Odyssey of the Unwelcomed : Holocaust Researchers Track Fate of Jews Aboard Ship Denied Entry in 1939

By HILARY E. MacGREGOR

Sept. 19, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

TARZANA —

It was May 1939, and the luxury liner St. Louis set sail from Hamburg, Germany, with 937 passengers, almost all of them Jews fleeing the Nazis.

The ship reached Havana on May 27, but Cuba, already awash in Jewish immigrants from Europe, denied the passengers entry. The ship then headed for the Florida coast--and with the lights of Miami twinkling in the distance--the passengers sent pleas for admission to the United States.

But they were turned away by the president himself, in what became front page national news of the day.

The ship returned to Europe, disgorging its weary travelers in Antwerp, Belgium, where the governments of Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands offered them temporary haven.

For many, it was only the beginning of a tragic odyssey as some passengers went into hiding, ghettos or concentration camps. Others returned to the United States in the next two years when their quota numbers came up.

Since 1996, researchers from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., have sought to uncover the fate of each of the 937 passengers aboard the St. Louis.

After years of walking through German-Jewish cemeteries in New York, sifting through thousands of synagogue burial records, traveling the frontiers of cyberspace and tracing uncertain leads from Palestine to Chile to Paris, researchers Scott Miller and Sarah Ogilvie have determined the fate of all but 11 passengers.

“It’s been an international search, utilizing more detective work than traditional research methods,” Miller said.

This month, the pair will bring their search to the West Coast for the first time and present their findings Sept. 28 at the University of Judaism.

About a dozen St. Louis passengers live in California, five of them in the Los Angeles area, including Czech-born Ana Marie Gordon and her 91-year-old mother, Sidonia Karmann, both of Tarzana.

Back in 1939, they had been joyful when a relative managed to book passage on the St. Louis for the family.

“We got big luck,” Karmann said last week. “It was like the Queen Elizabeth--a very nice boat.”

The Nazis had just begun to step up anti-Jewish measures in 1938. After Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when windows in thousands of Jewish shops, homes and synagogues were shattered, Jews were hurriedly seeking passage out of Europe.

Most escaped on smaller, less luxurious ships that held 100 to 170 passengers. Jewish groups in the United States had cabled their counterparts in Europe early in 1939, telling them not to send more than 150 refugees on any one ship.

But the ocean liner was filled with middle-class and upper-middle-class Jews, mostly from Germany, lending a feeling of security to those aboard, Karmann recalled. Gordon, only 4 at the time, said she remembers running all over the ship, showing adults the way between decks.

Karmann said the ship’s captain was “an extraordinarily good man,” who did his best to find his Jewish passengers safe refuge--even steaming back and forth for a week between Miami and Havana, while members of Jewish agencies desperately negotiated for someone to let St. Louis passengers ashore.

“But amongst the crew were Nazis,” Karmann said. “One of the stewards took us aside and pointed out the ones who were Nazi spies.”

Just 29 people were let off in Havana, six of them Jews. Those passengers had different visas from everyone else aboard, museum researchers said. They also paid exorbitant sums--the equivalent of $50,000 today, Karmann added.

“If you had money, you could get through everywhere,” Karmann said.

“But no one had any money left,” added Gordon, referring to passengers trapped on the ship as relatives already in Cuba sailed into Havana harbor in small boats to wave encouragement. “Everyone had put every last cent into getting their tickets and papers.”

So the ship turned back.

Records show the Dominican Republic was willing to admit the St. Louis passengers, but Jewish authorities declined because, among other issues, they worried the island nation could not adequately house the well-to-do refugees, said Sevrin Hochberg, a historian with the museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

“Going back to Germany in ‘39, at the time, was not as horrendous as we now know it was,” Hochberg said. “There was a certain expectation that there might be war, but no one expected that these people would be caught up in the defeat of nations, much less that some of them were going to be deported [or] murdered.”

The St. Louis captain continued to update passengers daily on the progress of negotiations.

“He was saying, ‘Keep courage, keep courage,’ ” Karmann recalled.

Gordon and her mother still have both the packet of daily notices from the St. Louis, printed on stationery of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, and their immigration papers.

The Karmanns were taken to the Netherlands, where they moved from one internment camp to another. Meanwhile, Karmann’s brother in Panama continued to try to book them passage to the Americas.

On the night in 1944 that they received tickets to Panama, they were sent instead to Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women in Germany.

Gordon’s father was sent to Buchenwald.

All three survived the war and were reunited in Amsterdam with Gordon’s aunt, a Christian who had thus avoided being sent to a camp, and her Jewish husband, who was not interned but was sterilized.

After the war, Karmann’s brother in Panama arranged for them to sail to Mexico City.

“If not for her, we wouldn’t be here,” Gordon says of her mother, who led a conga line at her 90th birthday party last year. “She took risks, she had energy, she was adaptable, and she was very, very smart. It’s because of her guts; she is unbelievable.”

Gordon moved to the United States in 1983.

Researcher Miller said about 60% of the St. Louis passengers survived the war. Many ended up in the United States, as well as in Israel and Canada. Some had their numbers for the U.S. quota come up from 1939 to 1942.

“But for people whose numbers came up in 1942, 1943, it was too late,” Miller said. “They were already on a train on the way to Auschwitz.”

The St. Louis was not the only boat to be turned back to Europe.

Ships with fewer passengers than the St. Louis had been refused entry to Cuba.

“From the beginning, because of the size of the ship, the St. Louis received tremendous publicity,” said historian Hochberg. “It would not have had the publicity were it not for the size or the number of passengers, which was five times the number of passengers on other ships.”

The story of the St. Louis was memorialized in the 1970s book “Voyage of the Damned,” which was later turned into a movie. But passengers and researchers say the book contains many inaccuracies.

Researcher Ogilvie said the impetus for the project came three years ago when six passengers from the St. Louis came through the Survivor’s Registry at the Holocaust museum in one week. Ogilvie began helping them search for relatives.

“I was familiar with the whole story of the St. Louis,” Ogilvie said. “But historians had said it would never be possible to know what happened to everyone.”

But that conclusion was reached in an era when archival materials were scattered and researchers would have had to travel to each country in Europe to search their individual archives, she said.

“At a certain point, we realized we could not rely on documents alone to try to track the fate of every passenger,” Miller said. “If they were in hiding, obviously there were no documents.”

Because of the nature of Nazi records, she said, it is often easier to find the dead than the living.

And there are other challenges: People change their names; they scatter to different countries; they don’t want to talk about it.

Said Ogilvie: “I realized if I could track down all 937 passengers, that would be a contribution to what we know of a major episode of the Holocaust.”

Holocaust researchers Scott Miller and Sarah Ogilvie will present their findings about the voyage of the ship St. Louis at 7 p.m. Sept. 28 at the University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Bel Air. The event is sold out, but organizers may add a second presentation, based on demand. Information: (310) 556-3222.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Still Searching

St. Louis passengers stillunaccounted for:

Ball (Lippert), Magdalena

Buchholz, Wilhelm

Goldbaum, Anna

Kaminker, Berthold

Lichtenstein, Fritz

Maschkowsky, Arthur

Rebemfeld, Kurt

Siegel, Arthur

Stemlicht, Lotte