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Sunday morning found us still anchored in the bay. We heard the sound of guns being fired and later learned that an American warship had arrived and had been greeted with a military salute. A new passenger ship was now tied up in the harbor where the first one had been. Sam and I and our families gathered in the social hall with the other passengers to demand answers from the committee. “Other ships are landing and letting off passengers,” someone said. “Why can’t we land?”
“Those were English and French ships. This one is German.”
“What difference does that make?”
“We aren’t sure. We’ve also been told that a religious holiday in Cuba may be adding to the delay. It’s the Feast of Pentecost, and many offices are closed. Perhaps more customs officials will be available to process our papers after the weekend.” The sun set on Sunday night, a fiery red ball in the tropical sky.
There was a small ray of hope on Monday when Max Aber, a Jewish doctor who’d been living in Cuba, arrived in a launch to pick up his two little daughters. The girls had traveled from Hamburg without their mother, under the guardianship of another passenger. Everyone gathered around him, showering him with questions as he waited near the ladder for his girls to collect their belongings. “What’s going on? Do you know when we will be allowed to leave? Can you help us?” He couldn’t. All he knew was that the delay seemed to involve our landing permits. Late that afternoon, fifteen more passengers were allowed to leave. We demanded to know why and learned that they had boarded in Cherbourg, France, and weren’t German.
We tried to be patient, but we all longed to be off the ship, out from under the swastika flag and Hitler’s glowering portrait. Our initial joy on arriving in Havana evaporated in the humid heat. Our despair climbed with the temperature as our questions went unanswered. What was causing the delay now? Why weren’t we being allowed off? We had all purchased Cuban landing permits, hadn’t we? Everywhere Sam and I went, we saw people weeping. Boatloads of anxious relatives continued to surround our ship. We saw Sam’s father again, and Vati finally spotted Uncle Aaron, who shouted up to us that there was no explanation onshore for the delay, either.
Vati knocked on our stateroom door as we were preparing for bed and Mutti quickly let him inside. His eyes were wide with fright and he couldn’t catch his breath. “Daniel, what’s wrong? What happened?” Mutti cried.
“They ransacked our cabins! Tore the place apart! They know which of us were in Buchenwald and they went after us.”
“Who did, Vati?”
“Crew members from this ship.”
The bottom seemed to drop out of my stomach. We had believed we were safe from the persecution we’d experienced back home. “You need to report this to someone,” I said.
“We can’t. Those crewmen are all Nazis. We can hear them playing the piano in our dining room in the evenings and singing Nazi songs.”
“But the captain isn’t a Nazi. He allowed us to cover Hitler’s portrait during Shabbat, remember? We need to tell him about this.”
“No, no, Gisela, no. Look out the window. They have us surrounded.” I went to the porthole and looked out. Cuban police boats encircled the ship. Sam and I had seen them earlier that evening before saying good night. Now those boats were sweeping the St.Louis with their searchlights. “It’s just like it was in Buchenwald. We’re on a prison ship,” Vati said. He spent the night in our stateroom. None of us got much sleep. We were trapped once again.
Tuesday, May30, dawned and nothing had changed. We’d been anchored here since early Saturday. Four days with land in sight and no way to get to it. Four days with few answers. I felt the way I had on Kristallnacht when we’d been trapped in our apartment, wondering if we would ever be able to leave it again. When the passenger committee finally gave us an explanation, the news was devastating. The Cuban president had passed a new immigration law in Cuba, and the landing permits we’d purchased in Germany were no longer valid.
“Representatives from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee are meeting with the Cuban president today,” we were told. “They’re asking that he at least honor the permits that were issued before the new law was passed.” His words were met with murmurs of alarm as we all wondered when our permits were dated and when the law had been passed. “Even if we aren’t allowed to land in Cuba,” the leader continued above the anxious voices, “we have Captain Schroeder’s promise that he will make every effort to land us somewhere outside of Germany.”
“I don’t know where in the world that would be,” Sam said when we were alone again. “If there was a place outside of Germany that wanted us, we would be there already.” We’d gone up on deck again to see if we could spot his father in one of the boats and tell him the news. It was the same deck where the burial at sea had taken place. Suddenly we heard an agonized scream and, a moment later, a distant splash. The gate in the ship’s railing hung open, and the area all around it was splattered with blood.
