The events of the Holo­caust may seem far away to some, but for Theodore Meron, who was a child when he lived through them, they are as close as the palm of his hand, the skin on his forearm.

When Meron was nine years old, Nazis invad­ed Kalisz, the small town in west­ern Poland where he lived. Dan­ger enveloped his pros­per­ous fam­i­ly, own­ers of a local lum­ber yard, as well as the entire com­mu­ni­ty of Jews around them. Near­ly every­one was caught in the Nazi net and perished. 

And those who were left alive had to learn how to go on.

For Meron, that meant find­ing a shred of shared human­i­ty that would enable him to acknowl­edge the his­toric crimes that were com­mit­ted and search for rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. Our soci­ety is for­tu­nate that he was suc­cess­ful in doing so, as he became a jurist of great integri­ty and courage, a rec­og­nized world leader in the prac­tice of inter­na­tion­al crim­i­nal jus­tice. In A Thou­sand Mir­a­cles, he tells us how this per­son­al mir­a­cle of his came to be.

The book is a smooth blend of schol­ar­ship, polit­i­cal his­to­ry, and per­son­al sto­ries. Meron writes with warmth, can­dor, and author­i­ty; he describes his life at The Hague as smooth­ly as he describes his child­hood in the lit­tle town in Poland where he was born. Meron writes about the geno­cide of Jews and how the per­pe­tra­tors were offered fair and decent tri­als under his watch. He tells us that for some­one of his back­ground to become a judge of war crimes and to pre­side over the tri­als is a won­der that amazes him every day. He pon­ders the mys­tery of how the major­i­ty of Ger­mans could col­lab­o­rate with the enforce­ment of the Holo­caust. And he offers abun­dant praise for the many Right­eous Gen­tiles who endan­gered their own lives to save Jews.

As a schol­ar of human­i­tar­i­an law, Meron is well qual­i­fied to guide us in under­stand­ing the affairs of state and war, and through­out the book he calls for civ­i­lized behav­ior and moral respon­si­bil­i­ty among the peo­ple who run our gov­ern­ments, out­lin­ing for us the breadth and depth of his work. He has served as the legal advi­sor to Israel’s Min­istry of For­eign Affairs and advised the Inter­na­tion­al Crim­i­nal Court on poten­tial crimes in the war between Ukraine and Rus­sia. And as pres­i­dent of three Unit­ed Nations tri­bunals, he deliv­ered land­mark deci­sions on geno­cide and war crimes. The book is a clear state­ment about the oblig­a­tion we have to our fel­low humans and at the same time a firm reminder of the account­abil­i­ty of the courts.

With­in this schol­ar­ly tome, it is sur­pris­ing yet heart­warm­ing that Meron includes per­son­al trib­utes to his wife, Monique Jon­quet-Meron, whose pass­ing inspired the writ­ing of the book as a lega­cy to her. In the appen­dix are five poems he wrote to her, one of which bears the same title as this book. In the very last lines of the text he explains why: ​“I know my life has been extra­or­di­nary and not with­out mir­a­cles, but most of all I will always trea­sure the mir­a­cle of Monique.”