After graduating from a local trade school in Białystok he began the study of linguistics at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów ( now Lviv , Ukraine ) . He was a polyglot , fluent in nine languages and reading fourteen . His first published book was a 1926 translation of the Hayim Nahman Bialik novella Noach i Marynka from Hebrew into Polish . It was in Bialystok that Lemkin became interested in the concept of crime , later developing the concept of genocide , based on the Armenian experience at the hands of the Ottoman Turks , then later the experience of Assyrians massacred in Iraq during the 1933 Simele massacre . Lemkin then moved on to Heidelberg University in Germany to study philosophy , returned to Lwów to study law in 1926 , becoming a prosecutor in Warsaw at graduation
Simele massacre
Simele massacre
Raphael Lemkin