I understand the book’s argument about the political realities of the time, but another of the authors’ assertions has been sharply rebuked by passengers who made that fateful voyage aboard the St. Louis. Breitman and Lichtman assert that “[T]here is no truth to the notion, found in some literature, that American officials ordered the coast guard to prevent any passengers from reaching American shores.” A group of St. Louis survivors, including Herbert Karliner, have insisted otherwise in a statement issued shortly after FDR and the Jews was published: “We saw the Coast Guard planes that flew around the ship to follow its movements,” they declared. “We saw the Coast Guard cutter that trailed us and made sure the St. Louis did not come close to the Florida coast. We heard the cutter blaring its warning to stay away. It was President Franklin Roosevelt who decided our fate, who denied us and our family’s permission to land, forcing us to return to Europe, where many of the passengers were murdered by the Nazis. We categorically reject any and all attempts to distort these indisputable historical facts.”
I am hardly an uninterested party in the debate over the meaning of the St. Louis and the Roosevelt administration’s handling of the complex diplomatic and political implications of its voyage. But neither am I blinded by my personal stake in the events of May and June 1939. I’m aware that, in most cases, policies are dictated by laws, and that the Immigration Act of 1924 was the unyielding given circumstance of the drama enacted fifteen years later. I understand and accept that, as is the case with most presidents, Franklin Roosevelt could not afford to get too far in front of public opinion, and that the American public of 1939 was in no hurry to concern itself with a boatload of Jewish refugees. And, of course, no one, neither everyday citizen nor administration official, could have anticipated the depth of the horror that awaited so many of the passengers of this singularly unhappy vessel.
Nevertheless, fully cognizant that more than seven decades after the fact I am in possession of knowledge unavailable to the principal actors of that drama, I cannot help wondering why President Roosevelt did not make an exception for those 907 wanderers and sign an executive order allowing the St. Louis to pull into safe harbor in Miami or Baltimore or in the tender welcoming shadow of Miss Liberty’s life-affirming torch. I remain ever grateful that my mother and father were allowed to come to America in 1941. Would that my grandfather and uncle had been granted a similar welcome two years earlier.
In the spring of 2009, the U.S. Senate came as close as the American government ever has to conceding that, just perhaps, something more might have been done on behalf of the 907 refugees. The Senate passed Resolution 111, which “acknowledges the suffering of those refugees caused by the refusal of the United States, Cuban, and Canadian governments to provide them political asylum.” In his remarks introducing the resolution, Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl pointed out that “the United States failed to provide refuge” to the passengers and concluded by declaring, “The St. Louis is only one tragedy out of millions from that time, but seventy years later it still haunts us as a nation.”
A final word about the ship that carried Alex and Helmut so far from their homeland and so close to freedom. The St. Louis was bombed by the Royal Air Force in 1944 as she lay at anchor in Hamburg. After the war, the ship was partly renovated and for a time served as a floating hotel. In 1950, with their profits plummeting, the new owners sold the St. Louis for scrap and she was broken up.
For his role in finding refuge for the passengers of the St. Louis, Morris Carlton Troper was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French and presented with both the Legion of Merit and the State Conspicuous Service Cross by the United States.
Captain Schroeder survived the war and died in 1959. Two years before his death, he was awarded the Order of Merit by the West German government “for services to the people and the land in the rescue of refugees.” There is currently a street in Hamburg named for him. For his efforts to find a safe haven for his passengers during the voyage of May and June 1939, Captain Gustav Schroeder was honored posthumously by Yad Vashem in Israel as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.”
To the Nazi leadership in Germany, the meaning of the voyage of the St. Louis was simple, unambiguous, and reassuring: for all its demonstrations of concern for the Jews, the rest of the world was apparently unprepared to do much on their behalf. The Nazi monthly Der Weltkampf published an editorial that stated, “We are saying openly that we do not want the Jews while the democracies keep on claiming that they are willing to receive them—and then leave the guests out in the cold! Aren’t we savages better men after all?”
