Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed

by Leslie Maitland

  Orders were issued matter-of-factly, but as not all the passengers understood English, there was a good deal of multilingual chatter on deck as the instructions were informally translated, person-to-person, with varying degrees of accuracy. The gist was this: passengers would have to leave their belongings behind, save for a change of clothes and toiletries for a couple of nights. When they returned to the ship, they would find everything just as they left it. Customs and immigration officials would be searching each person who filed off the ramp, inspecting their visas and asking them to declare any money and valuables in their possession.

  How could they know, these British officials at empire’s outstation, that to the refugees’ minds, this routine inventory would undercut pride? Lost, stolen, long since abandoned were homes and businesses, paintings and pianos, bank accounts, stock, insurance, furnishings, jewelry, cars, cash, and any and all other wealth they had once possessed. Schadenfreude lent truth to rumors that flew through the group that the British subjected the diamond dealers from Belgium and The Netherlands to the most invasive sort of personal searches.

  The Günzburger family was waiting on line for the bus to the camp when an officer tapped Janine on the shoulder. Her parents watched in alarm as he led her away, explaining he needed to ask her some questions. The Orthodox Jew she had insulted on the day that the Lipari sailed from Marseille had reported her emotional outburst in favor of France, which raised concerns regarding her sympathies now. Did she still maintain that this chance to leave France represented exile to her? Did she really imagine, as a Jew, that she could conceivably be better off there? His rhetorical questions still hung in the air when one of the British inspectors who had been searching the ship entered the office and placed a thick envelope on his superior’s desk. With horror, Janine recognized Roland’s parting letter—her most treasured possession. Testimony to the discipline with which her parents had reared her, she had obediently left it behind with her things in the hold.

  “No! No!” she exclaimed. “Please! You must give that back!” She lunged for the letter while she struggled to say what she needed in English. “That is only for me!” Silent tears of frustration rolled down her cheeks.

  “I understand your sentiments, but we shall have to examine this,” the officer said as he flipped through the twelve densely packed, handwritten French pages, his caution punctilious at this critical checkpoint. When he came to the last page, with writing that extended all the way to the bottom, he had to rotate it to read the signature, which ran sideways along the paper’s left margin in larger script than that of the text. He frowned at the name and then at the envelope, which offered no indication of where and when the letter was sent. “Who gave this to you? Schatsy, is it? A German name, if I’m not mistaken. Whoever that is, he certainly had a great deal to tell you! I’m afraid I shall have to order a translation of this, and that will take time, obviously.”

  No explanation and no amount of begging and blushing, of tears and pleading would induce the official to return it to her. All correspondence found on the ship, her letter included, would have to pass scrutiny by censors, he said. While she did not appear a dangerous person, the risk of permitting an Axis spy to enter undetected into Allied territory was simply too great, given the current state of the war. If her loyalties lay where they belonged, with the Brits and the Yanks, she would surely approve of every safeguard. The letter, he said, would be waiting for her, under her name at the main post office, poste restante or general delivery, when she got to Havana. But she would have traded an arm to take it with her.

  “By the way, young lady,” the officer added before he dismissed her to join the family and get on the bus, “in future, I’d advise being more careful about the sorts of things that you say. These are difficult times, and words can be weapons.”

  Three days later, almost all the 500-odd refugees were returned to the ship to continue their journeys to Mexico, Cuba, or the United States, depending upon which visa they held. Thirty-three remained in Jamaica. There were 235 bound for Mexico, 280 for Cuba, and only 10 for the States: American visas, most coveted, were the hardest to get for Jews fleeing Europe. Many of those on their way to Havana did not plan to stay there, but hoped to continue on to the States as soon as they could.

