Alex's Wake (21 page)

Thus the larger argument was joined. On one side was the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which insisted that its hands were legally tied by the Immigration Act of 1924 and which was unwilling to establish what it considered an untenable precedent by admitting this particular ship when the world's oceans were filling up with vessels carrying refugees from the four corners of an ever-more perilous world. On the other side were the advocates of those refugees, who looked to America to embrace its creed and provide a sanctuary for the homeless, hopeless, and desperate, to open the gates to its storied shining city on a hill and welcome these wanderers in their time of trouble.

What should Mr. Roosevelt have done, given both the legal and political realities of 1939 and the danger posed to the 907 by a forced return to Europe?

Among the most recent voices to join the debate are those belonging to American University professors Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman in their 2013 book
FDR and the Jews
. They argue first of all that much of the responsibility for the failure of the
St. Louis
to find safe anchor in the Western Hemisphere lies with the government of Cuba and with Lawrence Berenson. In the matter of the president, Breitman and Lichtman find Roosevelt innocent of the charge of “indifference to Jewish refugees.”

Rooted in a rich soil of isolationism, the U.S. Congress had passed three Neutrality Acts during the 1930s, essentially declaring that America should not and would not intervene in foreign affairs. The acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937 imposed an embargo on the sale of arms to any belligerent in any war anywhere. By the spring of 1939, as a large-scale war in Europe appeared ever more likely, President Roosevelt decided it was vital to repeal or revise the Neutrality Acts to give him greater flexibility in opposing Nazi Germany. The Democratic Party
controlled both houses of Congress, but President Roosevelt knew that neutrality would be a hard sell to Democratic senators from southern states and he needed their support.

Professors Breitman and Lichtman conclude that political calculations, neither idealistic nor craven but based on simple vote-counting arithmetic, are responsible for the president's silence on the matter of the
St. Louis
. They argue that “Roosevelt could have admitted the St. Louis passengers to the United States only by exceeding the immigration quotas,” and thus alienating a certain segment of the Congress. “A quarrel with Congress over the
St. Louis
had the potential to doom his efforts to revise the Neutrality Acts and aid the nations resisting Hitler's aggression. Had such events come to pass, posterity would have judged FDR far more harshly than it has in our time.”

I understand the book's argument about the political realities of the time, but another of the authors' assertions has been sharply rebuked by passengers who made that fateful voyage aboard the
St. Louis
. Breitman and Lichtman assert that “[T]here is no truth to the notion, found in some literature, that American officials ordered the coast guard to prevent any passengers from reaching American shores.” A group of
St. Louis
survivors, including Herbert Karliner, have insisted otherwise in a statement issued shortly after
FDR and the Jews
was published: “We saw the Coast Guard planes that flew around the ship to follow its movements,” they declared. “We saw the Coast Guard cutter that trailed us and made sure the
St. Louis
did not come close to the Florida coast. We heard the cutter blaring its warning to stay away. It was President Franklin Roosevelt who decided our fate, who denied us and our family's permission to land, forcing us to return to Europe, where many of the passengers were murdered by the Nazis. We categorically reject any and all attempts to distort these indisputable historical facts.”

I am hardly an uninterested party in the debate over the meaning of the
St. Louis
and the Roosevelt administration's handling of the complex diplomatic and political implications of its voyage. But neither am I blinded by my personal stake in the events of May and June 1939. I'm aware that, in most cases, policies are dictated by laws, and that the
Immigration Act of 1924 was the unyielding given circumstance of the drama enacted fifteen years later. I understand and accept that, as is the case with most presidents, Franklin Roosevelt could not afford to get too far in front of public opinion, and that the American public of 1939 was in no hurry to concern itself with a boatload of Jewish refugees. And, of course, no one, neither everyday citizen nor administration official, could have anticipated the depth of the horror that awaited so many of the passengers of this singularly unhappy vessel.

