Alex's Wake (15 page)

I was aware of a gulf between my music and my parents' music in my youth, but that gap began to close as I grew older and came to love what Bach and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Mahler and Debussy had left for me to discover. One master I didn't take to right away, however, was Johannes Brahms, who was born here in Hamburg in 1833. I once told my mother that I couldn't figure out why everyone made such a fuss over Brahms. She paused a moment and then said to me, “You will. Wait till you're forty-five or fifty. Then you'll understand.”

She was right, more than right. There's an underlying melancholy in nearly every note Brahms wrote that may only speak to us once we comprehend the transitory nature of all things, an understanding and appreciation of life that only a certain number of years on this earth can provide.

The Beatles still thrill me, still please me with their vibrant sounds of youthful exuberance. Brahms reassures me in the manner of a wise and kind companion who is equally comfortable in the presence of fleeting joys and immutable sorrow. I feel deeply fortunate that, as I continue this journey in Alex and Helmut's footsteps, I can turn to all of them.

Brahms was born no more than a mile or so east of here. We retrace our steps along the Reeperbahn, under skies that are still gray but no longer rainy. Leaving the St. Pauli district, we turn right on Budapest Strasse and left along the leafy Holstenwall, walking on for several blocks until we come to the Johannes Brahms Platz, an empty, rather soulless expanse of pavement. Around the corner, we find a monument to Brahms on the approximate site where his birthplace stood until it was destroyed in an Allied bombing campaign in 1943. Amy takes my picture as I pose beside the monument and I hum to myself the solemn opening lines of the “All flesh is grass” movement from his magnificent German Requiem.

A few steps away, on Peterstrasse, we find the Brahms Museum. The docent on duty on this quiet Tuesday afternoon shares her memories of days long gone on the waterfront, when dredgers scooped up sand from
the bottom of the Elbe to aid in the river's navigation, making a high-pitched squealing sound as they worked. “How Brahms would have hated that,” I observe, and she laughs.

Brahms endured a love-hate relationship with this city all his life. As a young boy, he played the piano in some of the roughest bars in St. Pauli and was subjected to unwanted attention from the prostitutes and their customers, experiences that, he later claimed, scarred him for life and made a loving relationship with a woman impossible. Brahms hoped for years that the Hamburg Philharmonic would hire him to be its music director, but despite his many accomplishments and honored status, the orchestra never did. For that reason, Brahms insisted, he lived the life of a vagabond and never found true happiness. Yet his music touched the hearts of listeners the world over, and when he died in 1897, alone in his cramped apartment in Vienna, the flags on all the ships in Hamburg harbor flew at half mast.

As we head back to the Landungsbrücken U-Bahn station, I catch a final glimpse of that harbor and think again of the departure of the
St. Louis
and how Alex and Helmut must have felt on that dreary day. Despite all they had endured, they must have felt some measure of hope knowing that the voyage that would deliver them and their family to a better world was finally underway.

Forty minutes later, we are sitting comfortably in our seats on the train returning us to Oldenburg. It's warm and dry and, nestled on Amy's shoulder and rocked by the rhythm of the rails, I fall into a peaceful doze. But, despite myself, my thoughts are with the voyagers out on the ocean, and I recall some rueful words from Brahms' beautiful
Schicksalslied
, or Song of Destiny: “It is our lot to find rest nowhere.”

5

The Voyage of the
St. Louis

“T
HERE IS A SOMEWHAT NERVOUS DISPOSITION
among the passengers. Everyone seems convinced they will never see Germany again. Touching departure scenes have taken place. Many seem light of heart, having left their homes. Others take it heavily. But pure sea air, good food, and attentive service will soon provide the usual worry-free atmosphere of a long sea voyage. Painful impressions on land disappear quickly at sea, and soon seem merely like dreams.”

