– RAPHAEL LEMKIN AND GENOCIDE –

consigns these achievements to silence, leaving us to ponder his deeper motivations.

The final decline of lonely men is often a chronicle of self-delusion, persecution mania and paranoia. Lemkin’s final years had its share of this, but it is also marked by aching awareness of the damage he was doing to himself. He appears to be one of Kafka’s ‘hunger artists’, those moving, self-punishing creatures who cut themselves off from the world, preyed upon by a guilt they cannot name, who make their misery into their life’s work. In some deep sense, Lemkin chose his own destruction and refused consolations that less complex characters would have easily embraced.

In his strangely lucid refusal of available consolations of career and company, he recalls another hunger artist of the same period, the young French philosopher Simone Weil. She starved herself so as not to eat more than the citizens of occupied Europe and died of tuberculosis at the age of 34 in a sanatorium in England in 1943, after completing what she called her ‘war work’ for the free French, a transcendent Declaration of the Duties of Mankind.1

Other pioneers in the battle to rebuild the European conscience after World War II – René Cassin who helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Hersh Lauterpacht, who wrote the first treatise calling for an enforceable international convention on human rights – would have regarded these Jewish hunger artists with baffled pity. Cassin, from an

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