Today, December 9, is the day to return to the platforms of the Lviv station, where the Nazi officer who coordinated the Holocaust and the Jewish law student who would coin the term genocide passed by.

Railway stations are, essentially, the people who have passed through them.

When the Russian army invaded Ukraine, a mass of people filled the very Austro-Hungarian Lviv station. They were looking for trains to get away from the missiles.

In that turbulence, what impressed me most were not the humans dislocated in front of the tracks, nor the fog that enveloped the art nouveau station at night, nor the anti-aircraft alarm in the darkness of its towers.

What impressed me most was, as always, the passage of time. It was the specter of two people who had walked, in the past, along those same platforms: the Nazi leader who coordinated the deportation of the Jews in Europe and the Jewish law student who would end up joining the Greek word genos (lineage) with the word Latin cide (kill).

Among Ukrainians, thousands of African medical students were also fleeing a savage war between white tribes – the savage wars are always waged by white tribes – along the same platforms previously walked by Adolf Eichmann and Raphael Lemkin.

The journey to unite the two words began when Lemkin – from a Polish Jewish family – read the novel Quo vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz at the age of twelve and was shocked 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 1920s, 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 the Lviv station, where he moved to study Law.

Europe ended up exploding, trains continued to pass along the platforms and in 1942 the two routes coincided.

Through a twist in history, Lemkin (a refugee in the US) found that year the word he was looking for, joining genos and cide, genocide. The crime of crimes.

And on the other hand, Eichmann (the main administrator of the largest genocide in history) found solace right in this season so familiar to Lemkin.

A consolation that the Nazi leader would explain, in 1961, before the court that tried him in Jerusalem. He was going by train from Minsk to Berlin, and stopped in Lviv. He confessed to Israeli judges that in Minsk he had watched the SS shoot a pit full of Jews, alive or dead, “blood gushing out like a geyser… I have never seen anything like it.” Execrable scenes that, he claimed, clouded his mind during the train journey and that he only found solace when he arrived at the Lviv station and discovered in its hall – life is a waltz – a memorial sculpted for the 60th anniversary of Francis’s reign. José.

“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 chased away those terrible thoughts that I couldn’t get rid of since I left Minsk.”

Nostalgic for Empress Sissi, Eichmann stated in his defense that he was only following orders. But from Lviv he went to Berlin and Auschwitz, to continue directing still unnamed crimes. 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 ruling (1945-1946). All the Nazi leaders convicted were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Not for genocide.

“The darkest day of my life,” he lamented (49 of his relatives had been murdered in the Holocaust).

From then on, Lemkin did nothing but be annoying. He walked the halls of the UN stopping journalists and delegates of nations to convince them that the genocide of any people should be criminalized. With no money, no office, no assistants, he waited for weeks sitting in front of the ambassadors’ offices to catch them on the fly. The UN guards let him pass and he brought his sandwich. They shook him off by asking him skeptically: 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 UN General Assembly had just adopted its Convention against Genocide in that palace.

Lemkin continued for years in the corridors of the world organization pleading with country after country, delegation after delegation, to join the Convention. Beyond Jewish pain: there he was – the platforms are infinite – working with countries colonized by the white man to denounce the murder of races.

He never saw any conviction for the crime he named. The first sentence for genocide was Eichmann, the Nazi who passed by the Lviv station nostalgically, hanged in 1962. Lemkin had died shortly before, in August 1959, in a hotel in New York. Poor. Lonely. Seven people attended his funeral.

Today is the day to remember it. Because today, December 9, is the International Day for the Commemoration and Dignification of the Victims of Genocide.

Today is the day to return to the platforms of the beautiful Ukrainian station through which, in search of the word, he passed as a law student. Some roads without a final destination, because always – he knew it – there will be those who deny him that 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].