I finished reading last night a book that has made a larger impression on me than anything I have read for a long time. It is East West Street by Philippe Sands. Bought for me as a Christmas present the year before last, I have only just managed to get around to reading it, and having sat up late in order to finish it last night I have spent a good part of the day with it on my mind. It is not everybody’s cup of tea, but I was profoundly moved and impressed and provoked to thought.
The author is an international lawyer, and the sub-title indicates one major thread running through it: “On the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity.” Despite the uncompromisingly academic title it is far from being simply an academic treaties. Sands takes the stories of several people from a small city in Poland/Ukraine/Germany (depending on when you look at it and whose point of view you take) and beginning in the early inter-war period inter-weaves their personal histories. Central to his tale are two figures who, adopting very different position, made important careers in international law, and whose work framed his own career. Other central characters include his own family, a missionary from Norwich who assisted Jews to flee from Nazism, and the Nazi governor of that part of eastern Europe who oversaw the “final solution” in his territory, and who ended as one of the defendants in the Nuremberg Trials.
The depth and detail of the research involved is truly astonishing, and contributes to making the book a skein of inter-twined very personal stories rather than a volume of legal history. So much is evident from the fact that I finished reading the book in tears.
At different levels I have been left in a state of ambivalence. As we approach the celebration of the victory over Nazi Germany (V-E Day) for the first time I find myself inclined to set aside my general tendencies to flee from anything remotely resembling militarism or nationalism. I can see now more clearly than ever before the absolute necessity of defeating fascism, wherever and whenever it appears. The defeat of Nazism is indeed something that merits celebration.
My feelings in a quite different respect are rather more ambivalent. I retired from university work in 2001. A project I had begun, but simply abandoned, could be summed up as laying the foundations for the discipline of the sociology of international law. A major impetus behind this project was my service as an advisor and witness at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in The Hague. A book was half-completed. Despite the temptations, however, so great was my determination to seize the opportunity presented by early retirement in order to take up my interest in art in a serious way, that I set all this aside. Reading Sands’ book woke the ghost of that past. His subject-matter was an absolutely crucial step in the process I was documenting and analysing. I could grasp once again why it was all important. I confronted once again, after many years, a major “might-have-been” in my life.
I am glad that I read Sands’ book: but for better or worse I cannot regret my decision to take a different direction.