  On April 16, more than a month after leaving Marseille, the San Thomé reached the port of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico. Unexpectedly, thirty-seven former fighters of the International Brigade from five different countries, all scheduled to disembark there, were forbidden to land. There were threats of shipping the former Loyalist fighters back, and they were terrified of returning to Europe. Negotiations sputtered on for ten days as all the passengers miserably languished, until finally money changed hands. The Mexican Central Jewish Committee, supported by the Joint, agreed to post bonds, which proved crucial to winning the refugees’ entry. In the interim, though, some daring young men even dove off the boat and into the water, viewing the prospect of creeping ashore as preferable to facing the risk of being hauled back to the Fascists in Europe. Bored with waiting, Norbert taunted his parents that he was planning to jump off as well.

  But the long delay, even while fraying the refugees’ nerves, inspired the locals to organize parties, which was more to his liking. Night after night—attracted, perhaps, by the allure of young foreign girls on the ship—handsome Mexican harbor policemen with pistols strapped to their waists boarded the San Thomé with musicians. Cheap local cane liquor called aguardiente may have helped to make the passengers friendly, and the music of sones lightened the mood. Steamy tropical nights sweated the notes of marimba and bamba played on harps, tambourines, and four-stringed guitars plucked with picks fashioned from cow horn. The Mexicans danced with young Europeans and tried to teach their dazzling footwork to people who, having run for their lives just weeks before, barely even knew where they stood or whether they ought to celebrate yet.

  On one of these evenings, the San Thomé’s attractive Portuguese captain, Antonio Bravo, having noticed Janine, invited her to dine with him in his personal quarters. He was at least two decades older than she, nearly bald and not very tall, but with a strong cleft chin and bright blue eyes, he cut an elegant figure in his well-fitting white uniform with its high collar, brass buttons, and epaulets. Sigmar was flattered the captain had singled her out, and as he calculated that such a connection might somehow prove useful, he urged her to accept. But did he stop to consider that after cold and lonely weeks on the ocean, shepherding refugees over the waters of war, the captain might seek something more from a beautiful woman who dined in his quarters than polite conversation? Certainly not. In good German fashion, Sigmar took in the title, the gold braid that adorned the captain’s square shoulders, the sense of authority that Bravo exuded, and he determined it quite safe and proper that Janine should go. Naïvely, he could not conceive of liberties taken, not under the eye of her very own father.

  “My, such an honor!” Sigmar reflected aloud. “My daughter invited to dine with the captain!”

  For history’s sake, Janine brought along her little autograph book, in which the captain obligingly pasted his picture and also penned an inscription in English: “I think every time the best and lovle [lovely] girl on my ship.” But the invitation would not be repeated, nor would she have accepted again. As they sat and talked on his deck after dinner, the captain took hold of her hand and without any warning urgently clasped it between his legs, where her fingers encountered a limp little bird. It attempted to flutter, but she yanked back her hand and ended the evening, realizing that nothing was ever as simple as her parents believed, nor could she ever tell them about it. It seemed too much to expect them to withstand the shock of her broaching a sexual topic. The captain’s behavior nonetheless marked the start of a new education. Without Roland at her side, she learned the language of strangers’ desires, which totally changed her views about men and affected the way she would one day teach me about them: skeptically, with mistrust and with wa
rnings about all of the ways one’s heart might be broken.

  As the San Thomé crossed the Yucatán Channel and drew closer to Cuba, the passengers read in the sun, played chess or cards, studied Spanish, debated the course of the war, and tried, if only for the sake of their children, to envision a new life with something resembling optimism. But for one couple, obsessed by memories of a similar trip three years before that had ended in nightmare, nervousness mounted. In May 1939, Arnost and Camilla Roth and their young son had sailed on the ill-fated St. Louis, almost all of whose 937 passengers were unaccountably barred from landing in Havana and then unconscionably shipped back to Europe. Most of them Jews who hoped eventually to settle in the United States, they had purchased Cuban landing permits in Germany at inflated prices through a racket headed by Colonel Manuel Benítez, Cuba’s corrupt immigration director. What they did not know, however, was that eight days before they set out, infighting among unscrupulous officials, in addition to political pressure against admitting more Jews, had led Cuban president Federico Laredo Brú retroactively to cancel permits and visas for all but twenty-eight of them.

