Anyone who has heard of Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany being denied entrance to the United States and other halfway civilized countries, while the British authorities in Palestine refused to allow them there, or of the Russian and other Eastern and Central European displaced persons being shipped back east, mostly to the Gulag, by British and American authorities after World War II, is beset by a nauseating deja vu.

The British authorities in Hong Kong have begun returning Vietnamese refugees to that country's tyrannical government, a government whose officials, in many cases, extorted from those refugees all their possessions in return for permission to risk their lives on ill-equipped boats trying to escape.

All decent people deplore this. Some content themselves with deploring. Others have sunk to suggesting that we open relations with the government of Vietnam, and provide aid on condition that the flow of boat people is restricted.

I call it the only policy worthy of our nation, as well as the only one likely to be of much benefit to the refugees, to admit them here.

We can take some, at least, of the pressure off Hong Kong and other Southeast Asian countries by raising our quotas for the refugees languishing there.

Please, everyone. Take a few minutes and write to your Congressman and Senators to urge that we do so. It might not hurt to write to the British Embassy, too, to express your horror at recent events in Hong Kong.

Enough cries of outrage might save thousands of lives.