Name ______________________
What percentage of the passengers of the SS St Louis were
killed by the Nazis upon its return to Europe?
Why couldn’t the family of Gisela Feldman wait for her father before leaving Europe?
Describe the living conditions of Jews living in Germany in
the late 1930’s.
What happened when the SS St. Louis arrived in Cuba?
What happened when the SS St. Louis tried to dock in the US?
Why did Cuba and the US choose to send the SS St. Louis
away?
Write a paragraph explaining to the Jewish passengers of the
SS St. Louis why they must return to Nazi controlled Germany, justifying the
decision.
SS St Louis: The ship of Jewish
refugees nobody wanted
"It was
really something to be going on a luxury liner," says Gisela Feldman.
"We didn't really know where we were heading, or how we would cope when we
got there."
At the age of
90, Feldman still clearly remembers the raw and mixed emotions she felt as a
15-year-old girl boarding the St Louis at Hamburg docks with her mother and
younger sister.
"I was
always aware of how anxious my mother looked, embarking on such a long journey,
on her own with two teenage daughters," she says.
In the years
following the rise to power of Hitler's Nazi party, ordinary Jewish families
like Feldman's had been left in no doubt about the increasing dangers they were
facing.
Jewish
properties had been confiscated, synagogues and businesses burned down. After Feldman's
Polish father was arrested and deported to Poland her mother decided it was
time to leave.
Feldman
remembers her father pleading with her mother to wait for him to return but her
mother was adamant and always replied: "I have to take the girls away to
safety."
So, armed
with visas for Cuba which she had bought in Berlin, 10 German marks in her
purse and another 200 hidden in her underclothes, she headed for Hamburg and
the St Louis.
"We were
fortunate that my mother was so brave," says Feldman with a note of pride
in her voice.
Tearful
relatives waved them off at the station in Berlin. "They knew we would
never see each other again," she says softly. "We were the lucky ones
- we managed to get out." She would never see her father or more than 30
other close family members again.
By early
1939, the Nazis had closed most of Germany's borders and many countries had
imposed quotas limiting the number of Jewish refugees they would allow in.
Cuba was seen
as a temporary transit point to get to America and officials at the Cuban
embassy in Berlin were offering visas for about $200 or $300 each - $3,000 to
$5,000 (£1,800 to £3,000) at today's prices.
When
six-year-old Gerald Granston was told by his father that they were leaving
their small town in southern Germany to take a ship to the other side of the
world, he struggled to understand what that meant.
"I'd
never heard of Cuba and I couldn't imagine what was going to happen. I remember
being scared all the time," he says, now aged 81.
For many of
the young passengers and their parents however, the trepidation and anxiety
soon faded as the St Louis began its two-week transatlantic voyage.
Feldman, who
shared a cabin in the lower part of the ship with her sister Sonja, spent her
time walking around the deck chatting with boys of her own age, or swimming in
the ship's pool.
On board,
there was a dance band in the evenings and even a cinema. There were regular
meals with a variety of food that the passengers rarely saw back home.
Under orders
from the ship's captain, Gustav Schroder, the waiters and crew members treated
the passengers politely, in stark contrast to the open hostility Jewish
families had become accustomed to under the Nazis.
The captain
allowed traditional Friday night prayers to be held, during which he gave
permission for the portrait of Adolf Hitler hanging in the main dining room to
be taken down.
Six-year-old
Sol Messinger, who was travelling with his father and mother, recalls how happy
everyone seemed. In fact, he says, the youngsters were constantly being told by
the adults that they were now safe from harm: "We're going away," he
heard people say again and again on that outward journey. "We don't have
to look over our shoulders any more."
But as the
luxury liner reached the coast of Havana on 27 May, that sense of optimism
disappeared to be replaced by fear, then dread.
Granston was
up on deck with his father and dozens of other families, their suitcases packed
and ready to disembark, when the Cuban officials, all smiles, first came
aboard.
What happened next?
- 288 passengers went to Great Britain, all of whom survived WW2
except one who died in an air raid in 1940
- The Netherlands took 181 people, Belgium 214 and France 224
- 87 of these emigrated before Germany invaded - of the 532 left,
278 survived and 254 died
- The journey was the subject of the 1976 film Voyage of the
Damned
It quickly
became clear that the ship was not going to dock and that no-one was being
allowed off. He kept hearing the words "manana, manana" - tomorrow,
tomorrow. When the Cubans left and the ship's captain announced that people
would have to wait, he could feel, even as a little boy, that something was
wrong.
For the next
seven days, Captain Schroder tried in vain to persuade the Cuban authorities to
allow them in. In fact, the Cubans had already decided to revoke all but a
handful of the visas - probably out of fear of being inundated with more
refugees fleeing Europe.
The captain
then steered the St Louis towards the Florida coast, but the US authorities
also refused it the right to dock, despite direct appeals to President Franklin
Roosevelt. Granston thinks he too was worried about the potential flood of
migrants.
By early
June, Captain Schroder had no option but to turn the giant liner back towards
Europe. "The joy had gone out of everything," Feldman recalls.
"No-one was talking about what would happen now."
As the ship
headed back across the Atlantic, six-year-old Granston kept asking his father
whether they were going back to see their grandparents. His father just shook
his head in silent despair.
By then,
people were openly crying as they wandered the ship - one passenger even slit
his wrists and threw himself overboard out of sheer desperation. "If I
close my eyes, I can still hear his shrieks and see the blood," Granston
says quietly.
In the end,
the ship's passengers did not have to go back to Nazi Germany. Instead,
Belgium, France, Holland and the UK agreed to take the refugees. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee(JDC)
posted a cash guarantee of $500,000 - or $8 million (£4.7m) in today's money -
as part of an agreement to cover any associated costs.
On 17 June,
the liner docked at the Belgian port of Antwerp, more than a month after it had
set sail from Hamburg. Feldman, her mother and sisters all went on to England,
as did Granston and his father.
They both
survived the war but between them they lost scores of relatives in the
Holocaust, including Feldman's father who never managed to get out of Poland.
Messinger and
his parents went to live in France but then had to flee the Nazis for a second
time, leaving just six weeks before Hitler invaded.
Two-hundred-and-fifty-four
other passengers from the St Louis were not so fortunate and were killed as the
Nazis swept across Western Europe.
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