EDINBURGH — Like many Holocaust survivors, his grandfather said little about the past.
Philippe Sands knew that his grandfather, Leon Buchholz, had been born in Lemberg, now Lviv, in Ukraine, and somehow had made his way to Vienna, where his daughter Ruth, Philippe’s mother, was born, and then to Paris. And he knew that his mother was only a year old when she was brought to Paris and was hidden by Christians for five years, until August 1944, when she was reunited with her family.
All Leon would say was: “It’s complicated, it’s the past, not important,” which Mr. Sands understood to mean: Don’t pry.
But it was not until Mr. Sands, an international lawyer and university professor, was invited to Lviv in 2010 to lecture at the university there that he began to dig into his suppressed past. His discoveries, some deeply unpleasant, some simply bizarre, became the core of an extraordinary book about his family, Lviv, the Holocaust, the Nuremberg trials and the drafting of the charges brought there – of crimes against humanity and of genocide, conceived by rival lawyers, both of whom studied law at what is now Lviv University.
Both of those men were, like Mr. Sands’s grandfather, the only survivors of their extended Jewish families, murdered by the Nazis under the administration of Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer, who became governor-general of occupied Poland and who was convicted and executed at Nuremberg.
Now, Mr. Sands has tried to draw the strings of all these strangely connected lives together.
“What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others,” wrote a Hungarian-born psychoanalyst, Nicolas Abraham, whom Mr. Sands uses as an epigraph to the book that resulted, “East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity.”
While the book has a legal history to tell, to Mr. Sands, it was most importantly an effort to understand the secrets his grandparents kept, and to fill the yawning gap he came to feel about who he is, what he has become and why.
“To know your own hinterland gives you a sense of security, and I never had that,” Mr. Sands said in a long interview here. “The absence of that knowledge is a source of insecurity, and I’ve come to realize that.”
Mr. Sands, 55, grew up in North London, of modest means, the son of an English dentist and his French mother, Ruth. She was 18 when she married Allan Sands, who was a friend of her cousin, and they divorced in what Philippe calls “a very conflictual separation” when he was just 15, though they now live on opposite sides of the same street.
He won his way to Cambridge University, where he studied economics. But bored, he soon turned to law, “because I thought it would create opportunities, and safety,” he said. He discovered a passion in international law. “It must have resonated in a subconscious way — this is my world, international, war, Europe, conflict, disagreements.”
Mr. Sands found a career, with the great benefit of being fluent in French as well as English, representing a large variety of clients in international courts.
He has a special interest in environmental law and laws governing crimes against humanity and genocide, having worked on cases involving Guantánamo, torture and claims of immunity by heads of state, including long conversations in 2006 advising Syrian leaders about the tribunal looking into the 2005 assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri.
Mr. Sands came out strongly against the legality of the 2003 Iraq war, an issue about which he is fiercely critical of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and he is despairing about Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, changing his entry on Wikipedia from an “Anglo-French lawyer” to a “Franco-British” one.
Unusually for a barrister, he declined some cases — those of the former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet and Saddam Hussein — because of the strongly felt advice of his American wife, Natalia Schiffrin, also a lawyer, with whom he has three children.
Mr. Sands adores Ms. Schiffrin, whom he met in New York in 1989. She is the daughter of the former publisher of Pantheon Books, the late André Schiffrin, and Mr. Sands concedes he was in awe of the family’s literary milieu.
“Suddenly I’m thrust into this world, and I think that upped the ante,” Mr. Sands said. “I want to try to match these people, I’m not going to be the schlemiel who, you know, just becomes some boring lawyer.”
Mr. Sands is hardly that, and with this book, he has found a wider audience. At the Edinburgh Literary Festival, he gave a lecture about Nuremberg and the law drawn from his book, with slides and violin accompaniment by Tomo Keller.
In the lecture, which he has given around Europe and last year in Nuremberg at the 70th anniversary of the trial, he tells the story of the two lawyers who both studied at Lviv — Hersch Lauterpacht, who formulated the concept of crimes against humanity, and Rafael Lemkin, who developed the concept of genocide — and of their rivalry over the trial. He works in the trajectory toward execution at Nuremberg of another lawyer, Hans Frank, and only glancingly brings in his own ties to the city and his own murdered family, the emotional thread that distinguishes his book and makes it extraordinary.
In the process of his research, he met Niklas Frank, who is deeply ashamed of his Nazi father, and Horst von Wächter, the son of one of Mr. Frank’s Nazi deputies in Poland, Otto von Wächter, whose memory his son cannot bear to reject. The tension of these two sons drives a film Mr. Sands made with them, “My Nazi Legacy (What Our Fathers Did),” in which he took them back to Krakow, Lviv and the swamp in the nearby village, Zolkiew, where 3,500 Jews, including Mr. Sands’s ancestors, were shot and dumped by the Nazis.
The research and the book have made him feel more Jewish, at least tribally, he said. “It’s liberating, but it’s tough to articulate clearly,” especially after a childhood when his French first name worked to disguise his religion. “I wonder if that name was chosen and imposed by my mother to mask history,” he said.
The more assimilated Mr. Lauterpacht, who pushed for “crimes against humanity,” which concentrates on crimes against individuals, appeals more to his intellect, Mr. Sands said, than the outsider Mr. Lemkin and his campaign for the crime of genocide, which focuses on groups.
Genocide is harder to prove and never satisfies anyone, Mr. Sands said. “It reinforces the sense of them against us,” he said, adding: “Once one community has genocide another community wants its genocide.”
But how would you feel during a roundup of Jews, what the French called “La Rafle”?
He paused, then cited the last line of the book, as he stood before the swamp that held the remains of his ancestors. “Right there, for a brief moment, I understood.”
But understood what, exactly? “I understood what motivated Lemkin and the essential truth he was articulating, that despite all our best efforts, the fact is, we are associated with particular groups, and there is no getting away from it. And however much I may struggle intellectually in support of the Lauterpacht idea that we should not reify the group,” and here he stopped for a time, then said: “Standing in a field in Central Europe outside the small town of Zolkiew looking into a pit of water in which 3,500 bodies are buried, including your own family, makes it impossible to get away from that tribal group connection. And the law has to recognize that.”
He paused again. “I don’t want to be treated as Sands the Brit, Sands the European, Sands the liberal, Sands the Jew,” he said. “I just want to be treated as Sands. And we all want that. But actually it’s never going to happen. It’s never going to happen.”
Follow Steven Erlanger on Twitter @StevenErlanger.
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