In 1901 Raphael Lemkin was born in Bezwodene, which was part of Russia. As he grew up it became part of the republic of Poland, which had gained independence from Russia in 1917. Today we can find it near Volkovysk in Belarus. Raphael’s father, Joseph, was a farmer and his mother Bella painted and studied linguistics and philosophy. Raphael had two brothers Elias and Samuel. Encouraged by his mother, young Raphael studied hard and made the most of his education. By the time he was a teenager he was able to converse in nine different languages. These linguistic skills were useful to him throughout his life.

In 1919, Raphael gained a place at the John Casimir University in Lvov, Poland. He further developed his skills in languages and read Linguistics. He then travelled to Germany to attend the University of Heidelberg and study Philosophy. In 1926 he decided to return to Poland. There he qualified in Law, earning another degree from his old university in Lvov. After his graduation he worked as a prosecutor in Warsaw. Between 1929 and 1934 he was Public Prosecutor for the district court. He also wrote legal books and academic papers and joined a team which was developing and explaining Polish penal codes. Professor Malcolm McDermott, a visiting legal academic from the United States, worked with Raphael on a translation of The Polish Legal Code of 1932 and the two men remained in contact when Professor McDermott returned to America.

Raphael used his legal training to argue for the rights of persecuted people. In 1915, when he was a teenager he had heard the reports about the deportations and massacre of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. It was a criminal act he never forgot. He was convinced that such deliberate murder of one population by another should be classed as a specific crime. As a legal expert he believed he was in a position to act and make this possible. In 1933 he wrote and presented a paper for the Madrid meeting of the League of Nations. In it he tried to persuade his audience that they should recognise and condemn acts like the massacre of the Armenians as Crimes Against Humanity. He argued that the ‘destruction of national, religious, and racial groups’ should be condemned as ‘an international crime.’

In 1933 there was no word to describe deliberate acts of murder and destruction that attempted to wipe out whole groups of people. Raphael challenged the delegation in Spain to declare that such intentional group destruction was against all international laws. However the League of Nations, which included a delegation of Nazi representatives from Germany, would not even put his proposals before a vote and he left the meeting disappointed but determined to continue his work for justice.

Raphael’s clearly stated views on Crimes Against Humanity must have proved too great a challenge for the legal department of Warsaw; shortly after his presentation in Madrid Raphael was pressured to resign from his post as Public Prosecutor. Raphael worked as an independent lawyer for five years but this was not easy because he was Jewish and anti-semitic feelings were growing in Poland even before the arrival of the Nazis from Germany.

In 1939 Germany invaded Poland and Raphael was in danger. He needed to avoid the Nazis. He joined an underground guerrilla group active in the Polish forests but eventually escaped from Poland into Lithuania and from there made it to Sweden. He became a lecturer at the University of Stockholm where he lectured and published papers on legal and financial affairs. He also managed to obtain copies of official Nazi directives to occupied territories which he was able to translate.

Raphael worked in Sweden for a year. In 1941 he received an invitation to work with his colleague and former translation partner Malcolm McDermott. This gave him the chance to leave Europe and he made his way through Russia and Japan to reach safety in America. He carried copies of the Nazi documents with him and passed them into the hands of U.S. State and War Department officials. He gave lectures at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Once America entered the war Raphael found himself in great demand. His knowledge and skills made a valuable contribution to the war effort. The army asked him to work for them and provide classes in military government whilst his knowledge of international financial law also proved useful to the U.S. Board of Economic Warfare. Despite his heavy workload Raphael did not forget powerless people, like the Armenian victims of the 1915 massacres. He strove hard to continue his work for international recognition of such crimes and to gain justice for the victims of discrimination, oppression and violence.

Between 1941 and 1943 he continued to develop the proposals he had originally presented in Madrid. He amended them and published a new version of the proposals in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In the book he also made public his translations of the Nazi directives, which he had carried from Sweden to America, and provided a commentary on and analysis of events and policies which were unfolding in Nazi occupied Europe. In his book he made a determined effort to draw attention to the crimes he wanted the international community to recognise. He combined the Greek word for race genos with the Latin term for killing cide to create the new term genocide to describe systematic and deliberate actions to destroy a specific group of people. He devoted a whole chapter to his own theories of genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. He wanted the world to respond to the Untold Stories of the victims.

Sadly, even whilst Raphael was drafting these first ideas on genocide, his own Jewish family was suffering in the Holocaust. By the end of the war many members of his family were murdered. His brother Elias survived and eventually made contact with Raphael before moving to Canada.

At the end of the war Raphael was once again asked to draw on his legal and linguistic skills when he became an advisor to Robert Jackson, a judge at the Nuremberg trials. As the trials progressed Raphael hoped that his new term genocide might be accepted and used in the proceedings and that it would be recorded in the trial transcripts. However he met opposition from British prosecutors who argued that the new word could not be used as it had no place in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Raphael was still determined that the crime of genocide be recognised by the international community. As soon as a new international body, the United Nations, began its work he began persuading delegates to accept the term genocide and condemn the actions it described as an international Crime Against Humanity. He drafted a resolution and presented it to the nations of Cuba, Panama and India who agreed to support it. America also backed the resolution and it was presented to the UN General Assembly. There were legal issues to resolve and debate in UN committees but, on 11 December 1946, the General Assembly approved a final draft of Raphael’s resolution which stated that genocide was a crime under international law.

A draft treaty was prepared to present to member states. Between 1947 and 1948, in consultation with Raphael, the text of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment on The Crime of Genocide Treaty took shape. From September to December the new treaty was presented to the U.N. General Assembly in Paris. Raphael’s health was failing and he was short of money, nevertheless he was able to be in attendance when the treaty was accepted on 9 December 1948.

In order for a new UN treaty to be accepted 20 member states have to agree and sign it. Individual signatories then approve and ratify the treaty in their own country. The process takes a long time. As the treaty passed through various individual parliaments the International Community began to take an interest in Raphael, his views and his Untold Story. He appeared in newspapers and magazines and a play about him was broadcast on the radio. He used this publicity to draw attention to genocide. He became the first lecturer in International Law at Yale University and also lectured at other institutions in the USA. He continued to write about genocide and began to write his autobiography. His work towards the creation of a UN Genocide Convention was recognised when he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide Treaty came into effect in January 1951. Raphael died in poverty in 1959 and is buried under a headstone which states ‘The Father of the Genocide Convention’. The United States of America did not ratify the treaty until 1988.

On Holocaust Memorial Day we can all acknowledge Raphael Lemkin’s commitment to the victims of genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. We can pause to remember the victims themselves and their Untold Stories and we can also remind ourselves that the man who challenged the international community to bring the perpetrators to justice lost members of his own family when the Nazis occupied his homeland. We can ensure that the work of Raphael is never forgotten and can make his hard work have an impact on how we and the international community as a whole respond to the threat of genocide today.