Raphael Lemkin - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Lemkin was born Rafał Lemkin in the village of Bezwodne in Imperial Russia, now the Vawkavysk district of Belarus. Not much is known of Lemkin's early life. He grew up in a Jewish family and was one of three children born to Joseph and Bella (Pomerantz) Lemkin. His father was a farmer and his mother a highly intellectual woman who was a painter, linguist, and philosophy student with a large collection of books on literature and history. With his mother as an influence, Lemkin mastered ten languages by the age of 14, including French, Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian.

After graduating from a local trade school in Białystok he began the study of linguistics at the John Casimir University in Lviv (at the time in Poland, now in Ukraine). It was there that Lemkin became interested in the concept of the crime, which later evolved into the idea of genocide, which was based on the Armenian experience at the hands of the Ottoman Turks then later the experience of Assyrians massacred in Iraq during the 1933 Simele massacre. Lemkin then moved on to the University of Heidelberg in Germany to study philosophy, and returned to Lviv to study law in 1926, becoming a prosecutor in Warsaw at graduation. His subsequent career as assistant prosecutor in the District Court of Berezhany (Ternopil Province of Eastern Galicia, now Western Ukraine) and Warsaw, followed by a private legal practice in the Polish capital, did not divert Lemkin from elaborating rudiments of international law dealing with group exterminations.