The Forgotten Prophet

Raphael then took the big step alone: he fled to Sweden and then to the United States in 1941. He probably escaped death. When the Nazis occupied all of Poland, 49 of his family members died in the extermination camps. In America, Lemkin did not sit idly by. He bombarded President Roosevelt with appeals to denounce the extermination of the Jews to the world , but the White House did not listen. So he devoted himself to writing.

In 1944, he published Axis Rule, in which he meticulously reconstructed the Nazi policies of annihilating conquered peoples and those considered "inferior," such as the Jews. He wrote: "The Reich's crime of willfully and deliberately exterminating entire peoples is not entirely new in the world. It is new only in the civilized world we have come to conceive. It is so new in the traditions of civilized man that no term exists to define it. That is why I took the liberty of inventing the word 'genocide.' This term derives from the Greek word ghénos, meaning tribe or race, and the Latin caedo, meaning to kill. Genocide must tragically find its place in the dictionary of the future alongside other tragic words such as murder and infanticide ."

At that point, Lemkin had only one mission: to have the crime of genocide recognized by the United Nations. He became the nightmare of the various national delegations present at the UN. He waited for officials outside their offices, pestering them until he convinced them to commit to the approval of a Genocide Convention. He became the insistent prophet evoked in the title of De Michele's book . Then things unraveled. On December 11, 1946, Resolution 96 was approved, which states: "Genocide is the denial of entire human groups of their right to exist; this denial of their right to exist shocks the human conscience, inflicts grave losses on humanity, which is deprived of the cultural and other contributions of these groups, and is contrary to moral law and to the spirit and purposes of the United Nations."

On 9 December 1948, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide , written with the contribution of Lemkin himself , was adopted. It was now possible to prosecute internationally what had until then been the "nameless crime".

At that point, years of exhaustion and tensions exploded at once. Lemkin suffered a nervous breakdown. Devoting himself wholeheartedly to the Genocide Convention, he had lost his university positions and found himself penniless. Homeless and penniless, he was supported by a few friends, while his obsession with not having done enough grew. In the last years of his life, he continued to insist that genocide be considered not only the physical extermination of a people, but also any attempt to crush their language and culture .

Then, on August 28, 1959, Raphael Lemkin collapsed at a bus stop in New York. In his shabby rented home, only a few clothes and a mountain of handwritten, disorganized papers were found. On one sheet of paper, he had written about himself: " Above all, soars a beautiful soul who loves humanity and is therefore alone ."

The hope is that, thanks also to Girolamo De Michele's book, that loneliness will now be less profound, perhaps more serene.