Private Life

Abstract

Since his mother’s death, Raphael Lemkin had grown increasingly suspicious of other human beings, so much so that he was unable to trust another person sufficiently to enter into an intimate relationship with them, if they were female. His relationships with women tended to be brief, fracturing easily. In this chapter, I cover a series of short encounters between Lemkin and members of the opposite sex. But 1947 was a significant year for Lemkin in another respect; it was when he started his first serious research into the history of genocide, sometimes with the help of these women, who filled the roles of both girl friend and researcher at the same time. I shall also discuss Lemkin’s efforts to assist his brother Elias to move from West Germany to Canada, efforts that were clouded by Lemkin’s smouldering resentment about the supposed abandonment of his parents in wartime Poland by his brother.