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Winner?of the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction

A monumental achievement&a profoundly personal account of the origins of crimes against humanity?and genocide told with love anger and precision. ?John le Carr??

A narrative to my knowledge unprecedented.?[It] should not be ignored?by anyone in the United States?or elsewhere. ??Bernard-Henri Levy on the front cover of The New York Times Book Review?
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Exceptional&has the intrigue verve and material density of a first-rate thriller.??The Guardian
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Astonishing&An outstanding book&A story of heroes and loss.??The New Statesman

A profound and profoundly important booka moving personal detective story an uncovering of secret pasts and a book that explores the creation and development of world-changing legal concepts that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitlers Third Reich.

East West Street?looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of genocide and crimes against humanity both of whom not knowing the other studied at the same university with the same professors in a city little known today that was a major cultural center of Europe the little Paris of Ukraine a city variously called Lemberg Lw?w Lvov or Lviv.

The book opens with the author being invited to give a lecture on genocide and crimes against humanity at Lviv University. Sands accepted the invitation with the intent of learning about the extraordinary city with its rich cultural and intellectual life home to his maternal grandfather a Galician Jew who had been born there a century before and whod moved to Vienna at the outbreak of the First World War married had a child (the authors mother) and who then had moved to Paris after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. It was a life that had been shrouded in secrecy with many questions not to be asked and fewer answers offered if they were.

As the author uncovered clue by clue the deliberately obscured story of his grandfather??s mysterious life?? and of his mother??s journey as a child surviving Nazi occupation?? Sands searched further into the history of the city of Lemberg and realized that his own field of humanitarian law had been forged by two men?Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht?each of whom had studied law at Lviv University in the city of his grandfather??s birth?? each considere