Railway stations are essentially the people who have passed through them.
When the Russian army invaded the Ukraine, a human mass filled the very Austro-Hungarian Lviv station. They were looking for trains to get away from the missiles.
In that turbulence, what impressed me the most was not the humans dislocated in front of the tracks, nor the fog that surrounded the art nouveau station at night, nor the anti-aircraft alarm in the darkness of the towers.
What impressed me the most was, as always, the passage of time. It was the specter of two people who had walked, in the past, on the same platforms: the Nazi hierarch who coordinated the deportation of the Jews to Europe and the Jewish law student who would combine the Greek word genos (lineage) with the Latin word cide (to kill).
Among Ukrainians, thousands of African medical students were also fleeing a savage war of white tribes – the most savage wars are always waged by white tribes – along the same platforms where Adolf Eichmann and Raphael Lemkin once walked.
The journey to unite the two words began when Lemkin – from a Polish Jewish family – read, when he was twelve, the novel Quo vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz and was struck by the episode of Nero throwing Christians to the lions. “Why didn’t the Christians call the police?” he asked his mother.
The journey continued in the twenties, when Lemkin discovered the massacre of Armenians committed in 1915 by the Turks (with the silence of the Ottoman Jews). A crime that had no name. And he continued through Lviv station, where he moved to study Law.
Europe ended up exploding, trains continued to pass through the platforms and in 1942 the two journeys coincided.
By way of history, Lemkin (refugee in the United States) found the word he was looking for that year when he joined genos and cide, genocide. The crime of crimes.
And on the other hand, Eichmann (the main administrator of the greatest genocide in history) found solace just in this station so familiar to Lemkin.
A consolation that the Nazi hierarch would explain, in 1961, before the court that judged him in Jerusalem. He was going by train from Minsk to Berlin, and stopped in Lviv. He confessed to the Israeli judges that in Minsk he had watched the SS shoot a well full of dead or alive Jews, “the blood gushed out like a geyser…, I have never seen anything like it”. Horrible scenes that, he claimed, clouded his mind during the railway journey and that he only found solace when he arrived at Lviv station and discovered in the hall – life is a waltz – a memorial carved for the 60th anniversary of the reign by Francis Joseph.
“When I saw him, I was overwhelmed with joy for the times of the emperor,” he said, “perhaps because I had heard wonderful things from my parents about his reign. The figures were engraved on the wall of the station, and they drove away the terrible thoughts that I couldn’t get out of my head since I left Minsk.”
Nostalgic for Empress Sissi, Eichmann said in his defense that he was only following orders. But from Lviv he went to Berlin and Auschwitz, to continue directing crimes still without a name.
Lemkin had already coined the word, but would not publish it until 1944, in his book Axis Power in Occupied Europe. A word that would not appear in any of the 190 pages of the Nuremberg judgment (1945-1946). All the Nazi hierarchs convicted were for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Not for genocide.
“The blackest day of my life”, he lamented (49 of his relatives had been killed in the Holocaust).
From then on, Lemkin did nothing but be heavy. He traveled the corridors of the UN and stopped journalists and delegates of nations to convince them that the genocide of any people should be typified. With no money, no office, no assistants, he waited for weeks sitting in front of the ambassadors’ offices to catch them on the flight. The UN guards let him pass and he brought his sandwich.
They took him off the top when they asked him with skepticism: “Will a piece of paper stop a new Hitler?”.
Until December 9, 1948 – 75 years ago today – Lemkin sat in a corner of Chaillot, in Paris, to cry in solitude: the General Assembly of the UN had just adopted in this palace the convention against the Genocide
Lemkin continued for years in the corridors of the world organization to plead with country after country, delegation after delegation, to join the Convention. Beyond the Jewish pain: there he was – the platforms are endless – working with countries colonized by the white man to denounce the murder of relatives.
He didn’t get to see any convictions for the crime he named. The first sentence for genocide was Eichmann, the Nazi who passed nostalgically through Lviv station, hanged in 1962. Lemkin had died shortly before, in August 1959, in a New York hotel. poor in solitude Seven people went to his funeral.
Today is the day to remember him. Because today, December 9, is the international day for the Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of Genocide.
Today is the day to return to the platforms of the beautiful Ukrainian station where, in search of the word, he traveled as a Law student. Paths without a final destination, because – he knew – there will always be someone who will deny him this word.
[Putin, for example, who has banned an article he wrote in 1953 about the Holodomor, the Stalinist genocide by starvation of millions of Ukrainians].