Raphael Lemkin – the man who coined the term “genocide”

Hardship in the final years of life
 

Raphael Lemkin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize ten times. In 1955, he was awarded the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Although he had fulfilled his life’s mission, he failed to make further progress in his professional life. During the 1950s, he was unable to obtain fixed employment, despite making every effort to do so. He earned his living as a visiting lecturer and gradually fell on hard times. At the same time, he repeatedly asserted that the term “genocide” should be applied to murder in peacetime, such as the famine in Ukraine (“Holodomor”) in 1932 and 1933, which was intentionally triggered by the Soviet government and which led to the deaths of millions of people. During the final years of his life, Raphael Lemkin lived in poverty. During this time, he worked on his autobiography, “Totally Unofficial”, the publication of which he never witnessed. He died on 28 August 1959 of a heart attack sustained on his journey back from his publisher in New York, whom he had contacted to discuss the publication of his memoirs. It was not until 2013 that the Yale University Press published his autobiography, the text of which was edited by Donna-Lee Frieze. The Polish edition, “Nieoficjalny”, published by the Pilecki Institute, appeared in 2018 to mark the 70th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Monika Stefanek, April 2022

Fragment of an interview with Raphael Lemkin, in: Television programme “U. N. Casebook”, CBS, February 1949, URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F57pgpr_jdw 

Lemkin Citizen of the World, audio drama in: UN Audiovisual Library, UN Radio Classics, 1/1/1958, duration: 13:49, URL: https://www.unmultimedia.org/avlibrary/asset/C904/C904/ 

Lemkin. Świadek wieku ludobójstwa [Lemkin. Witness of the Genocide Century], online exhibition, Pilecki Institute (in Polish), URL: https://instytutpileckiego.pl/pl/wystawy/wirtualne-wystawy/lemkin-swiadek-wieku-ludobojstwa