On June 9, the Times editorialized, “Attempts to trace responsibility for the plight of the refugees on board the Hamburg-American liner St. Louis lead into dark byways of human hard-heartedness. It is difficult to imagine the bitterness of exile when it takes place over a far-away frontier. Helpless families driven from their homes to a barren island in the Danube, thrust over the Polish frontier, escaping in terror of their lives to Switzerland or France, are hard for us in a free country to visualize. But these exiles floated by our own shores. We can only hope that some hearts will soften somewhere and some refuge be found. The cruise of the St. Louis cries to high heaven of man’s inhumanity to man.”
Fred Packer’s cartoon from the June 6, 1939, edition of the New York Daily Mirror. It expressed a sentiment shared by many editorialists and American citizens, though not enough to influence the Roosevelt Administration to offer the ship safe harbor.
One of the most striking images was a political cartoon by Fred Packer, a future Pulitzer Prize winner, that appeared in the New York Daily Mirror. Under the headline “Ashamed!,” the Statue of Liberty stands with eyes averted as a boat labeled “Jewish Refugee Ship” steams past. Hanging from her upraised right arm, the arm bearing the torch, is a sign that reads, “Keep Out.”
But for all those general expressions of support for the St. Louis passengers, few people explicitly demanded their admission to the United States. The Post-Dispatch editorial made a vague reference to America’s “broad expanses of unoccupied or sparsely settled territory” where, presumably, these wretched wanderers could be placed. Other papers declared that once this particular ship was allowed to circumvent the letter of the immigration law, a “dangerous precedent” would be set and other illegal vessels would soon be steaming toward American ports. Even the Times never came right out and called for a policy that would allow the St. Louis to sail past Miss Liberty and tie up at Ellis Island. Her “golden door” remained firmly closed to these particular “homeless, tempest-tossed” exiles.
Several interlocked reasons explain why America failed to welcome the refugees to their own shores. The Immigration Act of 1924, still very much on the books, set rigid quotas that limited the number of people who could enter the United States each year. For 1939, the quota from Germany and Austria was 27,370. Adding nearly a thousand more, all at once, would mean that an equal number of German Jews who had already applied for visas would have to be turned away.
Then there was the matter of American public opinion. Newspapers from coast to coast had been documenting the increasing savagery of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews—the events of Kristallnacht had been front-page news in dozens of papers—and by and large the American people were sympathetic. But anti-Semitism was by no means restricted to Europe. In 1938, the highly respected Elmo Roper polling agency asked a sampling of the American public, “What kinds of people do you object to?” Fourteen percent of the respondents answered “uncultured, unrefined, dumb people”; 27 percent answered “noisy, cheap, boisterous, loud people”; and 35 percent, the highest number, answered simply, “Jews.” The following year, another Roper poll revealed that 53 percent of the Americans queried thought that Jews were “different” from other people and thus should be subject to “restrictions” in their business and social lives. That same poll found that only 39 percent of the respondents believed that Jews should be treated the same as everyone else and that 10 percent of those polled thought that Jews should be deported. Despite their general compassion for the plight of the St. Louis refugees, most Americans did not want the United States to become a haven for European Jews. According to a poll taken in the spring of 1939 by Fortune magazine, 83 percent of the American people opposed relaxing restrictions on immigration.
Few politicians, including the nation’s First Politician, were willing to discount such majority opinion. An attempt to admit twenty thousand Jewish children from Germany, the Wagner-Rogers Bill of 1939, had died in committee. President Roosevelt, already gearing up his campaign for an unprecedented third term and unwilling to become mired in the immigration issue, had spoken not a word on Wagner-Rogers. In response to the telegrams he’d received from the St. Louis passengers’ committee and elsewhere, President Roosevelt remained silent.
Eleanor Roosevelt, thought by many Americans to be more compassionate than her husband, also received many pleas on behalf of the St. Louis voyagers. On June 8, an eleven-year-old girl named Dee Nye wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt, “Mother of our Country, I am so sad the Jewish people have to suffer so. Please let them land in America. It hurts me so that I would give them my little bed if it was the last thing I had because I am an American let us Americans not send them back to that slater house. We have three rooms that we do not use. Mother would be glad to let someone have them. Sure our Country will find a place for them, so they may rest in peace.”
Like the passengers’ committee and Edward G. Robinson, Dee Nye never received an answer. The United States of America would not permit the SS St. Louis to land at any of its ports.
One last possibility in the Western Hemisphere remained. Ships sailing the transatlantic crossing for HAPAG had put in at Halifax, Nova Scotia, for decades. With the St. Louis now two days out from Halifax, Captain Schroeder contacted Canadian authorities for permission to enter Halifax Harbor. But perhaps fearing repercussions from its powerful neighbor to the south, the government of Prime Minister William Mackenzie King added Canada to the list of nations that offered no succor to the St. Louis.
Joseph Goebbels seized on the news as further proof that the world shared the Nazis’ opinion of what they called a “criminal race.” “Since no one will accept the shabby Jews on the St. Louis,” the Propaganda Ministry declared, “we will have to take them back and support them.”
It took little imagination to conclude that Nazi “support” more than likely meant sending the passengers to the camps, and fear on board the ship grew to crisis proportions. A band of passengers attempted mutiny, overpowering the crew and temporarily seizing control of the engine room. The uprising was quickly contained, but the refugees had managed to convey their desperation to the outside world, which had begun to take a markedly increased interest in their fate. The Washington Post ran a story headlined, “200 Jews Aboard St. Louis Decide on Mass Suicide.” It read, in part:
Driven from every American port, like a pestiferous cargo, the 925 [sic] Jews on the St. Louis are prepared to face a self-inflicted death rather than experience the horrors of German concentration camps, according to wireless dispatches received by friends and relatives of the refugees, as the liner definitely steered a course for Hamburg.
Turned back by Cuba, unwanted by Mexico, the refugees saw their last hope of a new life vanish when they learned that President Roosevelt had refused to consider all appeals made directly to him. With blank despair staring them in the face, 200 of these modern pariahs have now decided to make their supreme protest against the civilization in which their lot has been cast by sacrificing their lives before the St. Louis comes within sight of Germany’s shores.
The suicide pact has been made in calm consciousness that the sacrifice might draw world attention to the outrage against humanity committed in their regard. The men and women who have taken it are persons of culture and the high positions they formerly occupied in Germany are a guaranty of their high-mindedness.
The cultured passengers had only been able to communicate with their friends and families on land because they had pawned such items as jewelry, cameras, and clothing with members of the ship’s crew in order to obtain the money required to send their unhappy telegrams.
For his part, Herbert Karliner remembers that up to three hundred people on board the St. Louis were prepared to jump overboard rather than risk setting foot once more on German soil. He also recalls that the mood of the return voyage to Europe was vastly different from that on the initial crossing; there were no dances, no movies, no games. The menus, which had been individually offered for each meal
and included a number of choices, were now presented on a single mimeographed sheet each day, with no options available. Hope had largely been replaced by despair.
Years later, in his memoirs, Captain Schroeder attempted to convey how the trauma of rejection played out among the most innocent of the blameless citizens of the St. Louis. He described a game he saw a group of children playing. Two boys guarded a gateway made out of chairs, fierce expressions on their faces, as other children attempted to enter. “Are you a Jew?” the guards would ask, and if the answer was yes, the reply was a sharp, “No Jews allowed!”
The captain, who from the beginning of the crisis had been aware of his passengers’ overwhelming desire not to return to Germany, began to devise an audacious plan to save them, should all other means of rescue prove impossible. Schroeder cleared his idea with three of his most trusted officers and with Josef Joseph of the passengers’ committee. As a last resort, said the captain, he was prepared to run the St. Louis aground off the Sussex coast of England, set her on fire, and evacuate the refugees to shore.
For many on board the ship, Alex and Helmut among them, that plan, ill conceived as it probably was, might ultimately have worked out for the best. But no such dramatics proved necessary, thanks to the efforts of another member of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee: its European director, Morris Troper.
Born in New York City in 1892, Morris Carlton Troper attended City College and later New York University, achieving both a master’s of commercial science degree and a law degree. He earned his living as a certified public accountant for many years, and indeed that is how he was remembered in the headline of his obituary in the New York Times in 1962. But it is for his work with the Joint Distribution Committee that Troper was most greatly honored in his lifetime.
He began his association with the Joint in the immediate aftermath of World War I, when on behalf of the committee, he investigated the conditions of Jewish refugees in Poland, Hungary, and other countries in Eastern Europe. His travels for the Joint took him to the Soviet Union in 1929 and 1936 and to Germany in 1933, where he spent six months observing firsthand the effects of Nazi policies on the Jews. In 1938, Troper was appointed the committee’s European chairman, overseeing its operations from the Joint’s Paris offices. In early June of the following year, he took on the task of finding a haven for the St. Louis.
On June 10, having accepted his assignment from the Joint’s American chairman, Paul Baerwald, Troper received two dire telegrams from the Joint’s New York office, underscoring the gravity of the situation. One read: “Any immigration this side of water is out of question. This we have not communicated to passengers but wish you to know.” And the other advised, “Regard these passengers as doomed once they reach German soil. Time is of essence. Boat has completed more than half of trip.”
After first considering and then rejecting Morocco as a possible sanctuary, Troper decided to focus his efforts on European relief agencies that had received financial support from the Joint. His first call went to Max Gottschalk of the Refugee Committee of Belgium, vowing that the Joint would guarantee $500 for each refugee accepted and that the refugees would not become a public burden. The next morning, Gottschalk spoke with the Belgian minister of justice, who consulted with the prime minister, who briefed King Leopold III, who agreed that Belgium would accept 250 of the St. Louis refugees. The dilemma that had occupied the Cuban and American governments for weeks was settled in Belgium within twenty-four hours.
With this immensely important breakthrough achieved, Troper turned his attention to three other countries: Holland, France, and England. He called his contact at the Refugee Committee of Amsterdam, who knocked on the door of the Dutch minister of justice, who approached Queen Wilhelmina. On Monday morning, June 12, the justice minister, Carolus Goseling, announced that Holland would accept 194 of the refugees. Within two years, Justice Goseling would be murdered in the German concentration camp Buchenwald.
With these two destinations in hand and with negotiations proceeding smoothly in France and England, Troper sent a telegram to Captain Schroeder: “Wish inform you making every effort land your passengers with several possible prospects enroute which we hope will become definite next thirty-six hours.”
Troper’s hope soon became a reality. In London, the Joint’s Chairman Baerwald met with the American ambassador to England, Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of the future president. Kennedy then delivered to authorities in the British government a letter from Baerwald spelling out the same terms—$500 per passenger and a guarantee that the refugees would not become public burdens—that had been accepted by Belgium and Holland. Meanwhile, Troper met with Louise Weiss, the director of the Central Refugee Committee in Paris. Weiss then spoke with Alexis Leger, the French foreign minister, and Albert Sarrault, the interior minister. By the evening of June 12, the governments of France and England had agreed to accept about two hundred fifty refugees each.
On the night of Tuesday, June 13, a week after the St. Louis had headed back to Europe and exactly a month since her departure from Hamburg, Troper cabled the ship from Paris with the happy news of his successful negotiations: “Final arrangements for disembarkation all passengers complete. Governments of Belgium, Holland, France, and England cooperated magnificently with American Joint Distribution Committee to effect this possibility.”
