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Holocaust Day: the man who named what was not named
Winston Churchill called him in 1944 “the crime without a name”.
And it is that there was not a term, a word, to express the gigantic and enormous barbarism that the Nazis committed against the Jewish people, and that according to the calculations ended with the murder of six million men, women and children , with the extermination of two out of every three Jews counted in Europe before World War II.
A study published this January and led by Lewi Stone, a professor of Mathematics at the University of Tel Aviv, states that only in August, September and October 1942 the Nazis perpetrated about half a million murders of Jews each month. say, they killed 15,000 every day .
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And, nevertheless, there was not a word with which to name that slaughter against a collective carried out in a systematic and industrial way , something unknown until then.
“Something unprecedented happened, terrifying. For the first time in the bloody history of humanity, in a modern state, at the center of a civilized continent, a decision was launched whose objective was to locate, register, mark, isolate from its environment, dispossess, humiliate, concentrate, transport and murder each member of an ethnic group “, in the words of the Israeli historian and expert on Holocaust studies, Yehuda Bauer.
Lemkin was impressed by the details of the Armenian genocide, in which more than one and a half million people died. Today there is a memorial in the Armenian capital, Yerevan.
GETTY IMAGES
That “crime without a name” finally managed to have one thanks to the determination and determination of a Polish Jew.
His name was Raphael Lemkin and it was he who coined the term “genocide” , a word he created from the Greek noun “genos” (race, people) and the Latin suffix “cide” (kill).
So for “genocide”, a word commonly used today, is the “extermination or systematic elimination of a human group because of race, ethnicity, religion, politics or nationality “, according to the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy.
There is a date in the biography of Lemkin, born in 1900 in the town of Bezwodne (then belonging to the Russian Empire, from 1919 to Poland and from 1945 to Belarus), which marked his life: March 15, 1921.
That day, in Berlin, a young Armenian murdered Talat Pasha in the middle of the street, who until three years before had been the main Turkish leader.
He did it for revenge, because he considered Pasha responsible for the massacre his village suffered when he ordered the extermination of the Armenians in 1915, of which, according to several sources, around one and a half million of them were annihilated until 1923.
Lemkin was then 20 years old, lived 885 kilometers from Berlin and studied Linguistics. But when the trial for murder against the young Armenian started (who, by the way, was acquitted) and details of the extermination suffered by his people at the hands of the Turks began to come to light, he was deeply shocked. So much that he decided to park the Linguistics and devote himself to the Law.
“I realized that the world should adopt a law against such racial or religious murders “,Lemkin wrote in his autobiography, entitled “Completely Unofficial.” And that’s what he devoted his life to from that moment: to try to get, in the name of universal justice, International Law to typify a law that would condemn that kind of mass murder.
Only in August, September and October 1942 did the Nazis perpetrate about half a million murders of Jews each month. GETTY IMAGES
Already before, with only 12 years, he had fallen flat on his face with the concept of genocide when he read “Quo Vadis”, the novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz, especially when he arrived at the passage in which Christians were thrown to the lions.
At first, and not having a specific word to name those killings, Lemkin designated them as “crimes of barbarism”, meaning such “exterminating actions” carried out for “political and religious” reasons.
“When a nation is destroyed, it is not the cargo of a ship that is destroyed, but a substantial part of humanity , with a whole spiritual inheritance that all humanity shares,” he said in the document he prepared to present at the conference. on Criminal Law that took place in Madrid in 1933.
But finally he could not attend: the Polish authorities did not want to antagonize Hitler – who in 1919 had already written that the “Jewish question” had to be solved by the total elimination of Jews from Europe through efficient planning – and he was denied a visa to travel to Spain. And that by then Lemkin was already a lawyer of great prestige.
Flight from Poland
As a Jew things were in Poland, they became increasingly difficult for him, especially after the occupation of that country in 1939 by Nazi troops. But, luckily, that same year he managed to escape from that country and the atrocious fate that awaited him there .
His parents failed to escape and were killed in the extermination camp of Auschwitz. In total, Lemkin lost 49 family members in the Holocaust .
All 18 convicted in Nuremberg were convicted of crimes against humanity, not genocide. GETTY IMAGES
Lemkin set course for the United States, and there he devoted himself to denouncing the brutalities of the Nazis in a clear and clear voice while teaching at Duke University in North Carolina.
In 1944 he published the book “The Power of the Axis in Occupied Europe”, in which he described all the atrocities committed by the Nazis with the aim of exterminating the Jewish people and where the word “genocide” appears for the first time.
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But “genocide” was just a way of giving a name to what until then had not been. Lemkin’s great struggle focused on getting international law to recognize the crime of genocide.
In search of a law
In the Nuremberg trials (the processes that started in November 1945 in that German city and in which leaders and collaborators of the Nazi regime were sitting on the bench) the word “genocicio” was already used by prosecutors, although in none of the 190 pages of the sentence was written.
All 18 convicted in Nuremberg were convicted of crimes against humanity , not genocide.”The darkest day of my life,” said Lemkin.
Genocides such as the one committed in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica are now being tried in the International Court of Justice, the main judicial organ of the UN. GETTY IMAGES
But a year later, in December 1946, the General Assembly of the newly created UN approved resolution 96, where for the first time in international legislation there is talk of a “crime of genocide”, meaning “a denial of the right to exist. to whole human groups, in the same way that homicide is the denial to a human individual of the right to live “.
And he concludes: “The General Assembly affirms that genocide is a crime of International Law that the civilized world condemns and for which the perpetrators and their accomplices must be punished.”
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The Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was approved by the UN in 1948 and, subsequently, ratified by each of the member states.
The International Court of Justice (the main judicial organ of the United Nations, established in 1945 and based in The Hague) would be responsible from that moment to judge crimes of genocide .
Lemkin spent his whole life and all his savings on getting that. In fact, when at the age of 59 a heart attack killed him, he was in absolute misery.
But he had achieved his goal.