And Adolf Hitler himself declared mockingly, “I can only hope and expect that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these Jewish criminals, will at least be generous enough to convert their sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to place these criminals at the disposal of other countries; even, for all I care, on luxury ships.”
6
Boulogne-sur-Mer
THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2011. Too late, I think. I’m too late.
In the glare of a brilliantly sunny late afternoon, I stand on the concrete pier that surrounds the horseshoe-shaped harbor of Boulogne-sur-Mer on the north coast of France, gazing with finely mixed emotions into the murky green water. Fifty yards away, six young men kick around a soccer ball, their collective skill apparently blocking from their minds the fear that an errant pass might send the ball plunging down an irretrievable thirty feet into the drink. On the harbor’s far side, an immense Greek cargo ship is being unloaded with the assistance of two cranes and at least a dozen strapping dockworkers. Far offshore, three industrious cormorants are scanning the waves for an early dinner, floating in seemingly aimless patterns until they drop bodily as if shot, plunging into the sea and then rising again with a gleaming, wriggling fish in their jaws. The bustling life of a seaside town is all around me.
I am more than a little awed to be standing here. And I feel as if I’ve missed the boat, literally. Alex and Helmut have come and gone.
Yesterday morning, Amy and I bade farewell to Hilu and Roland, climbed into our little Meriva, and drove west along the autobahn, leaving Germany and entering Holland. We set aside the Goldschmidt family saga for a while and explored the lives of Amy’s ancestors, whose roots for more than a century were planted in the rich soil of the Dutch province of Friesland. We visited the tiny village of Arum, where her great-great-grandfather Pieter Pieters Menage and great-great-grandmother Tjitse Blanksma were born in 1840, and walked wonderingly along Arum’s main street and through its tidy cemetery, looking for family. Back on the road, driving through the flat Frisian countryside, I often thought I was looking at a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, a Ruisdael or Hobbema, with deep green fields; a few lonely trees; a canal or two; grazing cows, horses, or sheep; and a couple of distant church spires breaking up the horizon.
We spent the night in the historic city of Harlingen, on the North Sea coast, in a cozy old hotel with slightly slanted wooden floors, our window looking out onto a canal that flowed into the sea. This morning, our travels took us south along the coast to the beautiful town of Hindeloopen, where Amy’s great-great-great-grandfather Pieter Thomas Menage was born in 1802. Hindeloopen is a magical little village of flowers and tiny old houses nestled in the protective embrace of an earthen dike. Amy and I were enchanted and vowed to return someday soon.
By then the day had started to slip away from us, so we regretfully left Hindeloopen behind to spend several hours on heavily traveled motorways that took us through and around a maze of smoggy cities from Amsterdam and Utrecht to Breda, and from there across the Belgian border to Antwerp, Ghent, and Brugge. Rain fell intermittently and the traffic was intense, so we were much relieved when the traffic thinned somewhat at the French frontier and the sun emerged from a bank of heavy clouds. There are actual hills in northern France, which were a welcome sight after the unending flatness of Holland and Belgium.
We had printed o
ut Google Maps directions to the hotel we’d booked in Boulogne, and when we got off the motorway at the edge of town, we thought we were only minutes away from stretching out on our bed and resting our eyes. No such luck. At the end of the motorway’s exit ramp, we encountered a detour, which threw us off our directions to such an extent that we wandered through side streets and battled one-ways for a good twenty minutes before we were able to find our lodging. As I was cursing this minor turn of fate, it occurred to me that since Alex and Helmut had to endure so much uncertainty and unpleasantness on their journey to Boulogne, perhaps it was only right that I experience 1/1000th of 1 percent of their tribulations.
Now, as I stand where they stood when their ocean-going odyssey finally ended, I am haunted by an admittedly irrational feeling of failure and the thought that we’ve come racing across the Low Countries to greet my grandfather and uncle as they stepped off the boat . . . only to have missed them. It’s all part of my equally irrational desire to save Alex and Helmut from the fate that befell them a decade before I was born, the fruitless fantasy that brought me here in the first place. But I manage to shake off those sad and useless thoughts by recalling that there is work to be accomplished in the morning: the task of learning more about my relatives’ brief encounter with this city.
