LAUTERPACHT, who knew nothing about what was happening to the niece he had never met, decided to give up alcohol and start a slimming cure. This was not on doctor’s orders, merely a sensible precaution. That was what he told himself, as he continued with Home Guard duties and thought about what a bill of rights might contain. He didn’t know that his father had been taken on August 18. That same day he sent a memorandum to the War Crimes Committee in London, setting out the paucity of international practice on the prosecution of war crimes.
From the east, bits of news and rumor trickled through. In September, an article appeared in The Times on Nazi atrocities in Poland. This ignited a feeling of kinship with Jewish colleagues in Cambridge, reflected in a letter to Rachel. “Last night I went to the Synagogue of the German refugees as a sign of my feeling of solidarity with their sufferings.” He sent food parcels into the Lemberg void, addressed to David, unaware of the situation in the city.
Eighteen months had now passed with no news from the family. Solace was hard to find. He listened to music, which generated a feeling of sentimentality, remembrance of a life past.
“It is 6 pm on a Sunday and I have been fasting all day,” he wrote to Rachel in December, a day of fast and intercession for the murdered Jews in Poland. “I felt I would like to join in.”
Lwów was perpetually on his mind. “My very dear ones are there, and I do not know whether they are alive. The situation there is so terrible that it is quite conceivable that they may prefer death to life. I have been thinking the whole day about them.”