East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

"This is a fantastic and very impressive book. He manages to maintain lots of different storylines through quite complex material, in a way that I found completely absorbing. He’s tracing the history of the notion of war crimes and genocide, through two lawyers who were most associated with the Nuremberg trials. They were not related to each other, and didn’t even knew each other very well, but they both came from the same town in Poland that his grandfather also came from. Yes, and he starts off the book saying it’s been known by four different names, depending on whether it was part of Poland, Germany, Russia or Ukraine. That is part of the story, what happens to this town, particularly during the war. “It’s like a detective story.” It’s also telling a story of the Holocaust, and how his grandparents managed to escape Vienna quite late and get back to London. There are lots of unanswered questions and loose ends in the story that he gets told by his mother and his grandfather never talked about it. He follows up all of these loose ends, including trying to find the mysterious woman who saved his mother’s life by taking her, as a baby, across Europe, for what turns out to be bizarre motives. That’s its touchstone, but it doesn’t spend a lot of time on that. The Nazi lawyer who was in charge of that bit of Poland, his story and trial at Nuremberg is the thread that runs through the book. He is the one who has presided over sending a large number of people to concentration camps and being part of managing the machinery of the Holocaust. “Our standard for the prize is that it should be an important book and rise above the narrow subject matter” You wouldn’t read this book to get a history of the Nuremberg trials, or even, necessarily, to get a history of the idea of genocide or crimes against humanity. But all of these things come together around the personal story that he is tracing. And the fact that he is a very well known and accomplished lawyer in this field, to say the least, who has been tangentially involved in prosecutions of some recent war crimes, adds to it. It’s like a detective story. You get the sense that he started off on this project and it absorbed more and more of his time. He was following up more and more of these stories from his personal life and then these turned out to relate, in interesting ways, to the big picture and the legal history that he was already familiar with as a lawyer in this field. It’s quite a dense book, it’s probably the least easy to read of these books, but our standard for the prize is that it should be an important book and rise above the narrow subject matter. This book definitely does that."