Pilecki Institute
promotes LEGACY
of RAFAŁ Lemkin
Bartosz Gralicki, Pilecki Institute
'Lemkin 2018' is a project of the Pilecki Institute devoted to Rafał Lemkin – a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent and author of the United Nations Convention draft on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The anniversary of the adoption of the 1948 convention was the perfect opportunity to recall the personage and accomplishment of Lemkin - a hero and witness of the “age of genocide”.
Rafał Lemkin
Rafał Lemkin was born on 24 June 1900 in the village of Bezwodne, near Wołkowysk, in the Polish lands of the Russian partition. From a very young age, he was touched by the fate of persons persecuted for their national and religious affiliation. Lemkin repeatedly emphasised that the importance of grouping for him was born from the youthful reading of Quo Vadis by H. Sienkiewicz. As a child, he experienced a wave of pogroms of the Russian Jewish population in the years 1903-1906. It became apparent that mass repression was not a thing of the past. It was also confirmed by the Armenian genocide, carried out by Turkey in 1915–1917, which Lemkin treated as a great challenge for the international community.
Poland, which regained independence in 1918, was the home of several nations and the Eastern Borderlands - the most ethnically diverse part of the country. Upon graduation from junior high school, Lemkin undertook law studies at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv - the most important centre of juridical thought in the Second Polish Republic. jurydycznej II Rzeczypospolitej.