Lemkin Train coming to stations in the Czech Republic to mark the 75th anniversary of genocide becoming a crime in international law
A special Lemkin Train will be stopping at Czech railway stations until the end of May to commemorate the 75th anniversary of genocide being declared a crime in international law. The Theresienstadt Centre for the Study of Genocides is presenting a multimedia exhibition and holding other educational events in the carriages of the train, which is named after Rafael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer of Jewish origin who first defined genocide and gave it the legal and scholarly framework that was later adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations.
The Lemkin Train was first parked on Track 7 of the Masaryk Train Station in Prague, where it was open to the public between 11:00 and 18:00 until 29 April. It was scheduled to visit Kolín next, Prague once again, and then Rakovník and Ústí nad Labem.
“The exhibition is conceived in such a way that an actor performs as Rafael Lemkin, based on his autobiography and memoirs, presenting his work and the enormous diplomatic success of the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” Šimon Krbec, director of the Theresienstadt Centre for the Study of Genocides explained. “The importance of this UN Convention is that it limits the sovereignty of states. Until then it was the case that states could do what they wanted on their territory and nobody else had any say in it. When states adopted this Convention as their own national legislation, they committed to preventing genocide,” explained Antonín Hradilek, the former Czech Government Commissioner on Holocaust Issues.
In the beginning, the concept of genocide existed only in the Polish language (as the word ludobójstwo). In 1944, Lemkin adapted this term for use in English as “genocide”, from the Greek word genos (nation, race) and the Latin suffix –cide (to kill) in his work entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
During the 1920s, Lemkin studied the behavior of the Ottoman Empire, which annihilated the Armenian population on its territory during the First World War, as a genocide. Those events are remembered today as the Armenian genocide, but the concept did not exist at the time and Türkiye still rejects this label.
The commemoration of Lemkin‘s life and work on board a train obviously symbolizes Nazi Germany’s transports to the concentration camps during the Second World War. Cattle cars were also used by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War to deport Armenians and other Christian minorities to the desert in Syria, and Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union used trains to transport people to labor camps.
“It is odd for people to believe that if evil is happening in the world it has nothing to do with them. Naturally, people have done many good things in history, for example, they created the Red List of Threatened Species of animals and plants. However, no such list exists for endangered groups of human beings. The adoption of the Convention was an important step,” Armenian historian Hayk Demoyan said at the opening of the Lemkin Train.
“Unfortunately, those of us who were born in the 20th century and live in the 21st have witnessed many genocides. The legacy of Rafael Lemkin is current, important and alarming for each of us, irrespective of what kind of values we espouse,” said Demoyan, who spoke with Hradilek and Krbec in one of the Lemkin Train’s four carriages.
In addition to representatives of the Theresienstadt Centre for the Study of Genocides, the creation of the educational content for the train involved the actors Aleš Bílík and Dušak Sitek. The artistic design and the scenography was created by Milan David.
