINA, as Lemkin continued to work on the decrees, a letter arrived from Bella and Josef. Slow to travel, the tired envelope contained a tiny scrap of paper, dated May 25, 1941. Josef thanked Lemkin for letters sent, said he was feeling better, that the potato season was over so he could spend more time at home. “For the time being, we are lacking nothing.” He sent his son a few names and addresses in America, and Bella offered reassurance that all was “perfectly well” and they had everything they needed. It was a message of survival. Write more often, Bella asked, “be healthy and happy.”
A few days later, on June 24, as Lemkin listened to music on the wireless, the program was interrupted. “The German army has invaded eastern Poland.” The Germans broke the pact with Stalin, sending troops eastward, to Lvov and Żółkiew, to Wołkowysk and beyond. Lemkin knew what would follow.
“Have you heard the news,” someone asked as he entered the Law School, “about Operation Barbarossa?” He heard “sorry” many times that day and those that followed, because somber and silent colleagues and students understood the implications. Overwhelmed with foreboding, he carried on work. “Keep your chin up, be strong,” McDermott encouraged him.
The Wehrmacht headed east, accompanied by the SS, extending Governor Frank’s empire. Żółkiew was taken within a week, then a day or two later Lvov was occupied and Professor Roman Longchamps de Bérier murdered with his three sons. That same day, farther north, Wołkowysk was taken by the Germans, just beyond Frank’s General Government. Lemkin’s family was now subject to German decrees of the kind with which he was familiar.
That day brought another announcement: Ignacy Paderewski, the founder of modern Poland, the man who objected to the Minorities Treaty of 1919, had died in New York while on a concert tour (buried in Arlington National Cemetery, his remains were transferred half a century later to St. John’s Cathedral in Warsaw). Shortly before he fell ill, Paderewski gave a public address to remind listeners of the distinction between good and evil and the role of the one and the many. “It certainly is important to individuals as well as to groups of individuals to keep on this path,” to avoid unnecessary suffering and aimless destruction.
In September, five months after arriving in America, Lemkin taught his first class at Duke Law School. That same month, he traveled to Indianapolis to attend the annual conference of the American Bar Association, where he delivered a lecture on totalitarian control and added his name to a resolution prepared by John Vance, condemning German atrocities. The U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson gave the after-dinner speech, titled “The Challenge of International Lawlessness.” The talk was threaded with ideas drawn from Lauterpacht, a man whose work Lemkin was coming to know. Lemkin would not have been aware, however, that another former student from Lwów had played a role in writing Jackson’s words.
“Germany went to war in breach of its treaty obligations,” Jackson told the attendees, discharging America from an obligation to treat the belligerents equally. He ended his speech with words of hope that there would be a “reign of law to which sovereign nations will defer, designed to protect the peace of the society of nations.” The talk must have resonated with Lemkin.