In a very literal sense the concept of “genocide” has its origins in Ukraine, specifically in the Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian city of Lviv. Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who invented the word—combining the Greek word “genos,” meaning race or nation, with the Latin “cide,” meaning killing—studied law at the University of Lviv, then called Lwów, in the 1920s.2 The city had previously been Polish until the eighteenth century, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It became Polish after the First World War; Soviet after the Red Army invasion of 1939; German between 1941 and 1944; part of
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