There has been a settlement on this site for at least two thousand years. In 43 AD, the Roman emperor Claudius launched his invasion of the British Isles from here, when the town was known as Bononia and served as an important fortress city in the northernmost regions of the empire. The walls of the fort were renovated in the early fourth century and survive to this day, though parts of the battlements that remain—looking out over the English Channel from the hills that rise above the port—date from yet another repair job undertaken during the thirteenth century. Boulogne fell to the English in 1544, but was then brought back into French possession when King Henri II purchased it six years later. In 1805, the French emperor Napoleon, perhaps inspired by the example of Emperor Claudius, amassed a grand army in Boulogne and planned an invasion of England, but events on other fronts forced him to abandon the project.
Within the walled sections of this ancient city stands the magnificent Cathedral of Notre Dame, renovated in the nineteenth century to replace the original medieval cathedral, which was torched by revolutionaries in the early 1790s. The old earl’s castle is also sheltered by the Roman wall, as is the city hall and the Bibliothèque Municipale. On Friday morning, under a deep blue sky, we walk up the hill from our hotel and pass through one of the four gates in the wall. For the first time since my long-ago eighth-grade French class, I actually find a use for the phrase “Où est la bibliothèque?” and we locate the library. With the assistance of two friendly librarians, one of whom speaks enough recognizable English to make up for our primitive French, we find several tall leather-bound editions of Boulogne newspapers from the spring of 1939.
“ALL OF THE FRENCH AND FOREIGN PRESS have been talking for some time now about the lamentable odyssey of Jews who fled Germany and who, on board steamships, have traveled from port to port, never finding the haven that they sought. But now France, perhaps the most hospitable nation in the world, is going to offer them the welcome that so many others have refused. More than two hundred Jewish refugees from the SS St. Louis will arrive early tomorrow morning in Boulogne-sur-Mer.”
So read an article in the June 19, 1939, edition of La Voix du Nord—the Voice of the North—a regional newspaper serving several cities in northern France. Over the next few days, dispatches from the Voice reporter kept readers abreast of what was happening to these weary visitors to their hospitable shores.
At a few minutes past 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday, June 20, in calm seas, the Rhakotis pulled into Boulogne’s outer harbor at the end of its relatively brief journey from Antwerp. It was a very warm morning and, due in part to the heat, a thick fog arose and blanketed the coast for miles in both directions. Foghorns sounded their booming calls, waking the passengers on board the Rhakotis, who were undoubtedly eager to finally set foot on dry land.
Toward 9 a.m., the fog began to lift, the skies cleared, the sun broke through the remaining wisps of mist, and the foghorns ceased their moaning. On board the Rhakotis, which was carrying both the French and English contingents of St. Louis refugees, small buckets of water were set out to facilitate a morning washing-up for the 224 arriving passengers. At about 10:00, a small shuttle boat, the France, left the inner harbor and steamed out to the Rhakotis. It was time for those disembarking in France to say farewell to the refugees bound for Southampton. Tears were shed by passengers who had become fast friends while in exile for more than a month and who now questioned whether they would ever see one another again.
Though outfitted for no more than fifty passengers, the France managed to accommodate all 224 refugees. They were greeted by Raymond-Raoul Lambert, the secretary general of the Comité d’Assistance aux Réfugiés, who had attended the planning meeting with Morris Troper in Paris five days earlier. Lambert declared grandly, “I welcome you on Free French soil.” The France then made its way carefully past the breakwater and into the safety of the Boulogne harbor.
At 10:55 a.m., the France tied up at the dock. It was low tide and the boat rode the waves well below the level of the pier, where upward of two hundred people awaited the arrival of their visitors, a crowd made up of journalists, members of the Boulogne Jewish community, curious townspeople, and a few indigents drawn into the unexpected hubbub. As a gangway was attached to the side of the little boat, leading up to the pier, the exiles on board began to cheer and wave hats and handkerchiefs, many of them shouting, “Vive la France!” with tears visibly streaking their cheeks.