Gustav Schroeder, the captain of the
St. Louis
, entered those words into his journal as his ship made its way down the River Elbe toward the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. It would be best, he thought, if he and his crew could instill that “worry-free atmosphere” as quickly as possible among his passengers. So he instructed his purser and First Officer to lead a tour of the ship's splendid facilities. Over the next hour, they showed passengers the swimming pool, gymnasium, and sports area, which included regulation shuffleboard courts, on A Deck; the nightclub on B Deck; and the dining hall that featured crisp white linens, leaded crystal glassware, and sterling silverware on C Deck. The first-class social hall had been converted into a synagogue for the duration of the voyage. The purser and First Officer neglected to tell the passengers that, at the express order of Captain Schroeder, a portrait of Adolf Hitler had been taken down from its prominent spot on the forward wall of the social hall.

The
St. Louis
amenities included a hairdresser and barber shop, well-stocked bars on every deck, and a shop that sold binoculars, cameras, books, postcards, and other souvenirs. Purchases had to be made using “shipboard money”—credits purchased from HAPAG up to the value of 230 Reichsmarks—that was good only at sea and could not be reconverted into real currency at the conclusion of the voyage. That shipboard money was necessary, as most of the refugees had been allowed to leave Germany with no more than 10 Reichsmarks in cash, only about four dollars, each.

Thirty-eight hours after departing Hamburg, at 9:30 on Monday morning, May 15, the
St. Louis
arrived in Cherbourg, France, to pick up a few more passengers and to bring aboard several crates of fresh fruits and vegetables for the ship's kitchens. Early that afternoon, the
St. Louis
once again weighed anchor and glided out into the English Channel to begin the transatlantic portion of the voyage. With the newly added passengers, there were now 937 refugees on board. Almost all of them were, like Alex and Helmut, Jews fleeing the Third Reich under great duress. Most had been citizens of Germany, some were from Eastern Europe, a few were Spaniards seeking sanctuary from the Civil War. None of them was traveling for pleasure.

They experienced more rain, fog, and some choppy seas in the channel, but as the ship left the European continent behind, the sun broke through a bank of clouds that lay upon the western horizon. Captain Schroeder ordered the engine room to achieve the maximum speed of sixteen knots. At that moment, only the most pessimistic of the passengers could have felt anything other than hope and relief as the
St. Louis
assumed a steady southwest course.

But they were sailing in blissful ignorance. Members of the Cuban government in Havana, Nazi leaders in Berlin, the U.S. State Department in Washington, and Jewish relief and refugee organizations on two continents were already aware that something was amiss and that the passengers on board the
St. Louis
might encounter difficulties when the vessel entered Cuban waters.

A confluence of economic issues, blatant anti-Semitism, corruption, greed, and political power plays within the Cuban government had begun
to shape events. Cuba was still trying to dig itself out from the effects of the worldwide Depression, and unemployment was high. Many Cubans thought that there were already far too many immigrants competing with native-born citizens for scarce jobs. The island's four thousand Jews were an obvious target for the usual charges of international financial manipulations and shady behind-the-scenes string-pulling. An active Cuban Nazi Party encouraged the growth of anti-Semitism by publishing such pamphlets as
Under the Jewish Communist Yoke
.

Three Cuban newspapers, all of which were owned by Jose Ignacio Rivero, an avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler, Spanish Generalissimo Francisco Franco, and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, also encouraged such sentiments. Rivero had recently been invited to the Italian Embassy in Havana to receive an award for his tireless support of the fascist cause, and he had begun a campaign in his newspapers to restrict Jewish immigration to Cuba. One of his editorials declared, “Against this Jewish invasion we must react with the same energy as have other peoples of the globe. Otherwise we will be absorbed, and the day will come when the blood of our martyrs and heroes shall have served solely to enable the Jews to enjoy a country conquered by our ancestors.”

