Raphael Lemkin, 1900-1959

Raphael Lemkin was born in Bezwodene, Poland (located in imperial Russia at the time of Lemkin's birth and now near Volkovysk, Belarus), on June 24, in 1900, though some sources claim 1901 as his birth year. 1 Little is known of Lemkin's early life in Poland, a point mentioned in the only full-length biography written to date about Lemkin by Dr. James Martin, a Holocaust revisionist. 2 What is known is that Lemkin was one of three children born to Joseph and Bella (Pomerantz) Lemkin, all boys, including brothers Elias and Samuel. According to various sources, his father was a farmer and his mother a highly intellectual woman who was a painter, linguist, and philosophy student with a large collection of books in literature and history. With his mother as an influence, Lemkin mastered nine languages by the age of 14, including English, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian. At the age of 15, Lemkin first encountered the idea of intentional mass murder of a population when news of the Turkish slaughter of Armenians reached Poland in 1915. 3 In addition, the novel Quo Vadis, by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, describing the barbarity of the Roman Empire under Nero, is cited as an additional influence on the young, sensitive, and impressionable Lemkin. Later in life, the 1933 slaughter of Christian Assyrians in Iraq propelled his work on the legal concepts of mass murder.

In 1919, he began the study of linguistics at the University of John Casimir in Lwow (Lviv, Poland), moved on to the University of Heidelberg in Germany to study philosophy, and returned to Lwow to study law at John Casimir in 1926, becoming a prosecutor in Warsaw at graduation. From 1929-1934, Lemkin was the Public Prosecutor for the district court of Warsaw. While Public Prosecutor, he wrote books on the law and worked on the team that codified the penal codes of Poland, which had gained independence from Russia in 1917. An important contact in the United States was forged during this time, when Lemkin worked with visiting Duke University law professor, Malcolm McDermott, in translating the The Polish Penal Code of 1932 . McDermott would later provide Lemkin with help in leaving Europe.

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