{"id":13700,"date":"2026-01-05T15:54:47","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T14:54:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/?p=13700"},"modified":"2026-08-15T19:40:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T17:40:07","slug":"i-18-the-birth-of-the-genocide-convention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/i-18-the-birth-of-the-genocide-convention\/","title":{"rendered":"I – 19 – The Birth of the Genocide Convention – Raphael Lemkin"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Birth of the Genocide Convention \u2013 Raphael Lemkin, the Initiator of a Global Movement to Condemn Genocide<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was the lawyer and activist Rafael Lemkin who, by drafting and securing the adoption of the Genocide Convention at the United Nations, made it clear to the world that the extermination of groups of people must be made a criminal offense. And that was a \u201cone-man operation\u201d! Lemkin was also the first to recognize the Holodomor (killing by starvation) of 1932\u20131933 in Ukraine as genocide. The UN Genocide Convention was adopted in 1948 as the first human rights convention and entered into force in 1951.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of his life, Raphael Lemkin had no money for a room and could barely afford to pay for his food. He spoke of an illness he had, the cause of which the doctors could not determine. Those countless sleepless nights.<\/p>\n

\u201cI suffered such a severe attack of agonizing pain that I could hardly breathe.\u201d (\u2026) \u201cNobody had established my diagnosis. I defined it myself and I called it Genociditis: exhaustion from the work on the Genocide Convention.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy nights turned into nightmares. Dreams came incessantly and compellingly. Visions of my parents in these dreams became very realistic. I saw the interior of a train. A drab light was falling on people sitting on the floor. Among them was my mother, stony-faced, her eyes saying nothing, her mouth silent as ice. Where was she going? Was it her last journey? (…) My health was deteriorating. \u201c(…) \u2018Nervous exhaustion, high blood pressure, slow down, rest, relax.”\u00a0Raphael Lemkin; Totally Unoffical, USA, Yale University Press, 2013<\/p>\n

Rafael Lemkin collapsed on August 29, 1959, at the age of 59, at a bus stop on 42nd Street in New York City and died at a police station.<\/p>\n

In the photo: Raphael Lemkin (1900\u20131959). Lemkin came from the Selva District, an Eastern European plain that was part of the Russian Empire at the time. He was from the town of Bezwodne. Lemkin lost his family in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Birth of the Genocide Convention \u2013 Raphael Lemkin, the Initiator of a Global Movement to Condemn Genocide It was the lawyer and activist Rafael Lemkin who, by drafting and securing the adoption of the Genocide Convention at the United Nations, made it clear to the world that the extermination of groups of people must […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11465,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-preserving-family-history"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13700"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17808,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13700\/revisions\/17808"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preserving-family-history.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}