The flashpoint of resistance to the orderly arrival of the
St. Louis
, however, was a dispute among Cuban politicians involving those ancient obsessions, money and power. Manuel Benitez Gonzalez, the immigration officer who had sold his landing certificates to Alex, Helmut, and hundreds of other passengers, was a protégé of Army Chief of Staff Fulgencio Batista, who in a few years would become president of Cuba. But well connected though he was, Benitez was on the outs with the current Cuban president, Federico Laredo Bru. And Benitez had made other enemies within the Cuban government through his shameless profiteering. By selling his landing certificates without checking with other officials, he had managed to amass a personal fortune of nearly a million dollars. Some of those other officials demanded a share of the certificate racket; when Benitez refused, they resolved to kill his golden goose.

So it was that the forces opposed to Jewish immigration on economic or bigoted grounds and those who were determined to halt the
lucrative sale of the Benitez certificates found common cause. On the morning of Thursday, May 4, one of Rivero's newspapers reported that a ship would arrive in Havana later that month carrying a thousand Jewish refugees who had obtained permission to land from a rogue officer within the Bru administration. Later that day, a member of the Cuban congress took to the floor to demand that the president issue an ordinance “prohibiting repeated immigrations of Hebrews who have been inundating the Republic and prohibiting permits that are being issued for the entrance of such immigrants to Cuba, until this House can approve a proposed law imposing severe penalties upon fraudulent immigration that makes a joke of the laws of the Republic.”

Unfortunately for the refugees on board the
St. Louis
, President Bru chose this moment to demonstrate to his countrymen just who was in charge of Cuban immigration. On the day after the congressional demand, Friday, May 5, eight days before the
St. Louis
steamed out of Hamburg, Bru issued an order—coincidentally, given the number of passengers aboard the ill-fated ship, known as Decree 937—that invalidated all of the Benitez landing certificates. The order stipulated that only with written authorization from the Cuban secretaries of state, labor, and treasury, plus the posting of a $500 bond, could an immigrant gain legal entry into Havana. This announcement was for internal consumption only; though it was transmitted to high HAPAG officials, word never leaked down to the people most affected: the refugees themselves.

Two significant circumstances explain the Hamburg-America Line's decision to keep news of the decree from spreading. To put it another way, HAPAG wanted the voyage of the
St. Louis
to proceed smoothly, but for two different reasons. The first was quite simple: the line needed the money. After months of falling revenue, this excursion that promised 937 customers paying fares ranging from 600 to 800 Reichsmarks each, plus the “contingency” fee, was simply too big a windfall to forgo.

Then there was the more shadowy reason that HAPAG wanted the voyage to proceed: espionage. Otto Schiendick, the second-class steward and Nazi provocateur, was traveling to Cuba as a courier on behalf of German military intelligence, the
Abwehr
. The plan was for Schiendick
to meet in Havana with a Nazi spy named Robert Hoffman, who would deliver to him a cache of important documents on top-secret subjects ranging from military installations throughout Central America to the potential vulnerability of the Panama Canal—topics of intense interest to a German military already dreaming of possible adventures in the Western Hemisphere. After securing this information, Schiendick would return to Hamburg with all possible speed on the return journey of the
St. Louis
and make his delivery to his
Abwehr
superiors. The plan was simple and airtight, especially given Hoffman's cover: assistant manager of the Havana offices of the Hamburg-America Line.

When HAPAG director Claus-Gottfried Holthusen learned of the existence of Decree 937, quite naturally he cabled Havana to ask for clarification of the situation. The next day, Luis Clasing, the manager of HAPAG's Havana office, informed Holthusen that he had received the “personal guarantee” of the Cuban immigration director that all would be well when the
St. Louis
reached Havana. Thus reassured, Holthusen kept the news of Decree 937 to himself and informed no one else, least of all Captain Schroeder and his passengers, who left Hamburg with no idea that anything untoward was awaiting them.

The citizens of Cuba soon learned of both Decree 937 and the imminent departure of the
St. Louis
. On Monday, May 8, whipped up by another savage editorial in one of Rivero's papers, forty thousand people attended a boisterous rally in downtown Havana. The organizers warned that this approaching boatload of new immigrants was yet another example of the worldwide Jewish threat. A speaker at the rally called upon his countrymen to “fight the Jews until the last one is driven out.”