EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece was originally published in the Spring 2019 magazine.
On the evening of Saturday May 13, 1939 tension was in the air as hundreds of Jewish passengers crowded the decks of the luxury ocean liner, the S.S. Saint Louis. Waves gently lapped the sides of the ship as the vessel departed from Hamburg, gently cruising away from Nazi-occupied Germany. By 1939, nearly half of the 1933 Jewish population of Germany had left the country. Those remaining were desperate to leave after the night of November 9, 1939 when Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass” led to the destruction of thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues. After that night of terror, open hostility to Jews in Hitler’s Germany grew substantially more pernicious due to the state-sponsored destruction of Jewish property and religious sights. Fearing for their lives, over 900 Jews obtained landing certificates in Cuba where they hoped to wait for entry into the United States. On the decks of the Saint Louis, these refugees watched their homeland disappear into the horizon as the ship moved towards the western hemisphere. Their voyage was made on the promise of finding a new home as expatriates, fleeing the grasp of Nazism. They left intending never to return.
About a year beforehand in 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt hosted the Évian Conference in France in response to the increase in forced Jewish emigration by the Nazi government. The conference was comprised of 32 countries allied with the United States that Roosevelt hoped would take in more Jewish refugees. This was done in part because the United States was not filling its immigration quotas from Europe and sought other states to bear the burden of taking in Jewish refugees. This effort to respond to the forced Jewish emigration was ultimately futile as anti-Semitic sentiment ruled the day. In a diary entry, Canadian Prime Minister W. L. Mackenzie King wrote “we must nevertheless seek to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood.” Similar ideological positions were taken by other countries, who failed to reach any agreement. Only the Dominican Republic pledged to take in a substantial number of Jewish refugees.
The anti-Semitic sentiment found in much of the western world would also be waiting for the Saint Louis at the docks of Havana. Calm had settled throughout the ship as swimming lessons, dances, and evening religious services created a comfortable voyage. Unfortunately, that glimmer of sunlight on a sea of endless ocean did not reach the island of Cuba. Unbeknownst to the passengers of the Saint Louis, Cuban President Federico Laredo Bru had issued a decree a week before the ship departed, invalidating all recently issued landing certificates. Political in-fighting within President Bru’s administration over corruption in how landing certificates were issued and anti-Semitic protests shaped hostility to the Saint Louis. On May 8, five days before the Saint Louis’ departure from Hamburg, Nazi operatives working in Cuba helped orchestrate a mass protest in Havana attended by over forty-thousand people where former Cuban President Grau San Martin urged protesters to “fight the Jews until the last one is driven out.” The Saint Louis would be no exception to this fear-mongering.
The Saint Louis drifted into the port of Havana on May 27th with the intent of allowing the nine-hundred thirty-seven passengers to disembark. Cuba only allowed twenty-eight to exit the ship, all of whom had U.S. visas save six who were Cuban and Spanish nationals. The American Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury as well as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Company, a Jewish advocacy group, attempted to persuade Cuban officials to permit the entry of Jewish passengers, but these negotiations failed. The Saint Louis then sailed towards the United States, hovering off the coast of Florida in a desperate hope that America would allow the ship to dock. Rather than even consider the entry of the Jewish Refugees, Secretary of State Cordell Hull ordered the Coast Guard to follow the ship and prevent it from coming close to the American coastline. All requests by the Saint Louis to allow passengers to disembark in the United States were denied. An effort to persuade Canadian authorities to admit the passengers also ultimately failed due to anti-Semitic sentiments among immigration officials. Lacking enough food and water to continue to sustain the ship for much longer, Captain Schroeder was forced to return to Europe on June 6. Persecuted by their own country, and rejected by the land of the free, the Jewish refugees remained in stateless limbo.
Captain Schroeder refused to return the refugees to Germany due to the certain peril Jews faced under the increasingly aggressive Nazi-regime. Ultimately, due to the last-minute negotiations conducted by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Company, multiple European countries opened their borders to the Jewish refugees on the Saint Louis. The United Kingdom allowed 288 to enter, France allowed 224, Belgium allowed 214, and the Netherlands allowed 181.
While this temporary settlement may have appeared to be a haven for those who had been living on the Saint Louis for over a month, the course of history did not favor their safety in Europe. On May 10th, 1940, Nazi forces began their western offensive moving into France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, all of whom gave protection to a total of 620 passengers of the Saint Louis living in continental Europe. Research conducted based upon average survival rates and documented evidence estimates that 255 of these individuals died in the Holocaust, predominantly at either Auschwitz or Sobibór.
Ultimately, the Saint Louis incident is a case of persecuted refugees being denied entry into the United States. There was no legitimate argument to prevent their entry into the United States; nevertheless, they were denied as they were by the rest of the world. After the second world war, the newly founded United Nations established asylum as a basic human right. The UN Declaration of Human Rights specifically enunciated this position in Article IX (b) “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” The United States has defined asylum seekers as those who have “[a history] of past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.” Modern asylum seekers often do not fit into these categories, fleeing instead due to persecution from instability and gang violence. While this may differentiate them from those on the Saint Louis, who were fleeing a well-organized state structure of oppression, it does not change the fact that they face similar dangers. While the United States must consider its interests and logistical feasibility in making asylum decisions, it must take a side on whether to keep those facing harm in their homelands in a place of safety or uncertain peril. When doing so, it should be informed of its past shortcomings in failing those who courageously boarded the Saint Louis and make a decision based on moral authority. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel recognized this clearly during his Nobel Prize Speech in 1986. “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”