The Trespassers by Laura Z. Hobson

Author:Laura Z. Hobson [Hobson, Laura Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-3873-8
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

FRANZ’ SECRET rubbed at his nerves. In all the long years of their marriage, he had never had a personal secret from Christa, and he felt distaste for the burden of it. But he did not waver about keeping it.

She knew everything else. He read her his letters to Ramsey-Smithe, to Cresselin, to colleagues in Belgium and Holland, and then as their answers came, he read those, translating loosely so that the nuances of discouragement did not come through too clearly. But there was no way to conceal the fact that permanent settlement in Europe looked impossible for them.

Hewlett Ramsey-Smithe replied at once, eager to help, and personally angry and ashamed over the medical situation in England. He wrote that during the very week of the Evian meeting, the British Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hare, was waited on by groups from the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Surgeons, making official protests against allowing in any more refugee physicians or surgeons. A few days later, in the House of Commons, the strongest demands for such restrictions were made again; the press quoted certain leading doctors as threatening to organize a national “stay in” strike of English doctors unless the doors were completely barred and at once. Since 1933, England had extended permission to 137 German physicians to practice there, and since Anschluss to 50 Austrian doctors as well. That was enough. German doctors, Austrian doctors, any outside doctors, had different standards, different methods, different fees.

But Hewlett Ramsey-Smithe was investigating the chances for him in other parts of the Empire and in the Commonwealth. As soon as he had something definite to report, he would write or, better yet, telephone, for he could well imagine the position his good and able colleague now found himself in. The most likely suggestion he had yet heard was in the Union of South Africa. Would Johannesburg appeal at all? Might it not do as a steppingstone, anyway? If they were to go there and it turned out they didn’t like it after a bit, they could apply for American visas from there.

Everything in Franz rejected the suggestion, but he was grateful for the concern behind it. Cresselin’s letters and all the others told of new bars going up in every country for all professional men; the letters varied only in the degree of warmth with which they offered help in spite of the difficulties. After two or three exchanges, some sixth sense told Franz that in all the world he had found only two people who were really persisting in their drive to help them. One was Vera M. Stamford, on the other side of the Atlantic; on this side was Mr. Hewlett Ramsey-Smithe. And from each of the Englishman’s frequent letters, one idea kept emerging. Their best hope lay in South Africa.

Franz began, reluctantly still, to consider it. “A steppingstone to America”—a far-flung one, but perhaps the surest, after all. He forced himself to adjust his point of view about the pattern of their future, to see it with this new detour in it.

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