East West Street

Winner of the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction Winner of the 2017 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize “A monumental achievement…a profoundly personal account of the origins of crimes against humanity and genocide, told with love, anger and precision.” –John le Carré “A narrative, to my knowledge unprecedented. [It] should not be ignored by anyone in the United States or elsewhere.” —Bernard-Henri Levy on the front cover of The New York Times Book Review “Exceptional…has the intrigue, verve and material density of a first-rate thriller.” —The Guardian “Astonishing…An outstanding book…A story of heroes and loss.” —The New Statesman A profound and profoundly important book—a moving personal detective story, an uncovering of secret pasts, and a book that explores the creation and development of world-changing legal concepts that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich. East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in a city little known today that was a major cultural center of Europe, “the little Paris of Ukraine,” a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. The book opens with the author being invited to give a lecture on genocide and crimes against humanity at Lviv University. Sands accepted the invitation with the intent of learning about the extraordinary city with its rich cultural and intellectual life, home to his maternal grandfather, a Galician Jew who had been born there a century before and who’d moved to Vienna at the outbreak of the First World War, married, had a child (the author’s mother), and…