East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"

by Philippe Sands

LEON CHOSE the path of silence. Nothing was said of Malke, his sisters Laura and Gusta, the family in Lemberg and Żółkiew, or the other family members in Vienna, including his four nieces. One of the four nieces was Herta, the eleven-year-old daughter of sister Laura, who was to travel to Paris with Miss Tilney and my mother in the summer of 1939, but did not do so. Leon never spoke of her. He said nothing either of his sister Gusta and her husband, Max, who remained in Vienna until December 1939. I knew little about Gusta and Max’s three daughters—Daisy, the eldest, Edith, the youngest, and the middle child, also called Herta—save that they had managed to leave Vienna in September 1938. The three made their way to Palestine, and in the 1950s my mother was in touch with two of them. As my mother and I were preparing to make the first trip to Lviv, she evoked the memory of these three sisters, Leon’s nieces, “long gone.” Two of them, Edith and Herta, had children; perhaps they might be worth tracking down. I had a distant memory of that generation, from childhood, but nothing more. Now I would try to locate them, to hear their stories.