A Thousand Miracles From Surviving the Holocaust to Judging Genocide

At age nine, Theodor Meron witnessed the unthinkable: ghettos, camps, and the murder of his family during the Holocaust. Decades later, he would shape international law at the highest level, presiding over UN war crimes tribunals and influencing decisions on genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

In this extraordinary memoir, Judge Meron recounts a life marked by survival, scholarship, and an unrelenting pursuit of justice. From his early legal opinions-like his now-famous 1967 memo on Israeli settlements-to his role in reviewing evidence for the International Criminal Court's 2024 arrest warrant applications in the Israel-Gaza conflict, Meron has been a consistent voice for accountability.

Spanning a career that took him from Israel's Foreign Ministry to courtrooms in The Hague and classrooms at Harvard, Oxford, and NYU, Meron's story is also the story of modern international justice. Aged 95, he remains one of its most authoritative and principled figures. At a time when the future of global justice hangs in the balance, A Thousand Miracles is both a compelling personal history and a timely reminder of the moral weight of law--and the power of one life dedicated to its pursuit.

Theodor Meron was born in 1930 in Kalisz, Poland, to a Jewish family, he was just nine years old when World War Two began. He survived ghettos, camps and the unimaginable atrocities of the Holocaust, but lost most of his family, as well as his home and many years of education and freedom and in 1945 immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. He received his legal education at the Hebrew University (M.J.), Harvard Law School (LL.M., J.S.D.) and Cambridge University (Diploma in Public International Law). He immigrated to the United States in 1978 and is a citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom.