Monday, December 3, 2018
Voyage of the SS St. Louis
937 passengers were aboard on the SS St. Louis fleeing from the Nazis on May 13, 1939. All of the passengers were desperate to flee from the Third Reich and all of the discrimination towards Jewish people. From Germany the people on board hoped to disembark in Cuba and finally be free. A major flaw with this idea was that many Jewish refugees were already in Cuba and were competing for scarce jobs, so the chances of the Cuban government admitting them were significantly lower. This turned out to be true as only 29 people were allowed into the country when they finally arrived. Being so close to Florida, the people on the ship wrote to the Franklin D. Roosevelt, but it was of no use since he never responded. This forced the ship to turn back and head back to Europe where after the Holocaust was over 254 of the 907 that remained were dead.
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2 comments:
I think this summary shows how tight of a situation it really was, when only about 3% of the people on the boat could get into Cuba. When even Roosevelt couldn't respond to the refugees, it was evident that maybe even he was too overwhelmed to be able to help them. It's hard to imagine the feelings of terror that these refugees had when they were denied entry to Cuba, knowing that they were likely to fall back into the doom of the Holocaust. There was really nowhere to go for some of these people, no matter where they tried to escape or what they tried to do in order to avoid the chaos.
Interesting insight on Roosevelt's orders. It's sad to think that if Roosevelt had just let the Jews into Florida then he could have saved around 250 lives. I wonder if the reason he didn't respond was because he didn't want to get involved in the war, and by letting Jews in the Germans would have reason to attack the US.
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