by Alan Gratz
“My father was the only one to make it to Cuba. He lived there for many years, long after the war, but I never saw him again. He died before we could find each other. The rest of us couldn’t leave the ship with him. And no other country would take us. So they brought us back to Europe just in time for the war. Just in time to go on the run again.
“The Nazis caught us, and they gave my mother a choice—save me, or save my brother. Well, she couldn’t choose. How could she? So my brother chose for her. His name was Josef.” Mahmoud watched as she reached out and gently touched the boy in the photograph, leaving a smudge on the glass. “He was about your age, I think. I don’t remember much about him, but I do remember he always wanted to be a grown-up. ‘I don’t have time for games,’ he would tell me. ‘I’m a man now.’ And when those soldiers said one of us could go free and the other would be taken to a concentration camp, Josef said, ‘Take me.’
“My brother, just a boy, becoming a man at last.”
She paused a moment, then took the picture down off the wall reverently, with both hands.
“They took my mother and my brother away from me that day, and left me alone there in the woods. I only survived because a kind old French lady took me in. She told the next Nazis who came knocking that I was family. When the war was over and I was old enough, I came back here, to Germany, to look for my mother and brother. I searched for them a long time, but they had died in the concentration camps. Both of them.” The woman drew a breath. “I only have this picture of them because a cousin kept it, a cousin who was hidden away by a Christian family throughout the war. Here in Germany I met my husband, Saul. He had also survived the Holocaust. We stayed because he had family here. And we made a family of our own,” Frau Rosenberg said. She spread her arms wide and turned in the little hallway, showing Mahmoud the dozens of pictures of her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She put her hand to the old yellowed picture of her family again.
“They died so I could live. Do you understand? They died so all these people could live. All the grandchildren and nieces and nephews they never got to meet. But you’ll get to meet them,” she told Mahmoud. “You’re still alive, and so is your little sister, somewhere. I know it. You saved her. And together we’ll find her, yes? I promise. We’ll find her and bring her home.”
Mahmoud started to cry, and he turned away and tried to blink back his tears. The old Jewish woman put her arms around him and pulled him into a tight hug.
“Everything’s going to be all right now,” she whispered. “We’ll help you.”
“Ruthie, komm hier,” Frau Rosenberg’s husband called to her. Mahmoud didn’t need the translator to tell him that Herr Rosenberg wanted them to join him in the living room.
Mahmoud dragged a sleeve across his wet eyes, and Frau Rosenberg tried to hang the picture back on the wall. Her old hands were too shaky, though, and Mahmoud took it from her and hung it back on its nail for her. His gaze lingered on the picture. He was filled with sadness for the boy his age. The boy who had died so Ruthie could live. But Mahmoud was also filled with gratitude. Josef had died so Ruthie could live, and one day welcome Mahmoud and his family into her house.
The old woman gave Mahmoud’s arm a squeeze, and she led him into the living room. Mom and Dad were there, and Waleed and Herr Rosenberg, and the space was bright and alive and filled with books and pictures of family and the smell of good food.
It felt like a home.
Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud are all fictional characters, but their tales are based on true stories.
JOSEF
The MS St. Louis was a real ship that set sail from Nazi Germany in 1939 with 937 passengers on board, almost all of them Jewish refugees trying to escape the Nazis. The Jews expected to be admitted to Cuba—some of them to live there permanently, some to stay only temporarily until they were admitted to the United States or Canada. But when they arrived, the Jews were told they would not be allowed to land. The reason was political: The Cuban official who had issued the refugees’ entrance visas had fallen out of favor with Cuba’s president at the time, Federico Brú. To embarrass the official, Brú retroactively canceled the Jews’ visas. Nazi agents in Havana helped keep the Jews out too, by spreading propaganda that turned the Cuban people against the refugees. The Germans didn’t want the Jews in their country, but they also loved seeing the refugees turned away by other countries. To the Nazis, it was proof that everybody else in the world secretly agreed with the way the Germans were treating the Jews.
Captain Gustav Schroeder was real, and he is remembered today for his kindness toward his Jewish passengers, and his efforts to find refuge for them. Otto Schiendick was real too, and was not only the Nazi Party representative on the ship, but also something of a spy, carrying secret messages back and forth between Germany and the Nazi agents working in Havana. Evelyne and Renata were the real names of two sisters whose mother chose to remain in Nazi Germany. Their father, Dr. Max Aber, was able to get them off the St. Louis in Havana because he had gone ahead of his family to Cuba and had strong connections with the local authorities. None of the other passengers were so lucky.
Josef’s father, Aaron Landau, was inspired by two different men who really sailed on the MS St. Louis—Aaron Pozner and Max Loewe. Aaron Pozner, a Hebrew teacher, had been taken from his home in Germany during Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and sent to Dachau, where he was beaten and humiliated, and where he witnessed incredible atrocities. It was Aaron Pozner who was released from Dachau after six months and told to leave the country within fourteen days, and it was Pozner who was the victim of Otto Schiendick and his firemen while on board. Pozner was also one of the mutineers who tried to take control of the ship when the St. Louis was turned away from the United States and Canada.
