2017: books that started and finished the year

The year started with me on the final few pages of Philippe Sands' magisterial and meticulously researched East West Street. Tracing the lives of his own grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, along with two international lawyers - Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, the narrative follows the implementation of the 'final solution' in and around the city of Lviv in Ukraine and the development of the crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity to punish those responsible. Ending the year on a similar theme, but this time from a personal family perspective, in the form of Fergal Keane's Wounds provided a timely warning of the dangers of nationalism and inter-communal violence in pre and immediately post-independent Ireland. Keane describes the roles that his grandmother, great uncle and their friends played in the War of Independence, and later how those bonds were fractured by civil war - with his forebears on the pro-treaty Free State side, ranged against former comrades in arms who sided with the Republicans in north Kerry. Neither of these works could be described as easy reading, but both have immense relevance for the present. While Sands deals with the horror wrought on those subjected to Nazi atrocities on an epic scale, Keane presents a far more subtle picture of youthful idealism forced to choose between acquiescence to British rule, in the face of repressive violence from the Black and Tans, the Auxilliaries and that both perpetrated by, and visited on, the Royal Irish Constabulary or joining the IRA. Following the treaty that gave rise to the 26-county Free State, though still requiring an oath of allegiance to the British Crown, and the presence in Dublin of a London-appointed Governor General - the monarch's representative in Ireland - the nationalist camp split into pro and anti treaty forces, which in turn led to a brutal civil war, in which those who had fought together against the British took up arms against each other. Taking his focal point from the murder of an RIC officer, Keane shows how the protagonists in the later civil war had become so inured to the effects of violence that - in many cases - they were able to visit death and suffering on former comrades in ways that were every bit as brutal as the violence and wanton destruction practised by the hated Black and Tans and Auxies. He also describes how the Irish Republic addressed the wounds caused by the civil war; building a democratic state on the far from promising foundations of emnity and distrust that were hallmarks of a conflict that neither side wanted to talk openly about, or felt able to let go of in a full spirit of reconciliation.

East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity by Philippe Sands

This is a great book and a worthy winner of the 2016 Baillie Gifford non-fiction prize, in which Philippe Sands traces the development of the international law terms ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’. But this is no dry legal treatise, largely due to his extensive research and highly engaging writing style, Philippe Sands shows how the lives of Hersch Lauterpacht, Rafael Lemkin and his maternal grandfather Leon Buchholz came to be intertwined in the now Ukrainian city of Lviv. While Lauterpacht and Lemkin studied there – with Lauterpacht going on to an academic career in Law at Cambridge, where he developed the concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ in an attempt to protect the rights of individuals, Lemkin’s work was focused on the protection afforded to identifiable groups and races by calling for recognition of the crime of genocide. On the other hand, Leon Buchholz lived through the full horror of the Nazi invasion before escaping to Paris, where he was eventually joined by his infant daughter and later his wife. The crimes defined by Lauterpacht and Lemkin featured in the indictments used at the Nuremberg trials, where Lauterpacht’s ‘crimes against humanity’ gained wider support than Lemkin’s ‘genocide’. Although arguable that this has been reversed in the prosecution of post-WWII war crimes, Sands’ narrative has an edge-of-the-seat quality as legal argument and the preferring of charges show how the four prosecution authorities built their cases against the defendants. Hersch Lauterpacht looms large in the development of international law, but at Nuremberg his powerful intellect and professionalism are brought face-to-face with the accused – at a time when he did not yet know the fate of so many of his own family members. The last five years of his life were spent as the British judge to the International Court of Justice in the Hague; an appointment that was criticised by some in politics and the media on the dubious – and frankly worrying ground – that he was not ‘sufficiently British’. Sands’ work is a triumph of research and great writing, as a work of legal history it also stands as a salutary warning for today, perhaps best encapsulated in George Santayana’s telling observation that: ‘Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it’. East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ISBN 9780385350716 (print) ISBN 9780385350723 (e-book)

The Little Red Chairs - Edna O'Brien

This story sees a 90s Serbian war criminal turned new-age healer (an obvious Karadzic manqué) turning up in a rural Irish backwater. Once established as a massage oil doling sex therapist, he impregnates the wife of a failed draper before the long-arm of an Garda Siochana whisks him off to stand trial in the Hague. Retribution is then visited on Fidelma, the woman he leaves behind by the wagging tongues of her neighbours and the altogether more terrifying hands of her erstwhile lover's former bodyguard. Forced to flee to London, Fidelma is transformed into that Irish every woman who leaves home under a cloud of disapproval or common or garden poverty, who then works in any menial job she can find, becoming strong in the process. O'Brien weaves a tale of violence and male weakness and female empowerment that is compelling and yet strangely tender. Mna na Eirean  have probably never had a more telling or powerful advocate.