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 Ordu?a 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 Ordu?a 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.