Raphael Lemkin, a giant in the fight for life, was a dramatic and noble character whose personal life story, like that of many great men and women who leave behind a special treasure for the story of humankind, sits on the edge of a tragic abyss.
Lemkin is credited, almost single-handedly, with designing the proposal for an international law against genocide which was the basis for the United Nations Convention on Genocide, the single most important piece of international legislation to date on the subject of the mass murder of millions of people, and for seeing the convention through the political process of the U.N. to its successful conclusion.
As early as 1933, when he was a law official in the judicial system of Poland, Lemkin traveled to the League of Nations meeting in Spain to propose a ban on mass killings, but, as history shows, he unfortunately failed to gain the support of the League.