On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner MS St. Louis set sail for Havana from Hamburg, Germany. Aboard were 937 Jewish-German refugees hoping to escape the tyranny and oppression of the Nazi regime. The journey, by all accounts, was a joyous one. The captain of the ship, Gustav Schröder, arranged for Jewish religious services to be offered onboard and ordered all crew members to treat the passengers with the utmost respect. His men served foods that, by that point, had been rationed in Germany, and even allowed the Jewish passengers to put a tablecloth over a bust of Hitler that sat in the dining room. Two weeks later, at 4:00 a.m. on May 27, the MS St. Louis dropped anchor in Havana’s harbor. Something, however, was not right: The boat wasn’t allowed to dock at any of the usual ports. For six days, the passengers sat nervously, only to be finally told that Cuba had retroactively revoked all visas issued before May 5, and that the vast majority would be denied entry. Only 29 passengers made it off the St. Louis in Havana, leaving the lives of 908 more in limbo.
Captain Schröder, however, feared not. He was determined to get his Jewish sea-goers to safety, so he turned the boat around and headed for Florida. Once again, Schröder and the Jewish passengers felt hope, but once again, they were turned away. In fact, warning shots were even fired by Coast Guard vessels trailing the German ship in an effort to force it out of the port. The Roosevelt administration, of course, had severely restricted immigration in the wake of World War II. One such measure was “The Relative Rule,” which made it damn near impossible for anybody with family in Axis countries to come to the United States. Furthermore, under the Immigration Act of 1924, the refugees couldn’t enter the country anyway because they didn’t have a return address. Sounds clear-cut, right? The Jews would just find refuge somewhere else, right?
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case; the ship was forced to return to Europe. 908 refugees painfully watched their hopes and dreams for a new, safer home die. 908 people sat on a boat, stateless and helpless, as the world’s greatest force for good turned its back on the people who were most vulnerable and needed help.
The doomed voyage of the MS St. Louis occurred in 1939, when agents of evil forced an entire group of people to either leave the country or die in it. Fast forward to 2015, and America is in the same debacle. As of November 17, 2015, there are 4,289,792 Syrian refugees registered with the UN Refugee Agency. That’s almost 4.3 million people who justifiably feel unsafe in the midst of a war between some of the greatest forces of evil ever seen, such as the tyrannical Bashar al-Assad and his regime, the al-Nusra Front, and ISIS. In fact, there are several parallels between the Syrian civil war and the Holocaust. Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on the Syrian people just like Hitler made sure that every European Jew knew that a shower was a death sentence. ISIS murders innocent people en masse and dumps their bodies in mass graves simply because they don’t subscribe to the same ideological viewpoint they do. Doesn’t that sound distinctly Hitler-ish?
One of the perks of hindsight is that it’s 20/20. Looking back, it’s clear that the American government failed the Jewish refugees during the Holocaust in a big way. As a nation, we didn’t live up to our name as the world’s “beacon of freedom.” Sure, we sent our boys to fight the Nazis. Sure, we stormed the beaches at Normandy. Sure, we liberated a couple of concentration camps. But regrettably we didn’t do enough, and we can’t risk making the same mistake. As a Jewish American, I can’t bring myself to keep out an entire population of innocents. I can’t support turning them away from what is likely one of their last hopes, especially given the European response to the tragic terror attacks in Paris. I can’t sit and watch what happened to my people happen to another group of equally faultless victims. Let’s do our part.