The passengers’ committee wired back, “The 907 passengers of St. Louis dangling for last thirteen days between hope and despair received today your liberating message of 13th June that final arrangements for all passengers have at last been reached. Our gratitude is as immense as the ocean on which we have been floating since May 13, first full of hope for a good future and afterwards in the deepest despair. Accept Mr. Chairman for you and for the American Joint Distribution Committee and last but not least for the governments of Belgium, Holland, France and England the deepest and eternal thanks of men women and children united by the same fate on board the St. Louis.”
After breakfast the next morning, in the presence of Captain Schroeder, the committee read Troper’s telegram to the assembled passengers. The news was met with unrestrained cheering and sobs of joy. They were Wandering Jews no more.
Captain Schroeder now set a course for Antwerp, Belgium, where the St. Louis would finally make landfall and where the other three countries of asylum would make arrangements to accept their respective refugees. Meanwhile, there were hastily arranged gatherings in all four countries, as both public and private organizations met to hammer out the details of this immense humanitarian undertaking.
One such meeting occurred in Paris on the morning of Thursday, June 15, in the office of Amédeé Bussières, the chief of the French national police. Troper attended, as did Louise Weiss of the Parisian refugee committee and Raymond-Raoul Lambert, representing the most visible national Jewish relief organization, the Comité d’Assistance aux Réfugiés. Everyone agreed at the outset that, generous as this offer from the French government had been, no one should assume that a precedent had been set; this was strictly a onetime gesture made under extraordinary circumstances. Weiss suggested that the French ministry of foreign affairs should work with the other three countries to issue an official communiqué making that position explicitly clear.
Bussières, with a meaningful glance at Troper, declared his regret that “our American friends” had not accepted the St. Louis refugees when they were on their doorstep but rather sent them back to Europe. But Bussières then went on to say that the French government would not accept the Joint’s generous offer of $500 per passenger. Rather, he said, the various French refugee organizations, working in tandem with their American counterparts, should share the costs of providing for the refugees until such time—and surely that time would come soon—that the unfortunate displaced persons would find a permanent home. Lambert gave his agreement and, after a decision that the French refugees would be transported to Boulogne-sur-Mer once they’d landed in Antwerp, the meeting adjou
rned. Everything seemed to be under control.
Troper and his wife, Ethel, spent the night of Friday, June 16, in a comfortable room of the Century Hotel in Antwerp, where the St. Louis was due to arrive the next day. At 4 a.m. on Saturday, the Tropers met in the lobby of their hotel with a contingent of sixteen people representing the four welcoming countries. They traveled in three cars to the Dutch city of Vlissingen, known in English as Flushing, a port town located at the head of the estuary leading to Antwerp. The journey was delayed when one of the cars suffered a flat tire, but the traveling party managed to meet for a quick cup of coffee in a restaurant in downtown Vlissingen before going to the police station. There Troper signed the necessary papers to obtain a permit to board a tugboat that would take everyone out to the site where the St. Louis had dropped anchor.
It was a misty, foggy morning. Shortly after 9 a.m., the tugboat left the dock at Vlissingen and made its way through rough seas out to the ship. The scene was recorded by a representative of the Joint:
No words can describe the feelings of everyone on the tug when sighting the St. Louis with its human cargo, all standing as one man along the rails of the port side of the steamer. Although those strained moments seemed to be long hours, yet it took only a few seconds for the tug to find itself alongside the St. Louis, with all passengers waving and yelling in unison. Mr. Troper was met on board the steamer in the hallway, lined on each side by the children of the passengers, one hundred on each side. From every corner of the boat, the grown-up passengers called to Mr. Troper, “God bless you!” A little girl, Liesl Joseph [the daughter of Josef Joseph], eleven years old this very day, stepped forward, greeted Mr. Troper and, in German, welcomed him with these words: “We, the children of the St. Louis, wish to express to you our deep thanks from the bottom of our hearts for having saved us from a great misery. We pray that God’s blessing be upon you. We regret exceedingly that flowers do not grow on ships; otherwise we would have presented to you the largest and most beautiful bouquet.”
Alex's Wake Page 13