The Trespassers by Laura Z. Hobson

different kind of headline, and at once they lit with an odd, personal gratification.
    That very day, she read, on the twenty-fourth of March, less than a fortnight after Anschluss , invitations were going forth from President Roosevelt himself to twenty South American republics and nine European countries. The President was asking if each “would be willing to co-operate in setting up a special committee for the purpose of facilitating the emigration from Austria and presumably from Germany of political refugees.”
    As she read, her heart swelled with a nameless relief and pride. This was the kind of thing free men could do. This was good, generous, human stuff. It was especially fine that the United States should be originating it.
    A few weeks ago, this newspaper story would have been impersonal, distant. Now it touched her as personally as a good letter from a friend. It was valiant news, it made her happy.
    The Vederles wouldn’t benefit by this conference—their need would be over before the meeting began. But there must be hundreds of thousands of other Vederle families who would read or hear that America was moving to help them. And those who read or heard the news would feel the pulse of renewed hope beat hard in their veins.
    Listen, hopeful ones. Do you know the laws, do you know the quota laws, the visa laws? Do you know the quota-control officials who cannot, who may not, let the besieged Consulate give you the quick document that may save your life? For under the quota there is not room for people of your nationality in the three million square miles of the United States. Not now, perhaps in a few months, but now the quota is full, the quota is full.
    Did you know about the quota laws, you Austrian suicides who killed yourselves in those first days and weeks after Anschluss ? There were eight hundred of you every day, day after day, killed by your own hope-abandoned hands. The British journalists told us, the American journalists told us; Gedye of the Times and Shirer and Fodor, Mowrer, John Elliott, they told us how eight hundred of you each day and terror-crowded night killed yourselves rather than face a brutal tomorrow.
    But perhaps the pulse of renewed hope beats hard in you fleeing ones, your faces turned toward Switzerland as the nearest place of respite, you who travel by foot, by car, by plane, by train? You there, you, traveling on skis through the forbidding and beautiful mountain passes of the Alps—you, wading the shallow reaches of the Upper Rhine—you crowding like hungry, tired beasts into the impromptu shelters at Saint Gall and Diepldsau—does it comfort you to know that in far-off Washington President Roosevelt has today moved to set up a great international committee to help you?
    Hurry, hurry, let men of good will meet, decide, ratify. Let the doors of decent nations be thrown wide, let the padlocks and chains of quota numbers and immigration laws be burned through with the acetylene flame of compassion. But hurry, hurry.
    There was need for hurry in that springtime of 1938. Most of you migrating ones had yet to learn the stony face of the immigration laws in each possible host country. The United States, for instance? The huge, sprawling land of promise settled by earlier migrants from persecution or poverty?
    Yes, the United States will welcome you.
    Will welcome if you please, sir, 27,370 from Germany and Austria; that is the quota for a year. Will welcome 2874 Czechs, 6524 Poles, 869 Hungarians, 100 from the Free City of Danzig, 252 from Spain…these are the quotas for any fiscal year, even this year.
    It was as if the great, heaving breakers of the ocean were to burst and crash against a three-inch channel through mighty rock.
    Those who were denied turned elsewhere, changed plans, sought every consulate of every land. And these were only the first, the prompt ones. Behind them were the uncounted others who would soon follow in this seeking of permission to live, if not on this