The Doomed Voyage of the St. Louis.

• Author: Bubar, Joe
• Position: TIMES PAST 1939

Eighty years ago, a ship approached U.S. shores with more than 900 Jewish refugees on board, begging for safety from the Nazis. What happened next might surprise you.

All Ruth Zellner wanted was to get to shore. Looking out from the deck of the giant steamliner the St. Louis, the 18-year-old could see the bright lights and palm trees of Miami.

"I [wished] they would let us in," Zellner recalled in a 1999 interview. "I wasn't particularly interested in going to America. I was interested in staying alive."

Zellner and her parents were among the 937 people--almost all German Jews--who'd boarded the St. Louis hoping to escape the forces of Nazi Germany and find safety elsewhere. The passengers had departed Hamburg, Germany, on May 13, 1939, en route to Cuba. Most had documents from the Cuban government that would allow them to stay there while they awaited visas to come to the U.S.

But when the ship arrived, the Cuban government had had a change of heart and prevented almost all of the passengers from disembarking.

The St. Louis then turned toward Miami, as passengers pleaded with the United States, Canada, and any other nation on this side of the Atlantic that would listen to save them.

None of them did.

"That's when [we] really screamed," Zellner said in an oral history conducted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. "It was a riot."

The St. Louis was forced to return to Europe. Though Zellner survived World War II, many others on the ship weren't so lucky: More than a quarter of them were killed in the Holocaust.

Many say the turning away of the St. Louis by the U.S. 80 years ago is one of the most infamous moments in American history, when the nation failed to live up to its ideals as a land of refuge.

"We tell ourselves in the United States, in our national mythology, that we're a nation of immigrants," says Daniel Greene, a historian at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. "And then we often don't live out those realities on the ground."

The Rise of Hitler

By the time the St. Louis set sail in 1939, it was clear to Zellner and many other German Jews that they were in danger.

Adolf Hitler had risen to power as chancellor of Germany six years earlier (see ameline, p. 18), using Jews as a scapegoat for many of the nation's problems, including its defeat in World War I (1914-18) and the economic crisis that followed. In his speeches and writings, he compared Jews to "vermin" and called them "subhuman."

As Germany's leader, he took advantage of widespread anti-Semitism to systematically target Jewish people, stripping them of their rights, forbidding them to work in certain jobs, and shutting down Jewish businesses.

This anti-Semitic rhetoric and legislation turned into physical violence on the night of November 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass. " Vicious mobs, spurred by Nazi officials, decimated Zellner's hometown of Breslau, Germany, and other Jewish communities. They destroyed thousands of Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and schools, killed nearly 100 Jews, and imprisoned another 30,000 in concentration camps.

Zellner and others sensed that this was only the beginning.

"You knew that things were coming. Nobody knew how horrible, but still," she recalled. "Everybody was trying to get out."

The worst was yet to come: By 1945, 6 million European Jews would be murdered by the Nazis-either shot on sight or imprisoned in concentration camps, where they were worked and starved to death or killed in gas chambers. Two-thirds of the continent's Jewish population would be wiped out, along with another 5 million people, including Roma, Poles, homosexuals, and the disabled.

Zellner and her parents left their friends, family, and home behind, and boarded the St. Louis in May 1939 with only suitcases of clothes, about $120, and landing permits for Cuba. Still, they considered themselves among the lucky few who were escaping.

"We were happy," Zellner said. "We thought we were out of it--which we were not."

Stuck at Sea

Little did they know that a few days before they had set sail, 40,000 Cubans had protested the ship's arrival. The pro-fascist Cuban government caved to this pressure, and when the St. Louis pulled into Cuba's port after its two-week voyage, only 28 passengers were allowed to disembark.

The rest were stuck at sea.

"People were planning to go overboard," Zellner said. "They were not taking any chances to go to Germany. They'd rather drown."

One passenger, who'd already been in a concentration camp, tried to commit suicide. He slit his wrist and jumped overboard, but a crew member saved him and took him to a hospital in Havana, Cuba. However, his wife and kids weren't allowed to go with him.

A committee of passengers, including Zellner's father, Max, worked with U.S.-based Jewish organizations to try to convince the Cuban government to let more passengers in, but to no avail.

Over the next 10 days, the St. Louis remained in the Atlantic Ocean, the fate of the passengers in limbo. Some of them cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge. He never responded. They received only a telegram from the State Department saying they wouldn't be allowed in at the time.

After more than three weeks at sea, the St. Louis re-routed to Antwerp, Belgium. Jewish organizations had negotiated with four European governments to take in the passengers. The luckiest ones--nearly 300, including the Zellners--went to Great Britain, where all but one survived the war. The rest were divided up among the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Each of these nations was later invaded by Germany, and more than 250 of the St. Louis passengers were killed in the Holocaust.

The U.S. & the Holocaust

Looking back, it might seem rather unfathomable that the U.S. wouldn't let in the passengers of the St. Louis.

Americans weren't oblivious to the horrors Jews faced across the Atlantic. The plight of the St. Louis was on the front page of The New York Times. And though nobody predicted just how bad things would get, American newspapers frequently reported on Germany's persecution of Jews. In 1938, a front-page article in the Los Angeles Examiner even read: "Nazis...