EAST WEST STREET: PERSONAL STORIES ABOUT LIFE AND LAW.

• Published date: 22 September 2017
• Author: Sands, Philippe
• Date: 22 September 2017

PROLOGUE

A little after three o'clock on Friday October 1st, 1946, the last day of a trial that has lasted a full year in Nuremberg's Palace of Justice, Hans Frank stands in an elevator. A small wooden door slides open, he passes through, enters Court Room 600.

Sitting there is Hersch Lauterpacht. He is waiting for that door to open, for Frank to emerge. Seven hundred kilometres to the west, Rafael Lemkin lies on a bed in an American military hospital in Paris, being treated for hypertension. He awaits by a radio for news of the judgment.

Three men, in search of consolation, each a lover of music. Which piece came to each at this moment?

I. FRANK

AUGUST 1,1942, LEMBERG

Let us go back four years, to July 31st, 1942, to Lemberg, the capital of Distrikt Galitzie, in the heart of Europe. No longer Soviet Lviv, or Polish Lwow, the City of Lions has been controlled by Germany for a year. At the main rail station Hans Frank arrives by train, to the sound of church bells and a military orchestra. He leaves the station in a large black automobile, passing through handsome streets decorated with the insignia of the Third Reich. In front of the opera house schoolchildren wave little flags, in red, white and black.

Since October 1939 he has been the Governor General of occupied Poland, appointed by Adolf Hitler, a gift in return for services rendered to the Nazis, since the 1920s. He spends the day at party functions. In the evening, he inaugurates a new theatre, a "sanctuary of art." He is a man of culture. Years later, after the war, his friend Richard Strauss will tell Klaus Mann that Frank was "a nice guy, a music lover, refined, with a great sense of humour." In 1943 Strauss composed a short piece in his honour. I have the lyrics, but the music has been "lost," so to speak. So, we must imagine Frank, slender and swank.

Frank says: "We, the Germans, do not go to foreign lands with opium and similar measures like the English...we bring art and culture." To Lemberg he has brought Beethoven and Fritz Weidlich, an unknown Austrian conductor. He wanted von Karajan, or Furtwangler, but neither was available. He has chosen the repertoire, Beethoven's Leonore Overture, then the 9th Symphony.

The following morning Frank attends a ceremony to mark the first anniversary of the incorporation of Distrikt Galicia and Lemberg into his Gouvernment General, after the removal of the Soviets. The Gazeta Lwowska praises his "elaborate" speech. He announces the reintroduction of "European rules of social order" into the city. Later that day he holds a series of private meetings, to offer reassurance on Hitler's approach. Galicia and Lemberg are the "primeval source" of the Jewish problem, under German control that problem will be addressed. "We still have some of them around... but we'll take care of that."

Like a good courtroom lawyer, he pauses for effect, a moment of drama.

"I haven't seen any of that trash hanging around here today. What's going on? They tell me that there were thousands and thousands of those flat-footed primitives in this city... but there hasn't been a single one to be seen since I arrived." Those were the words entered into his diary.

The audience applauds. Frank hasn't seen any Jews because they are in the ghetto, ten minutes away, 100,000 of them. In November 1941 his office prepared a map with the title Umsiedlung der Juden: Resettlement of the Jews. The ghetto is a direct consequence of his decrees, as is the death penalty imposed for setting foot outside the ghetto. A report records that his words are followed by "lively applause."

Within days of Frank leaving Lemberg--on August 16th 1942 to be precise - die Grosse Aktion begins, the Great Action to empty the ghetto. A week later, Himmler comes to town. Such events have consequences, across great distances and over time.

II. THE GREAT AKTION

AUGUST 18, 1942, LEMBERG

In August 1942 the ghetto in the city of Lemberg is emptied, under Governor Frank's authority. This is footage from another ghetto, the ghetto in Krakow. Made on the orders of Hans Frank, the footage is in the possession of his son Niklas, who has allowed me to show it. A private film, street scenes, people milling around, barefoot children, white armbands. Eventually we come to a young girl, with a beautiful smile, the girl in a red dress. Her smile has stayed with me ever since I first saw it, and now she is released.

One of the families in the Lemberg ghetto is that of a Cambridge academic, Hersch Lauterpacht. His parents, brother and sister, and many other family members are confined there in Lemberg, and in Zolkiew, a small town 25 kilometres to the west.

During the First World War Lauterpacht enrolls at Lemberg's law faculty, when the city is in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Three years later, in 1918, the War is over and so is that Empire. Over a bitter month, control of the city passes from the Austrians to the Western Ukrainians, and then to the Poles. The city's name changes with each successive regime, and there is much bloodshed. Through a long winter, Lauterpacht is on the front lines, protecting his parents. I find a photograph, the snow-covered street, which ends with a barricade, as you can see.

In 1919 Lauterpacht moves to Vienna. At the Law Faculty he picks up interesting new ideas about the rights of individuals. A seed is sown. He meets Rachel, a student of classical piano. She records that on the first date she played "one of the early Beethoven sonatas." "Very lovely, but not too easy to execute."

Hersch and Rachel marry in 1923 and move to London. He enrolls at the LSE, five years later their only child is born, a son called Eli. In 1937 Lauterpacht is elected to a Chair at Cambridge University. The war begins in September 1939. Polish Lwow becomes Soviet Lviv. In June 1941 the Germans take control of the city from the Soviets, once more it is Lemberg. By then Hersch Lauterpacht is 45 years old. As Hans Frank visits Lemberg, Lauterpacht is deeply worried about his family, he hasn't heard from them for eighteen months. His sister Deborah has one child, a girl called Inka, born in Lemberg.

Four summers ago I met Inka in Paris. We drank black tea, she told me about August 1942, with a clear memory. The first to be taken was her grandfather Aron, Lauterpacht's father.

"Two days later, Hersch's sister, my mother, was taken by the Germans. It was on the street; my mother was rushed by Ukrainians and German soldiers." Inka watches from a window of their home, on an upper floor, alone. Her father is working nearby. "Someone went and told him that my mother had been taken." "I understood what had happened, I saw everything looking out of the window... I was twelve, not a child any more. I stopped being a child in 1939. I knew the dangers and all the rest. I saw my father running after my mother, behind her, on the street. I understood, it was over."

She speaks without obvious emotion. She has spent a lifetime dealing with that single moment, watching from a window. "I was watching discretely. I wasn't brave. If I had been, I would have run after her. I knew what was happening. I can still visualize the scene, my mother's dress, her high heels..."

"My father didn't think about me. You know what? I rather liked that. For him, it was simply that they had taken his wife, the woman he loved so much. It was just about bringing her back."

Her father goes off, to look for his love, in a dark grey suit. Then he is taken, and Inka is alone.

She survives a few weeks, hiding in attics, sheltered by neighbours. One day she knocks on the door of a Roman Catholic convent, where she is taken in, hidden until the war's end. The only condition is that she must be baptised.

III. "CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY"

JULY 29, 1945, CAMBRIDGE

Lauterpacht knows nothing of this. He is far away, an academic in Cambridge. On the very day his father is taken he starts work with the British and American governments on the war effort, offering legal advice. He has come to know Robert Jackson, President Roosevelt's Attorney General, later a Justice at the U.S. Supreme Court. They work together, as Lauterpacht imagines the role of the law in the protection of individuals.

In the summer of 1945, after the war in Europe ends, Lauterpacht publishes a new book, titled An International Bill of the Rights of Man. It includes ideas on the protection of the individual against the actions of states, who should not be able to kill and torture and then hide behind a principle of sovereignty. It's a revolutionary idea, his draft international Bill of Rights.

With end of the war, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin announce there will...