Three elderly women in their seventies were the first to disembark. They were quickly followed by a stream of young people and their parents, some pushing prams, and a crowd of older men, who formed the majority. Most of the adult passengers wore light-colored raincoats, and all carried a boxed breakfast that the CAR representatives had prepared for them. Each of the sixty children was presented with a bag full of fruits and sweets. “Some of the faces were sad,” reported the press, “but nonetheless the refugees appeared to be in good health and seemed to be in good spirits.”
On the pier, the journalists took photos and exchanged a few words with the newcomers, who were then ushered onto a fleet of waiting buses and driven about a mile to an establishment called the Hotel des Emigrants, at 41 Rue de Liane, where they would rest for several days before moving on to a less temporary address in France. Their luggage would follow, taken off the boat by the longshoremen of Boulogne, who refused payment for their labors. By 11:30, after having been the scene of so much unusual animation, the docks had resumed their normal pace.
A headline from the June 21, 1939, edition of the Voice of the North: “224 Jewish Refugees From the ‘St. Louis’ Disembarked Yesterday Morning in Boulogne.” The subheadline reads, “The oldest of the group was 80 years old and the youngest only two months.”
At the Hotel des Emigrants, the refugees were greeted by M. Sagnier, a member of the Boulogne Chamber of Commerce, and served a meal of hot coffee, croissants, local cheese, and soup. Everyone began to relax a little, and the reporters from La Voix were able to spend some time talking with the weary but happy travelers:
We were introduced to the most senior member of the contingent, an 80-year-old lady who has a son in Cuba. She got a glimpse of him from the deck of the St. Louis but was not permitted to go embrace him on land. The youngest refugee was a darling child, barely two months old.
One woman, whose husband already lives in Cuba, wanted to give us her impressions. “Our suffering during this voyage was more emotional than physical. Think of the pain that I suffered when I learned that I was not permitted to join my husband. The saddest moment of our long crossing was when they refused to let us disembark in Cuba. An epidemic of despair spread rapidly among us and we had to organize a suicide watch and formed an orchestra to c
heer up those who were most desperate. I must say that we were well taken care of on board, but you can imagine our joy when we heard that we would be authorized to land at last.” When our conversation ended, we were introduced by the CAR’s Gaston Kahn to a charming three-year-old toddler who was in his grandmother’s arms and who was unaware that his father, a physician in Berlin, had just died in a German concentration camp.
A reporter from La Voix interviewed a young woman from the St. Louis, who provided her impressions of the increasingly dangerous quality of daily life within Nazi Germany:
You are unaware of what is going on in my country. Espionage is everywhere. One day I telephoned one of my friends and someone was listening in on our conversation. “Wait,” they said to me, “What is that last sentence you just uttered supposed to mean? This is the Gestapo . . . stay right where you are. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” In much less than fifteen minutes the agents were in my home. One of them said to me, “You called a certain person. In the future you are forbidden to call her.” The Gestapo is everywhere; you run into their agents in all the streets, you see them in all the buildings. One of my friends’ little boy was stopped in the street by a man who asked him, “What did your father say at lunchtime about Mr. Adolf Hitler? What did he say about the regime?” You in free France are unaware of what could happen in your country.
By mid-afternoon, the meal ended, the reporters packed up their notebooks and cameras, and the refugees settled into their rooms at the Hotel des Emigrants. They were permitted to stroll through the hotel’s courtyard to get some fresh air and to use all the establishment’s somewhat threadbare facilities, but for forty-eight hours they were not allowed to leave. On Thursday afternoon, however, the doors of the hotel were thrown open and the refugees were given the freedom to stroll wherever they wished through the streets of Boulogne. How wide those boulevards must have seemed to them after their long weeks at sea.
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