ABSTRACT
Raphael Lemkin was born on 24 June 1900, in the Belarusian-Jewish-Polish region, as a subject of tsar Nikolay II. He described the boundaries of his home region as stretching between Grodno, Białystok, and Baranovichi. His family was Jewish, but he operated between various languages, such as Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and Polish. In Lemkin’s house the Jewish, Russian, and Polish cultures coexisted. An important experience was the 1906 pogrom in Białystok. Before Lemkin went to school, his family moved to Volkovysk, but it is unclear which school Lemkin attended there. It is not known what happened to his family during World War I. In my opinion, he did not study the history of genocide, but simply went to school, studied for his finals, and made plans concerning his university education, at the same time being a careful observer of the war developments.