Nevertheless, fully cognizant that more than seven decades after the fact I am in possession of knowledge unavailable to the principal actors of that drama, I cannot help wondering why President Roosevelt did not make an exception for those 907 wanderers and sign an executive order allowing the
St. Louis
to pull into safe harbor in Miami or Baltimore or in the tender welcoming shadow of Miss Liberty's life-affirming torch. I remain ever grateful that my mother and father were allowed to come to America in 1941. Would that my grandfather and uncle had been granted a similar welcome two years earlier.

In the spring of 2009, the U.S. Senate came as close as the American government ever has to conceding that, just perhaps, something more might have been done on behalf of the 907 refugees. The Senate passed Resolution 111, which “acknowledges the suffering of those refugees caused by the refusal of the United States, Cuban, and Canadian governments to provide them political asylum.” In his remarks introducing the resolution, Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl pointed out that “the United States failed to provide refuge” to the passengers and concluded by declaring, “The
St. Louis
is only one tragedy out of millions from that time, but seventy years later it still haunts us as a nation.”

A final word about the ship that carried Alex and Helmut so far from their homeland and so close to freedom. The
St. Louis
was bombed by the Royal Air Force in 1944 as she lay at anchor in Hamburg. After the war, the ship was partly renovated and for a time served as a floating hotel. In 1950, with their profits plummeting, the new owners sold the
St. Louis
for scrap and she was broken up.

For his role in finding refuge for the passengers of the
St. Louis
, Morris Carlton Troper was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French
and presented with both the Legion of Merit and the State Conspicuous Service Cross by the United States.

Captain Schroeder survived the war and died in 1959. Two years before his death, he was awarded the Order of Merit by the West German government “for services to the people and the land in the rescue of refugees.” There is currently a street in Hamburg named for him. For his efforts to find a safe haven for his passengers during the voyage of May and June 1939, Captain Gustav Schroeder was honored posthumously by Yad Vashem in Israel as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.”

To the Nazi leadership in Germany, the meaning of the voyage of the
St. Louis
was simple, unambiguous, and reassuring: for all its demonstrations of concern for the Jews, the rest of the world was apparently unprepared to do much on their behalf. The Nazi monthly
Der Weltkampf
published an editorial that stated, “We are saying openly that we do not want the Jews while the democracies keep on claiming that they are willing to receive them—and then leave the guests out in the cold! Aren't we savages better men after all?”

And Adolf Hitler himself declared mockingly, “I can only hope and expect that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these Jewish criminals, will at least be generous enough to convert their sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to place these criminals at the disposal of other countries; even, for all I care, on luxury ships.”

6

Boulogne-sur-Mer

T
HURSDAY
, M
AY
19, 2011. Too late, I think. I'm too late.

In the glare of a brilliantly sunny late afternoon, I stand on the concrete pier that surrounds the horseshoe-shaped harbor of Boulogne-sur-Mer on the north coast of France, gazing with finely mixed emotions into the murky green water. Fifty yards away, six young men kick around a soccer ball, their collective skill apparently blocking from their minds the fear that an errant pass might send the ball plunging down an irretrievable thirty feet into the drink. On the harbor's far side, an immense Greek cargo ship is being unloaded with the assistance of two cranes and at least a dozen strapping dockworkers. Far offshore, three industrious cormorants are scanning the waves for an early dinner, floating in seemingly aimless patterns until they drop bodily as if shot, plunging into the sea and then rising again with a gleaming, wriggling fish in their jaws. The bustling life of a seaside town is all around me.

I am more than a little awed to be standing here. And I feel as if I've missed the boat, literally. Alex and Helmut have come and gone.

Yesterday morning, Amy and I bade farewell to Hilu and Roland, climbed into our little Meriva, and drove west along the autobahn, leaving Germany and entering Holland. We set aside the Goldschmidt family saga for a while and explored the lives of Amy's ancestors, whose roots for more than a century were planted in the rich soil of the Dutch province of Friesland. We visited the tiny village of Arum,
where her great-great-grandfather Pieter Pieters Menage and great-great-grandmother Tjitse Blanksma were born in 1840, and walked wonderingly along Arum's main street and through its tidy cemetery, looking for family. Back on the road, driving through the flat Frisian countryside, I often thought I was looking at a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, a Ruisdael or Hobbema, with deep green fields; a few lonely trees; a canal or two; grazing cows, horses, or sheep; and a couple of distant church spires breaking up the horizon.

