If the Whole Body Dies

Raphael Lemkin and the Treaty Against Genocide

a play by Robert Skloot

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If the Whole Body Dies tells the story of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born Jew and lawyer, who escaped the Holocaust by emigrating to  the U.S. in 1941, and who coined the term genocide in 1944. He campaigned throughout his life to establish the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Despite Lemkin’s extraordinary achievement, he was until recently one of    the forgotten figures of history.

The play takes place largely in Lemkin’s mind, in dialogs with Anne Frank or with his mother, both murdered in Nazi concentration camps, and with Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin who fought for the treaty’s adoption for years after Lemkin’s death. The narrative moves back and forth through time, describing the struggle for the world to acknowledge that genocide is (still) occurring now generations after the Holocaust.