Raphael Lemkin

Raphael Lemkin was born on 24 June 1900 into a Jewish farming family near Wolkowysk, then in the Russian Empire and now in Belarus. As a boy he read about the persecution of Christians under Nero, and as a student he was shaken by the killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Why, he asked, was killing a whole people not a crime? He studied law at Lwów and became a prosecutor in Warsaw. In 1933 he proposed that the League of Nations' legal conference outlaw the destruction of national, religious and ethnic groups. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939 he escaped to Sweden and reached the United States in 1941. Most of his family, including his parents, died in the Holocaust. In his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) he coined the word genocide, from the Greek genos (people) and the Latin -cide (killing). He then lobbied the new United Nations until it adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on 9 December 1948. He died, poor, in New York on 28 August 1959.

Faith: A Polish Jew deeply conscious of the persecution of Jews. Source: Wikipedia

See also: Robert H. Jackson · Eleanor Roosevelt