While Richard lay in the hospital Eleanor had been busy with more than the house. With some leads from Rex she had written to everyone she could think of who might help in the matter of the Liebermanns. And once she’d started, the list only seemed to grow.
She wrote to the Berlin correspondents of the New York Times, the Daily Express, the Mail, and the Herald Tribune, urging them to keep Hannah’s name alive at press briefings. She thanked Sir Eric for his efforts in getting Richard released and asked him to raise the matter of the Liebermanns with the German Foreign Ministry. She made pleas to Lord Beaverbrook and William Randolph Hearst, underlining the public interest in the case and calling for their newspapers to adopt Hannah’s cause. She appealed to the president of the IOC, flattering his vanity by suggesting the Reich leadership would hear his petitions for the release of Hannah Liebermann.
As the weeks passed and the season changed, the responses to Eleanor’s letters dropped like so many leaves onto the doormat: a mixed bag of general sympathy, vague support, and one or two blunt rebuffs. Sir Eric had broached the subject over tea with von Ribbentrop and had been heard with ‘cold contempt.’ A response from the IOC’s president, Count Henri de Baillet-Latour, contained such flannel about goodwill between nations as to be almost meaningless-or at any rate, it meant he wasn’t going to do anything. Only Rex seemed to be really trying, but his questions were met each time by the same statement: that Hannah Liebermann was convalescing from a breakdown and was not receiving visitors in her weakened state. Eleanor tossed each letter onto the shelf over the escritoire. At the end of October a letter from Ambassador Dodd arrived. She and Denham read it together.
My dear Eleanor:
Life at Tiergartenstr has been most dull without you. Martha, Mattie, and I have missed your company. I can only apologise for taking so long in responding to your letter about the Liebermanns. You’ll forgive me, I hope, when I tell you that we have been waiting on responses to petitions made by the State Department to the Reich government.
Hitler’s reply to our request that Hannah and her family be permitted to emigrate to the States was, I regret to say, a flat refusal. When I tried to get a private interview with him to plead the case in person I was brushed off.
There is little more I can do. I am deeply sorry that this news will disappoint. Let us hope that Hannah’s fame affords her some protection for the time being.
We wish you well, my dear. Martha says she’ll write soon. She has been much in the company of a young Russian here in our diplomatic community, which she’ll want to tell you all about I’m sure. Knowing well how disapproval only emboldens her, I’m keeping my views on this latest suitor to myself!
Please send my fond regards to your father.
Yours affectionately,
W E Dodd
Denham stood up, put his hat on, and went out without saying a word, but Eleanor read over it again, lit a cigarette, and sat watching the trees thrashing in the wind through the kitchen window. The cat was curled on a chair, with one eye open. A log in the stove shifted, sending a heap of ash through the grate.
Despite their efforts, it seemed the book was closing on Hannah, Jakob, and Ilse.