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Man's PerseverancE
:11.) V V
•
Justice in the face of genocide.
Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News
N
o matter how enthusiastically
a critic may commend Edet
Belzberg's artful and inspiring
documentary, Watchers of the Sky, the fact
is many readers will lose interest as soon
as they hear the word "genocide"
Raphael Lemkin would understand
completely.
A Polish Jew born in 1900 on a farm
near Bialystok, Lemkin was a student of
history who became a victim of history
and, ultimately, left his mark on history.
Lemkin trained as
a lawyer and, remark-
ably, found his mission
when he was just 21: to
change the legal frame-
work for dealing with
mass murder.
"Why is the killing of
a million a lesser crime
than the killing of an
individual?" Lemkin
asked.
Lemkin was dis-
mayed that the inter-
Raphael Lemkin
national community
allowed the Turks to
get away with massacring the Armenians.
He was appalled by the tacit agreement
among nations that a government operat-
ing within its own borders was free from
outside intervention.
Through archival footage and photo-
graphs, onscreen text, animation and the
narration of Samantha Power, author of A
Problem From Hell and U.S. ambassador
to the United Nations, Watchers of the Sky
threads Lemkin's remarkable life story
into a riveting narrative that encompasses
contemporary standard-bearers for inter-
national justice.
A stunningly ambitious work that
achieves the level of art, Watchers of the
Sky screens Nov. 22-23 at the Detroit Film
Theatre.
Incredibly, Lemkin endured what he
had read about in history books, namely
the murder of family members (at the
hands of the Nazis) and exile. He landed
in the U.S. in 1941, and the next chapter
of his life provides the most revelatory,
agonizing and poignant segment of
Watchers of the Sky.
He labored to coin a word — "ethno-
cide" was one candidate — that would
uniquely invoke the organized murders
of a targeted group, eventually arriving at
"genocide"
After the war, without resources or
allies, equipped only with unimaginable
perseverance and an unwavering sense
of what was right, Lemkin personally
lobbied dozens and dozens of members
of the newly created United Nations to
vote to codify genocide as a crime and to
take responsibility for prosecuting future
incidents.
Part of the resistance he encountered
was a belief that the horrors of the Third
Reich were so enormous and reviled that
they would never be repeated. If anything,
this detail provides even more proof that
Lemkin was decades ahead of his time.
The high point of Watchers of the Sky is
the U.N. vote that resulted solely from the
work of one man: Raphael Lemkin.
Many years later,
but as a direct
= consequence of
Lemkin's efforts,
the International
I Criminal Court (ICC)
", was established.
If Watchers of the
.^ Sky concerned itself
solely with resur-
r7 recting, celebrating
3 and immortalizing
Raphael Lemkin,
© it would stand as a
valuable contribu-
tion. But the film
goes much further. By extending the past
into the present, it furthers Lemkin's work
and itself becomes an act of conscience.
One of the central characters in the film
is Luis Moreno Ocampo, the Argentine
attorney who was named the first chief
prosecutor of the ICC. Ambassador
Power provides another powerful voice
of conscience, along with Emmanuel
Uwurukundo, a Rwandan national who
is the U.N. Refugee Agency Field Director
in Chad.
A somewhat forlorn figure is Ben
Ferencz, a former Nuremberg prosecutor
in his 80s who continues to travel and
lobby for peace but whose ongoing efforts
seem to fall on the deafest ears.
But the nature of the good fight is that
there are setbacks, and Ferenz's inclusion
in Watchers of the Sky speaks to the film's
embrace of reality rather than empty,
platitude-draped optimism.
Even as we are invited by the film to
bring mass murderers to justice and end
the practice of genocide, it remains an
ongoing struggle.
❑
Watchers of the Sky screens at
the Detroit Film Theatre in the
Detroit Institute of Arts at 7 p.m.
Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov.
22-23. $6.50-$8.50. (313) 833-
4005; www.dia.org/dft.
A I
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November 20 • 2014
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