The setting of the poem is in a city of over 10 million people but the refugees like the narrator and his lover are unable to settle in any place because they are 'Jews'. They have no right to live because Hitler had declared that according to ideologies of Nazism, Jews were unfit to live and had to be eliminated without mercy. This thundered across Europe and in the minds of the terrified Jews who are then treated miserably by Europe and other places they sought refuge. They are constantly threatened by death at the hands of the non-Jews.