I attended the opening of the League’s Assembly, but that is hardly important. The thoughts of Assembly members are now turned in a quite different direction. A dark and terrifying cloud hovers in the political atmosphere. In the corridors of the League everyone was asking one another: ‘What will Hitler say, do you think?’

That’s all that matters.

At tea-time I went to a reception organized by the Women’s International League for Peace. I made the acquaintance of delegates from all over the world. Every lady asked me one and the same question: ‘What do you think Hitler will say?’

The delegate from Czechoslovakia, after a firm handshake, looked at me like a wounded doe and almost pleaded: ‘You’re our only hope… Please, don’t betray us…’

We had dinner at Café Landolt, so well known to me from my distant years in emigration.

The Landolt was the favourite brasserie of Lenin and Trotsky, and a meeting place of revolutionaries during the First World War.

Hitler was yelling from the loudspeaker, making his speech in Nuremberg. But Agniya and I were sitting quite far away and I could not make everything out. One thing was clear though: Hitler has made up his mind to stake his all.

Back in the hotel I learned the latest news from London. Yesterday Attlee saw Chamberlain and insisted that Britain, France and the USSR issue a joint declaration concerning assistance to Czechoslovakia in the event of German aggression, but Chamberlain found such a move ‘inexpedient’. Eden visited Halifax, and Churchill met Chamberlain: they both demanded that the British government make a clear declaration of its position, but without success. Masaryk handed a note to the Foreign Office, informing the British government that Czechoslovakia could not agree to a plebiscite in the Sudetenland, a subject of talks in recent days both inside and outside Germany. The Cabinet met, discussed and decided: they would do nothing until they had heard the speech of the ‘Führer’.