Max Loewe was a Jewish lawyer who, like my fictional Aaron Landau, had been forbidden by the Nazis to practice law. Loewe had continued to give legal advice to sympathetic German lawyers who paid him “under the table,” but the Gestapo eventually caught on and Loewe was forced into hiding. He joined his wife and two children—a boy and a girl—just in time for them to all board the MS St. Louis and make their escape. But like Aaron Landau, Max Loewe was a broken man when he rejoined his family. It was Loewe who tried to commit suicide by jumping off the St. Louis while it lay at anchor outside Havana Harbor.
The English ship Orduña and the French ship Flandre, both carrying Jewish refugees bound for Cuba, were initially kept out of Havana Harbor just like the St. Louis. But both ships, to the frustration of the passengers on the St. Louis, were eventually allowed to dock and disembark their own refugees. But what the passengers on the St. Louis didn’t know was that the only people allowed off the Orduña and the Flandre were passengers with Cuban passports. The rest, mostly Jews with now-invalid entry visas like the Jewish passengers on the St. Louis, had been turned away to find another country that would take them.
The Jewish refugees from the St. Louis who were allowed to enter the United Kingdom were the lucky ones—they escaped the Holocaust. Of the 620 Jewish refugees who returned to continental Europe, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that 254 of them were among the six million European Jews who died in the Holocaust. “Most of these people were murdered in the killing centers of Auschwitz and Sobibór,” says the museum. “The rest died in internment camps, in hiding, or attempting to evade the Nazis.” Ruthie, who survived, would be among the approximately 100,000 Jews who live in Germany today, down from around 500,000 Jewish German citizens before World War II. Many more Jews who survived the Holocaust chose not to return to their European home countries, settling instead in the United States and the newly formed country of Israel.
The tragedy of the MS St. Louis is now famous, and has been the subject of many books, plays, films, and even an opera.
ISABEL
In 1994, thanks in large part to the recent collapse of the Soviet Union and the ongoing US embargo against trade with Cuba,
hungry citizens of Havana rioted up and down the Malecón. In response, Cuban president Fidel Castro announced that anyone who wanted to leave Cuba could do so without being thrown in jail, which was the usual punishment for trying to escape. It was a strategy Castro had employed before—when protests threatened to overwhelm his security forces and overthrow his government, Castro would allow people to leave any way they could, usually on homemade boats and rafts. When all the people angry enough to fight him had fled to America, the protests would stop and things would settle back down again. In the five weeks in 1994 when Castro allowed unhappy citizens to leave Cuba, an estimated thirty-five thousand people fled the island for the United States—almost ten times the number of people who had tried to escape to America in all of 1993.
Many Americans objected to the sudden influx of Cuban refugees, particularly because, at the time, Cubans enjoyed a unique path to becoming American citizens that immigrants from other countries did not. Others recognized Castro’s ploy for what it was, and argued that the protestors should remain in Cuba in the hope that their riots would finally overthrow the Cuban government. US president Bill Clinton had a big decision to make: Let the Cuban refugees in, or send American warships out to turn them away? While he tried to figure out what to do, Clinton ordered any Cuban refugees caught at sea to be sent to a refugee camp at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. From there, Cuban refugees could choose to return to Cuba, or wait and see if the United States or another country would take them. A few months later in 1995, Clinton announced that the Cuban refugees at Guantanamo would be allowed entry to the United States, but from that point on any Cuban refugees caught at sea would be sent back to Cuba, not taken the rest of the way to Florida or sent to Guantanamo. Any Cuban refugees who made it to America could stay. Isabel and her family refer to this new attitude toward Cuban refugees as “Wet Foot, Dry Foot,” though that name wasn’t commonly used to describe the situation until the policy was officially made law in 1995. I’ve also used artistic license to combine the riot that prompts Isabel’s family to leave with the US decision to detain Cuban refugees caught at sea. Those two events actually happened a month apart, but I have brought them together here to make my story tighter and more dramatic.
Despite the threat of imprisonment in Cuba and the dangers of sea swells, storms, drowning, sharks, dehydration, and starvation, increasing numbers of Cubans still try to cross the ninety miles of ocean between Havana and Florida each year. According to the Pew Research Center, 43,635 Cuban refugees entered the United States in 2015, and that number was surpassed in 2016 by October. In recent years, many Cuban refugees have skipped America’s “Wet Foot, Dry Foot” policy altogether and chosen to fly or sail from Cuba to Mexico or Ecuador, and then walk north into America—an alternate route observers nicknamed “Dusty Foot.” But as more and more countries south of the United States close their borders, more Cubans are heading back into the Straits of Florida on homemade boats and rafts. Again, according to the Pew Research Center, 9,999 Cuban refugees entered the United States through the Miami sector in 2015. That same year, the US Coast Guard apprehended 3,505 Cubans at sea. And there is no way of telling how many Cubans die in the attempt each year. In 1994, the year of Isabel’s story, an estimated three out of every five Cuban refugees who attempted the journey died at sea.
