Search Continues for Jews From World War II Voyage

Two Holocaust researchers, who have traveled the world to uncover the fate of 937 Jews who tried to flee the Nazis in 1939 aboard an ocean liner that was later turned away by Cuba and the United States, will bring their project to the West Coast this month for the first time.

They are still trying to track down 11 passengers who remain unaccounted for.

“It’s been an international search, utilizing more detective work than traditional research methods,” said Scott Miller, who with research partner Sarah Ogilvie will present the findings Sept. 28 at the University of Judaism.

The luxury liner St. Louis set sail from Hamburg, Germany, in May 1939. It reached Havana on May 27 but Cuba, already awash in Jewish immigrants from Europe, denied the passengers entry.

The ship 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 in what became front page news.

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

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, of Tarzana.

Sixty years ago, they were joyful when Karmann’s brother-in-law managed to get tickets for their family and Gordon’s aunt, uncle and his wife.

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

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.

Just 29 people were let off in Havana, six of them Jews. Records show that the Dominican Republic was willing to admit the St. Louis passengers, but Jewish authorities declined because, among other issues, they worried that the island nation could not adequately house the German Jews, said Sevrin Hochberg, a historian with the U.S. Holocaust 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 and murdered.”

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

On the night in 1944 that they received a package of tickets to Panama, Gordon and Karmann were sent to Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women in Germany. Gordon’s father was sent to Buchenwald.

All three survived the war and were later 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. Gordon moved to the U.S. in 1983.