Raphael Lernkin is the man responsible for the creation of the word genocide. Lemkin was a Polish lawyer who also happened to be Jewish. Lemkin is most famous for coining the term genocide in 1943 or 1944 as well as calling for an international law to prevent genocide. Lemkin was born on June 24, 1900 in a small village near the town of Wolkowysk which at that time was part of the Russian Empire. As a child, Lemkin was very interested in things like the sack of Carthage, Mongol invasions, and the persecution of the Huguenots. Lemkin came across these atrocities at the age of 12 and even experienced them firsthand when the small farm where he lived was in the middle of the fighting of World War I. Lernkin and his family had to flee their home and went to live in a nearby forest. At the end of the war, Lemkin saw that his house had been destroyed by German artillery fire, while the Germans seized crops, livestock, and horses from their small farm as well.

As Lemkin's life went on he became a public prosecutor in Warsaw Poland while also working as the secretary on the committee on the codification of the laws of the Republic of Poland. In 1933 Lemkin presented to the legal counsel of the League of Nations an essay on the crime of barbarity; this later became the basis of the term he coined: genocide. During World War II Lemkin barely evaded capture and escaped to Sweden and then by early 1940 he was a lecturer at the University of Stockholm. It was there where Lemkin began to collect documents of Nazi Decrees and ordinances because he believed that it showed the underlying objective even though it did not say it outright. After finding out what he believed to be Hitler's true objective to rid the world of the so-called Jewish problem. After he was able to receive permission to enter the United States. However, while he was able to escape Europe Lemkin lost over forty relatives during the Holocaust; and the only survivors were his brother's family, who were sent to a Russian labor camp but later immigrated to Canada.

During the latter years of the war, Lemkin had some of his work published most importantly his work titled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The book included legal analysis of countries that were occupied by the Nazis in World War II. However, the most important piece of information included was the definition of genocide, which was then widely accepted in the international community. To this day Lemkin is not as well known in the United States as he is across the globe. However, he is one of the most important if not the most important person when it comes to defining Genocide.

Text by Michael Cardoza