February 11, 1928
Dear Friends in many Lands:
Fully five months have passed since a gracious message bearing also your name brightened the day which marked half a century of my very futile life.
Tragedy enough for a whole lifetime was crowded into these last months. Cancer had just robbed the world of the beautiful and valuable life of Vilma Glücklich, my dear friend and team-mate for a quarter of a century in Pacificist and Feminist work. A social cancer had led to the appalling martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti. Heartrending suicides in the circle of friends have followed each other. And all the while cancer was slowly but inevitable extinguishing my own beloved Mother's life.
The international message of friendship and of encouragement came as a flashlight into the darkness of those days. I wished to rush off my thanks to you and all the others who had united in the message of generous appreciation for my past work, and encouragement for the future. But the days following its receipt were tightly packed with events that absorbed every ounce of my mental and physical strength.
Expatriated because of my pacifist and democratic principles, I sought citizenship in the New World where principles of this nature used to be at home. Citizenship, however, has been denied to me in the United States because of my uncompromising pacifism, an event of crushing effect not only because of its consequences for my person but for its broader and terrible significance.
In spirit a world citizen, I remain politically a "woman without a country," which means also without a passport, that [page 2] [indispensable] document for free movement. And it means above everything else exclusion from participation in the world's work. Unable to resign myself without resistance to a life of inactivity and fruitless contemplation, I spent the past months in a last attempt for my reactivation. Having utterly failed, I must at last give in.
The time has come now to explain what kept me from thanking you, my friends, earlier for the birthday message, the flowers, the presents and the cables. All those manifestations of friendship were immeasurably precious to me and made me the more happy because they brightened the last days of my Mother, who had followed me into exile to die here.
Your encouragement to write a chronicle of the efforts for peace during the war, will help me to take up the book I had started to write several years ago but abandoned because I lacked the spirit for the work. It is not an empty phrase if I say I consider myself blessed with the best friends any one can have. Without them, their loyalty, life would long ago have ceased to be bearable to me.
In thanking you so late for your kind birthday message, I trust you will forgive the delay and continue to support me with your generous sympathy.
To those of you who kindly expressed their condolence at the death of my Mother and their regrets at the refusal of citizenship, I wish to add another word of apology for the delay in thanking them for these manifestations for friendliness.
Cordially,
Rosika Schwimmer [signed]
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