We spent the night in the historic city of Harlingen, on the North Sea coast, in a cozy old hotel with slightly slanted wooden floors, our window looking out onto a canal that flowed into the sea. This morning, our travels took us south along the coast to the beautiful town of Hindeloopen, where Amy's great-great-great-grandfather Pieter Thomas Menage was born in 1802. Hindeloopen is a magical little village of flowers and tiny old houses nestled in the protective embrace of an earthen dike. Amy and I were enchanted and vowed to return someday soon.

By then the day had started to slip away from us, so we regretfully left Hindeloopen behind to spend several hours on heavily traveled motorways that took us through and around a maze of smoggy cities from Amsterdam and Utrecht to Breda, and from there across the Belgian border to Antwerp, Ghent, and Brugge. Rain fell intermittently and the traffic was intense, so we were much relieved when the traffic thinned somewhat at the French frontier and the sun emerged from a bank of heavy clouds. There are actual hills in northern France, which were a welcome sight after the unending flatness of Holland and Belgium.

We had printed out Google Maps directions to the hotel we'd booked in Boulogne, and when we got off the motorway at the edge of town, we thought we were only minutes away from stretching out on our bed and resting our eyes. No such luck. At the end of the motorway's exit ramp, we encountered a detour, which threw us off our directions to such an extent that we wandered through side streets and battled one-ways for a good twenty minutes before we were able to find our lodging. As I was cursing this minor turn of fate, it occurred to me
that since Alex and Helmut had to endure so much uncertainty and unpleasantness on their journey to Boulogne, perhaps it was only right that I experience 1/1000th of 1 percent of their tribulations.

Now, as I stand where they stood when their ocean-going odyssey finally ended, I am haunted by an admittedly irrational feeling of failure and the thought that we've come racing across the Low Countries to greet my grandfather and uncle as they stepped off the boat . . . only to have missed them. It's all part of my equally irrational desire to save Alex and Helmut from the fate that befell them a decade before I was born, the fruitless fantasy that brought me here in the first place. But I manage to shake off those sad and useless thoughts by recalling that there is work to be accomplished in the morning: the task of learning more about my relatives' brief encounter with this city.

There has been a settlement on this site for at least two thousand years. In 43 AD, the Roman emperor Claudius launched his invasion of the British Isles from here, when the town was known as Bononia and served as an important fortress city in the northernmost regions of the empire. The walls of the fort were renovated in the early fourth century and survive to this day, though parts of the battlements that remain—looking out over the English Channel from the hills that rise above the port—date from yet another repair job undertaken during the thirteenth century. Boulogne fell to the English in 1544, but was then brought back into French possession when King Henri II purchased it six years later. In 1805, the French emperor Napoleon, perhaps inspired by the example of Emperor Claudius, amassed a grand army in Boulogne and planned an invasion of England, but events on other fronts forced him to abandon the project.

Within the walled sections of this ancient city stands the magnificent Cathedral of Notre Dame, renovated in the nineteenth century to replace the original medieval cathedral, which was torched by revolutionaries in the early 1790s. The old earl's castle is also sheltered by the Roman wall, as is the city hall and the Bibliothèque Municipale. On Friday morning, under a deep blue sky, we walk up the hill from our hotel and pass through one of the four gates in the wall. For the first time since my long-ago eighth-grade French class, I actually find a use
for the phrase
“Où est la bibliothèque?”
and we locate the library. With the assistance of two friendly librarians, one of whom speaks enough recognizable English to make up for our primitive French, we find several tall leather-bound editions of Boulogne newspapers from the spring of 1939.