  When the St. Louis entered Havana’s outer harbor on May 27, 1939, it was not permitted to approach the dock and was shortly ordered to leave Cuban waters. Frantic telegrams to President Roosevelt and other world leaders proved unavailing. No country would offer asylum. Even with the St. Louis anchored off Miami Beach, the combined forces of anti-Semitism and isolationism chilled the American State Department, which refused to relent. To spare the imperiled Jews from returning to Germany, the Joint finally arranged—posting a cash guarantee of $500,000 (equal to almost $7 million today)—for France, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Great Britain each to admit a share of them. Still, when war broke out the following year, only the 287 accepted by England were safe from the Nazis, and a quarter of the rest ultimately perished in internment or death camps.

  Among the group admitted to France, the Roths had sailed again for Cuba, now on the San Thomé, relying on assurances that the island’s immigration restrictions had changed since their last diverted and harrowing journey. Inevitably, though, their story spread through the ship, terrifying the travelers holding visas for Cuba who had missed or forgotten the shocking headlines of three years before. As the San Thomé moved toward Havana, the refugees restlessly counted the days and waited to land, while a new specter of horror haunted the ship.

  On Sunday morning, April 26, almost six weeks after the refugees sailed from Marseille, the San Thomé arrived at the tip of the port of Havana where the great Spanish fortress, the Castillo del Morro, has stood for centuries facing the sea, guarding the city and watching for pirates. But on that spring day, in a place far removed from the violence of war, the “pirates” were already ashore—mercenary Cuban officials looking for plunder under cover of law. Their attack on the refugee ship came by way of a special decree signed by the Cuban president, General Fulgencio Batista, on April 16, just as the San Thomé was dropping anchor in Veracruz.

  While Cuba had already provided asylum for six thousand Jewish refugees up to that point—five thousand six hundred of them having arrived just within the previous year—now, abruptly, Batista cut off the island to those seeking safe harbor. It seemed the tragic experience of the St. Louis would be repeated, as his new regulations effectively revoked permission for the San Thomé refugees to land in Havana. They blocked entry to all natives or citizens of any enemy country and, moreover, of any country being occupied by an enemy power. (Although Cuba did not engage in the fighting, its government four months earlier had declared war on Germany, Italy, and Japan.) By denying admission to refugees not only from the three Axis countries but also from any part of the globe the Axis occupied, Batista’s decree banned refugees from virtually all of Europe and good deal of Asia. Described as a measure aimed “to avoid infiltration of enemy aliens into Cuba,” the decree resulted in only 40 San Thomé passengers free to debark. Among those barred from entry, subsumed under the law as possible enemy spies, were 147 women and children. Just as in the St. Louis fiasco, the new law made no exception for refugees already at sea and heading for Cuba with visas in hand. To the contrary, the third provision of the new decree spoke directly and negatively to their situation: “All visas granted prior to this decree to persons who have not yet entered Cuba and are included in the above named restrictions, are hereby annulled.”

  The Joint jumped into action even before the passengers learned of the crisis ahead. The agency sought help “on humanitarian grounds” from the American State Department and the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees; from the Polish, Czech, and British embassies; from top ranks of the Catholic church and Cuban officials. The American embassy in Havana cabled the State Department that “while the decree’s ostensible purpose was to prevent entrance of possible Axis agents,” it seemed the real purpose involved “an attempt to extract more money from Jewish relief societies” eager to see the refugees land.

  Meanwhile, Cuban newspaper accounts compared the San Thomé to the St. Louis and begged that mercy be shown to the beleaguered “Hebrews.”

  “It would be a cruelty to have refugees turned back to the Axis-controlled nations,” wrote El Crisol on April 18. “In this moment of drama and horror for humanity, all those persecuted by the Nazi-fascist monster are worthy of the respect and consideration of all free men.”

