ABSTRACT
There was a man who predicted and warned against the mass killings of Jews, Roma, Poles, and other Slavic nations by the Nazis and their collaborators. This very same man also dedicated his life to doing everything in his power to attempt to prevent future genocides. From his childhood into adulthood, Raphael Lemkin came to care deeply about the fate of entire groups of people. His concern, his questions, his distress only increased when, as a student at secondary school, Lemkin heard that over a million Armenians lost their lives at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. In the 1930s, as a delegate of the Polish Republic to the International Bureau for the Unification of the Criminal Law, Lemkin proclaimed the need to take up negotiations for an international treaty. Sensing that the extermination of the Polish Jews was inevitable, Lemkin fled from Poland as soon as the war began.