In 2014, President Barack Obama and Cuban president Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother, announced that Cuba and the United States were reestablishing relations with each other, and in 2015 President Obama announced that formal diplomatic relations between the two countries would resume, including the reopening of their respective embassies in Havana and Washington, DC. As a part of the normalization of relations, the US government relaxed travel restrictions that had barred most Americans from visiting Cuba, and in August 2016 the first commercial flight from America to Cuba since 1962 landed in Havana. On January 12, 2017, in one of his last acts in office, President Obama announced the immediate end of the “Wet Foot, Dry Foot” policy. How these changes to US-Cuban relations—and the death of Fidel Castro on November 25, 2016—will affect the future of Cuba and its people remains to be seen.
MAHMOUD
As I write this, Syria is in its sixth year of one of the most brutal and vicious civil wars in history. The city of Aleppo, Mahmoud’s hometown, lies in ruins today because it is home to a large group of rebels who oppose Bashir al-Assad’s war on his own people. The city is under siege, pounded daily by Russian air attacks and Syrian army artillery. If they didn’t leave by 2015, when Mahmoud and his family went on the run, the remaining citizens of Aleppo are now trapped in a war zone. According the United Nations, more than 470,000 people have been killed since the conflict began in 2011. That’s roughly equal to the entire population of Atlanta, Georgia. And more people are dying every day. In just one week of fighting in September 2016, the United Nations reported the deaths of ninety-six children. That’s like an entire grade level of children dying every week. In a major offensive in December 2016, the Syrian army conquered an estimated 95 percent of Aleppo’s rebel-held territory, spurring a new humanitarian crisis as hundreds of thousands more civilians were caught in the crossfire. Fighting in Aleppo continues today.
And those who survive often have nowhere to live. The Guardian newspaper estimates 40 percent of the city’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed. Whole neighborhoods lie in ruins. Markets, restaurants, shops, apartment buildings—nothing has been spared. Almost no one goes to work anymore, or to school. Every tree in the city has been cut down for firewood, and when they ran out of trees, the Syrians had to burn school desks and chairs to heat their homes. Hospitals, if they still stand, have no medicine or equipment to treat patients.
It’s no wonder then that more than 10 million Syrians have been displaced from their homes. Of those 10 million, the United Nations estimates that 4.8 million Syrians have left their country as refugees. That’s more people than live in the entire state of Connecticut, or Kentucky, or Oregon. And more are fleeing every day, leaving behind everything they owned and everything they knew, just to escape the war and bloodshed. Just to survive.
But where do they go? The United Nations reports that Turkey is already home to more than 2.7 million registered Syrian refugees, many of them in refugee camps like the one in Kilis that Mahmoud and his family pass through. Other countries in the region, like Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, have all received huge numbers of Syrian refugees, but their resources are stretched to the limit, and public sentiment in many countries has turned against the influx of immigrants. Millions more refugees try to reach Europe, where countries like Germany and Sweden and Hungary have accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees. But getting there is difficult, and often deadly. According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 3,770 refugees died trying to cross the Mediterranean by boat in 2015. And once they reach the European Union, refugees still face persecution and imprisonment from countries that don’t want to deal with them or don’t have the resources to handle the huge influx of people. Hungary was the first country to build a fence to keep out Middle Eastern refugees walking north, and more and more countries are building walls. Even Austria, which has been incredibly welcoming to refugees, began building a fence in 2016.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, between October 1, 2011, and December 31, 2016, the United States admitted just 18,007 Syrian refugees—less than one half of 1 percent of all Syrian refugees who have resettled in other countries. On January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769, indefinitely suspending the entry of all Syrian refugees into the United States. The Executive Order was titled, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” despite a report by the Cato Institute that says that no person accepted to the United States as a refugee, Syrian or otherwise, has been implicated in a major fatal terrorist attack since the Refugee Act of 1980 established the current system for accepting refugees into the United State
s. The states of Washington and Minnesota have challenged the executive order in court, but as I write this, the outcome—and the future of Syrian refugees in the United States—remains unclear.
The experiences of Mahmoud and his family are based on things that really happened to different Syrian refugees. In 2015, a group of about three hundred refugees who had been detained at a Danish school/refugee camp finally had enough of being held for no reason. As one, they marched up the highway toward Sweden, forming a human chain that stopped traffic. And cheering bystanders really did stand on overpasses and toss down food and water. A similar protest took place in Hungary a week before, when thousands of refugees marched from Budapest to the border of Austria. I have combined the two events in this book.
Mahmoud and his mother and father are composites of different refugees I read about. But Waleed is specifically based on a now-famous photograph of a five-year-old boy from Aleppo named Omran Daqneesh. In the picture, Omran sits alone in the back of an ambulance after surviving an airstrike, his feet bare, his face bloody, his body covered in dirt and gray ash. He’s not crying. He’s not angry. Maybe he’s in shock—or maybe he’s just used to this. This is the only life he knows, because his country has been at war as long as he’s been alive. He is a member of what the United Nations warns will become a “lost generation” of Syrian children if nothing is done to help them now.