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Crimes and punishment

What's the difference between atrocities committed in war and outright genocide?

by Joshua Rozenberg / May 19, 2016 / Leave a comment
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Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, 20th November 1945

Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, 20th November 1945

I always wanted to know exactly how my father had managed to escape from Nazi-occupied Poland and survive the Holocaust that killed almost his entire family.

Like so many other refugees trying to build a new life in a foreign land, he didn’t want to talk about the past he’d lost for ever. When my father reached his early seventies, though, he seemed more willing to open up. Thinking he’d find it easier to talk to a stranger, I arranged for a fellow journalist to interview him. There seemed no particular hurry. And then my father suddenly died. Even though I used to carry a BBC tape recorder on my shoulder for a living, I found I didn’t even have a recording of his voice—let alone an account of his life.

When my son was two, his grandfather died. So, after university, he set off for Poland to find out about the grandfather he never knew. To my amazement, he was able to trace the Rozenbergs of Izbica as far back as the 18th century. He also discovered that my father had been deported to the Soviet Union before enlisting in the Polish forces under British command in Iran. That was followed by the British Army, naturalisation and a return to his pre-war occupation as a tailor.

Researching and publishing our family histories allows European Jews to demonstrate—in a way that readers can readily comprehend—the ultimate failure of Adolf Hitler’s attempt to wipe us all out. It is a well-trodden path. In his new memoir My Dear Ones: One Family and the Final Solution (William Collins), Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg consults the German Holocaust researcher Götz Aly. “Many people come to see me with their enquiries,” Aly tells him. “They almost all have one thing in common: they’re over 50, mostly over 60, and those from whom they could once have enquired are dead.”

But there are two things that make the family story of the lawyer and author Philippe Sands stand out from the rest of the genre. First, his assiduous research has enabled him to construct entire chapters of East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity from a flimsy scrap of paper or an unidentified photograph. Those interspersed passages, which…

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Comments

  1. Alyson K
    May 21, 2016 at 22:57
    'Who now remembers the Armenians?' Hitler said as he began the industrialized slaughter of Poles, Jews, Gypsies and the mentally ill. It is still utterly shocking that Europeans killed Europeans in a modern democracy such as Germany then was, and it was only after the Liberation that other countries began to understand the scale of the atrocity. Peace and reconciliation was the message that was taught to post war communities across the UK and Europe where people strove to forgive survivors when they had lost family members who died fighting to defeat fascism and to prevent it spreading across Europe. Generations have grown up since who can see each other as humans not as their tribal identities. Humanitarianism has given us Human Rights and International Law to try and ensure that division does not lead to oppression of minorities, that othering is prevented, that compassion prevails. Europe has put in place safeguards to try and end the kind of revenge killings that still prevail in countries like Albania and Montenegro which have the highest gun crime along with the US. Armenia still needs to be acknowledged in relation to the Armenian genocide, especially in consideration of Turkey joining the EU. The term genocide was first coined in relation to the Armenians by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who tried to raise awareness in Europe of the horrors and atrocities being perpetrated against the Christian Armenians in Turkey. Patrick Thomas's book Remembering the Armenian Genocide 1915, tells of the unbelievable and unimaginable cruelty that was inflicted on perhaps 2 million Armenian Christians, wiping out an entire race, culture, language and history. Peace and reconciliation requires all of us to respect the humanity of each other, to do as we would be done by, and ensure through rule of law that any and all such crimes meet with full sanctions of the law.

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About this author

Joshua Rozenberg
Joshua Rozenberg QC (hon) is a British legal commentator and journalist. He was the BBC's legal correspondent for 15 years and presents "Law in Action" on BBC Radio 4

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