Free A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power Page A

the president and prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, and explained his imminent act:
    The responsibility for this crime of murdering the entire Jewish population of Poland falls in the first instance on the perpetrators, but indirectly also it weighs on the whole of humanity, the peoples and governments of the Allied States, which so far have made no effort toward a concrete action for the purpose of curtailing this crime.
    By passive observation of this murder of defenseless millions and of the maltreatment of children, women, and old men, these countries have become the criminals' accomplices....
    I can not be silent and I can not live while the remnants of the Jewish people of Poland, of whom I am a representative, are perishing....
    By my death I wish to express my strongest protest against the inactivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of Jewish people. I know how little human life is worth, especially today. But as I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall contribute to destroying the indifference of those who are able and should act.2
    Szmul Zygielbojm took an overdose of sleeping pills in his Paddington flat on May 12, 1943. News that the Nazis had crushed the Warsaw ghetto uprising and liquidated its inhabitants reached London and Washington the day of his memorial service."
    The New York Times published Zygielbojm's suicide letter on June 4, 1943, under the headline "Pole's Suicide Note Pleads for Jews" with the further headline "He Denounced Apathy."The last line of the Times piece suggested that Zygielbojm "may have achieved more in his death than in his life." In fact, he failed to alter Allied policy in either state.21
    In Their Own Words
    Back in Washington, Raphael Lemkin, too, thought of taking his own life but concluded he was too "peculiarly placed" to bow out. After all, while others were mulling atrocity prevention for the first time, he had been thinking of little else for more than a decade. He identified himself with the cause and quickly began to personify it. When he read the chilling reports from his homeland, he did what Zvegielbojm had done initiallyhe placed faith in information. Lemkin also played to his strengths: law and language.
    In November 1944 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Lemkin's Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, by then a 712-page book of the rules and decrees imposed by the Axis powers and their client states in nineteen Nazi-occupied countries and territories in Europe. Having begun gathering these laws while in Sweden, Lemkin had continued the compilation as part of his service to the U.S. government. Whatever Lernkin's stated aspirations to appeal to a popular audience, Axis Rule was a dry and staunchly legalistic reference book."' It included proposals for postwar restitution of property to the dispossessed and for the reimbursement of millions to foreign workers who had been forced into labor in Germany. It also restated his 1933 Madrid proposal to outlaw the targeted destruction of groups and urged the creation of an international treaty that could be used as a basis for trying and punishing perpetrators.

    Jews in the Warsaw ghetto being marched to the rail station for deportation, in 1943. Of the four members of the family shown at the head of the column, only the man survived.
    However useful the book's recommendations, Lemkin believed his real contribution lay in reproducing the stark collection of decrees (which accounted for some 360 of the book's pages). These, he was certain, would do wonders to combat widespread disbelief and despondency, especially in the Anglo-American reader, who, he wrote, "with his innate respect for human rights and human personality may be inclined to believe that the Axis regime could not possibly have been as cruel and ruthless as it has been hitherto described." By presenting documents authored by Hitler and his advisers, he was ensuring that