Ship carrying 937 Jewish refugees, fleeing Nazi Germany, is turned away in Cuba

Ship carrying 937 Jewish refugees, fleeing Nazi Germany, is turned away in Cuba

On May 27, 1939, A boat carrying 937 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution is turned awayfrom Havana, Cuba. Only 28 immigrants are admitted into the country. After appeals to the United States and Canada for entry are denied, the rest are forced to sail back to Europe, where they’re distributed among several countries including Great Britain and France.

On May 13, the S.S. St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany to Havana, Cuba. Most of the passengers—many of them children—were German Jews escaping increasing persecution under the Third Reich. Six months earlier, 91 people were killed and Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were destroyed in what became known as the Kristallnacht pogrom. It was becoming increasing clear the Nazis were accelerating their efforts to exterminate Jews by arresting them and placing them in concentration camps.World War II and the formal implementation of The Final Solution were just months from beginning. 

The refugees had applied for U.S. visas, and planned to stay in Cuba until they could enter the United States legally. Even before they set sail, their impending arrival was greeted with hostility in Cuba. On May 8, there was a massive anti-Semitic demonstration in Havana. Right-wing newspapers claimed that the incoming immigrants were Communists.

The St. Louis arrived in Havana on May 27. Roughly 28 people onboard had valid visas or travel documents and were allowed to disembark. The Cuban government refused to admit the nearly 900 others. For seven days, the ship’s captain attempted to negotiate with Cuban officials, but they refused to comply.

The ship sailed closer to Florida, hoping to disembark there, but it was not permitted to dock. Some passengers attempted to cable President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge, but he never responded. A State Department telegram stated that the asylum-seekers must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.”

As a last resort, the St. Louis continued north to Canada, but it was rejected there, too. “No country could open its doors wide enough to take in the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who want to leave Europe: the line must be drawn somewhere,” Frederick Blair, Canada’s director of immigration, said at the time.

Faced with no other options, the ship returned to Europe. It docked in Antwerp, Belgium on June 17. By then, several Jewish organizations had secured entry visas for the refugees in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Great Britain. The majority who had traveled on the ship survived the Holocaust; 254 later died as the Nazis swept through the continent.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Woolly mammoth

Image
***Farmer finds woolly mammoth bones in Michigan field, stashed by Ancient Natives*** Though buried for thousands of years, the partial skeleton of a woolly mammoth found in Lima Township indicates that the animal actually ended up on the dinner plate of a Native American. “It’s too early to tell how it died but the skeleton showed signs of butchering,” said Professor Dan Fisher of the Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan. The remains were found by James Bristle, on the soy bean farm that was owned by him. When he first encountered the remains, he thought it was an old fence post, but it turned out to be about 20 percent of a woolly mammoth, including the skull, jaw, vertebrae and ribs, that died between 11,000 and 15,000 years ago. The site holds “excellent evidence of human activity,” Fisher said. “We think that humans were here and may have butchered and stashed the meat so that they could come back later for it.” Mammoths and mastodons — another extinct elephant-lik
Read more

The first case of shell-shock

Image
"It was while I was in this Field Hospital that I saw the first case of shell-shock. The enemy opened fire about dinner time, as usual, with his big guns. As soon as the first shell came over, the shell-shock case nearly went mad. He screamed and raved, and it took eight men to hold him down on the stretcher. With every shell he would go into a fit of screaming and fight to get away. A much larger number of soldiers with these symptoms were classified as 'malingerers' and sent back to the front-line. In some cases men committed suicide. Others broke down under the pressure and refused to obey the orders of their officers. Some responded to the pressures of shell-shock by deserting. Sometimes soldiers who disobeyed orders got shot on the spot. In some cases, soldiers were court-martialled. It is heartbreaking to watch a shell-shock case. The terror is indescribable. The flesh on their faces shakes in fear, and their teeth continually chatter. Shell-shock was brought about i
Read more

Polish war hero Witold Pilecki was executed

Image
Polish war hero Witold Pilecki was executed  On May 25, 1948, Witold Pilecki was executed by communist authorities, in the Rakowiecka detention center after a show trial.  During World War II, Pilecki volunteered for a Polish resistance operation that involved being imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp in order to gather intelligence. At Auschwitz, he organized a resistance movement within the camp which eventually numbered in the hundreds, and secretly sent messages to the Western Allies detailing Nazi atrocities at the camp. He escaped in April 1943 after nearly 2½ years of imprisonment. Pilecki later fought in the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944. He remained loyal to the London-based Polish government in-exile after the communist takeover of Poland. In 1947, he was arrested by the secret police on charges of working for "foreign imperialism" (referring to his work for British intelligence). Pilecki was executed after a show trial in 1948. The story of
Read more