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Rafał Lemkin (1900-1959) was a Polish lawyer. He is best known for his work against genocide, a word that he defined in 1944, from the roots genos (Greek for family, tribe or race) and -cide (Latin for killing). He used the word first in print in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress.
Lemkin was originally born in imperial Russia, an area that later become the Bialystok Voivodship town of Wylkowyszki, Poland (now Volkovysk located in Belarus). He fled to Sweden shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. He lost about 49 of his close relatives in the Holocaust; they were among over 3 million Polish Jews annihilated during the Nazi occupation. Some members of his family died in Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union. Lemkin's only European family members to survive were his brother, Elias, and his wife and two sons, who had been sent to a Soviet forced labor camp.
After the Holocaust, Lemkin campaigned for the international laws defining and forbidding genocide (in the non-political sense), and achieved his goal in 1951 when the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide came into effect.
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