Raphael Lemkin
Born in 1900, Raphael Lemkin, devoted most of his life to a single goal: making the world understand and recognize a crime so horrific that there was not even a word for it. Lemkin took a step toward his goal in 1944 when he coined the word "genocide" which means the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group. He said he had created the word by combining the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing). In 1948, three years after the concentration camps of World War II had been closed forever, the newly formed United Nations used this new word in a treaty called the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that was intended to prevent any future genocides. Lemkin’s story is told in Facing History and Ourselves book Totally Unofficial: Raphael Lemkin and the Genocide Convention.
