LAUTERPACHT RETURNED to Cambridge at the end of January 1941, three flights on an Atlantic clipper, via Bermuda, the Azores, and Lisbon. His travel companions included Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate defeated by Roosevelt in the presidential elections just a few weeks earlier. They spent much of the flight in animated conversation about the state of the world. Willkie never did make good on his acceptance of an invitation to visit Trinity.
Lauterpacht’s return coincided with the arrival of an increasingly rare communication from Lvov. “My Dear!” his brother wrote, with news that the family was “relatively well” and that “our dear old ones have aged in this period by twenty years.” Under the gaze of the Soviet censors, the letter offered coded messages. “We would like to see you so that we could be together again,” David hinted, “in what way it is up to you.” If they were to be reunited, it would be for Lauterpacht to make the arrangements. The family preferred “to be together in such times.” Could Lauterpacht come to Lvov to get them? “You know our wishes,” David concluded, somewhat cryptically due to the censorship. “Stay healthy, we send you our kisses.”
The letter caused concern, but any steps he took to get the family to Britain went unrecorded. He put effort into lectures, the “troublesome” but distracting work on the Annual Digest, and a new edition of Oppenheim’s International Law. Food was comforting; because stocks in Cambridge were limited, he made regular trips to his favored delicatessen in Cricklewood, run by Mr. Ziedman. He is a “blessing,” Lauterpacht told Rachel, somehow able to get “all the frying oil I wanted” and other unobtainable items.
Writing also gave him comfort. One letter went to Leonard Woolf, whom he had known during his days at the LSE, expressing condolence at the death of Virginia. Another was sent to Rachel in New York, worrying about the war’s direction as Yugoslavia entered on the side of the Germans, more positive as to the recapture of Addis Ababa, a rare success for his onetime client Haile Selassie. A letter to Eli berated him for complaining about life in New York while people in Britain lived “in a state of more immediate anxiety and worries of all kinds.”
In April 1941, he received an invitation to lecture at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. In May, he gave a talk at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London on “The Reality of the Law of Nations,” in which he once more focused on the plight of individuals. He railed against despondency and cynicism, putting the positive case for international law and hope. This was something of a challenge, given widespread reports that circulated as to the “grievous violations” occurring across Europe. Such acts by lawless states had to be confronted by governments, he told the audience, by international lawyers and “the will and exertion of the citizen.”
Lauterpacht found a voice that drew strength in adversity, speaking to the “rights and duties of man.” The passion was fueled by the arrival of a short letter from his father, written on January 4, 1941. “Dearest!” he wrote lovingly to his son, your letters “rejoiced us extraordinarily.” He was “totally becalmed” by the news that the family was safe in America. In Lvov everyone was “perfectly sound,” but no more than that. They hoped for the best. Greetings were sent from Uncle David in Żółkiew. “We heartily greet and kiss you all.” His mother added a line of kisses.
Then came silence. “Write often to my family,” he urged Rachel, offering an address in Lvov now in “Soviet Russia”: ulica Obrony Lwów, a street named in honor of the “Defenders of Lvov.” The family lived on May the Third Street.