  The paper Finanzas lauded the Batista government for guarding against the entry of enemy spies, yet it also denounced the injustice of voiding visas that Cuba had previously granted to the “unfortunates” already at sea. “Let not our Cuban government permit another spectacle such as that of the St. Louis; let it for the last time permit the disembarkation of this boatload of Hebrews who have fulfilled all the requisites of immigration before the issuance of this decree,” it suggested. If they are not permitted to land, “they will have to be returned to their ports of entry to be at the mercy of the fiendish Gestapo torments.” Still other editorial comments spoke in favor of granting the Jews permits to land on the grounds that they were “people of means,” likely to “add to the wealth of the country.”

  For ten nerve-racking days, the San Thomé waited in limbo outside the harbor. Although there was no way for them to know, on April 19 the United States had rejected the Günzburgers’ applications for visas, so admission to Cuba was essential for them, as it was for most of the others on board. The Joint brought fresh supplies of food and water onto the ship and held meetings with a passenger panel that struggled to find an end to the impasse. The refugees’ panic and fear mounted each day, much like the garbage and excrement that overwhelmed efforts to maintain hygienic conditions on a ship that had now been at sea three times longer than initially planned. The course of the talks with Cuban officials was the only thing on the passengers’ minds, and rumors spread through the ship like a virulent plague.

  Casablanca! A fate overheard. God, no, the passengers wailed, was it possible the Cubans would actually ship them back there? In the face of despair, the understanding arose that the situation might change if only they could raise sufficient funds for a meaningful bribe. Janine would always remember that the figure demanded was $100,000—equivalent to almost $1.4 million today—but few of the refugees had any substantial money with them. There were, however, those who had diamonds. And Janine would also remember that the Orthodox Jewish merchants from Antwerp whom she had scorned at the start of the journey were the ones who helped pay for the passengers’ lives.

  In a special bulletin when the crisis was over, the Joint would announce that for two weeks it had “worked incessantly” with Cuban officials and “interested public-spirited persons” before receiving a call at eleven forty-five p.m. on May 5 with the news that the Cuban government would admit all the San Thomé refugees still out in the harbor. Of the twelve thousand refugees who had sought shelter in Cuba since Hitler took power, these were the last, as the decree of April 1942 shut the doors of the island for the dura
tion of war. Sizable bribes bought sanctuary for the persecuted who came in those years, helping to add to the staggering fortune that Batista took with him when Fidel Castro’s revolution forced him from power and required him to flee in the following decade.

  “The nature of the problems which confront us in the Cuban situation do not permit us to give them publicity,” a confidential Joint memorandum noted that June. “You can readily understand that much that is done must go unsung.” But in a subsequent report it clearly explained that Colonel Benítez, Batista’s director of immigration, had “conducted a thriving trade in the sale of illegal landing permits,” and that refugees, once admitted, then became vulnerable to “squeezes” from other officials “using the threat of expulsion from Cuba.” When refugees lacked funds to pay, the burden fell on the Joint.

  The resolution of the San Thomé story as presented for public consumption, however, in the Havana Post, El País, and other newspapers ascribed Cuba’s decision to admit this last boatload of Jews to an Allied agreement to help weed out any Axis agents hiding among them. American and British officials resolved the crisis by offering “to ‘cooperate with the Cuban Government’ in checking over the refugees’ documents, to determine whether they are political refugees in good faith or not,” the Havana Post said. It reported that the refugees, guardedly viewed as enemy aliens, were being transferred to the Tiscornia Immigration Station to await thorough investigation of their papers before being released into civic Havana.

  Havaner Leben, a Yiddish-language newspaper founded in 1932 to serve a large, settled Jewish Cuban population stemming from earlier waves of European immigration, explained that the American and British ambassadors had also promised to help verify which of the San Thomé passengers would eventually be able to proceed to the United States.