“Max Loewe just slit his wrists and jumped overboard!” someone shouted. We looked over the rail and saw him thrashing below us, the water around him turning red. His wife began to scream. A long blast of the ship’s whistle signaled “man overboard,” and more passengers raced to the side of the ship to see.
“Murderers!” Loewe screamed from far below. “They’ll never get me!” We heard another splash as one of the crew members jumped in to save him. He swam toward Herr Loewe. Several police boats sped toward him, too. Loewe kicked and fought with the sailor who’d reached him, crying, “Let me die! Let me die!” The police pulled both men into their boat. The ship’s siren finally stopped wailing as the police hurried toward shore with the two men. Many of the passengers watching with us were weeping.
“I need to go be with my father,” I told Sam. “I know he’ll be upset by this. Mutti, too. I need to be strong for them.”
“I’ll go with you. Your father and I can say afternoon prayers together.”
The passengers cheered when the heroic sailor returned to the ship later that day. We were told that Max Loewe was in the hospital and would live. But his distraught wife would not be allowed off the ship to go to him. Rumors were whispered all around that another passenger, Dr. Fritz Herrmann, a physician from Munich, had also attempted suicide today by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. “It goes to show how hopeless we all feel,” Vati said. “And desperate. There will be more suicides if they try to take us back to Hamburg. Many of us would rather die than let the Nazis kill us.” His words made me shiver with fear. Would those be our only options if we returned to Germany—kill ourselves or let the Nazis do it? There were more police boats with searchlights after dark, making sure that none of us escaped. Vati was right—we’d become a floating prison.
On Wednesday, Sam and I went up on deck to watch for his father and Uncle Aaron again, anxious for news of what was happening onshore. We didn’t see them. The sun was too hot for us to stay on deck for very long, and the dining room was stuffy and airless. Few of us felt like eating. We wandered aimlessly, trying to reassure each other that this stalemate couldn’t possibly last much longer. We were near the purser’s office when we overheard a woman pleading with him. “Don’t take us back to Hamburg! Please! I would rather die!” Later that evening, someone from the passenger committee quietly asked Sam to be part of a suicide patrol, watching the decks all night in two-hour shifts so no one else would jump overboard.
I awoke on Thursday morning feeling numb and drained of emotion. How much longer would we be held in suspense this way? Surely the Cuban officials would have pity on us, wouldn’t they? Sam raised my spirits and revived my hopes whenever we were together, but we spent less time with each other as the days dragged by, both of us obligated to comfort our families. We happened to be outside together near the landing ladder when a small boat approached and an official from the shipping company shouted up, asking for a representative from the passenger committee. His message when the representative arrived devastated us. The St.Louis had been ordered to leave Havana within three hours. I leaned my head on Sam’s chest and wept. We heard weeping coming from all over the ship as word spread.
A little while later, we saw the crew preparing to lower the ship’s launch. “Look,” Sam said. “That’s Captain Schroeder getting into the boat.” He had changed into civilian clothes and was going ashore. Was he abandoning us or going for help? Around three o’clock we heard a rumbling sound as the ship’s engines started up. The deck vibrated beneath our feet.
“Oh, Sam, no! No!” I cried. I was convinced that the Nazi sailors who had ransacked Vati’s room had taken over the ship and were heading back to Germany. Sam and I were still on the deck, wondering what we should do, when suddenly a group of women whose husbands were waiting onshore stormed the Cuban police who were guarding the landing ladder, desperate to get off. The police fought back, knocking a pregnant woman to the deck. Sam and I ran to help her.
“She needs a doctor,” Sam said when he saw that she was unconscious. He and another passenger scooped her up and carried her to the infirmary. I stood again, my legs trembling. The police had drawn their guns. I couldn’t move, frozen with fear. I was terrified that my father would join the mob and do something rash. He knew firsthand what awaited us in the Nazi prison camps. By the time Sam returned, the standoff with the police had swelled to a large crowd. I didn’t see my father among them. We waited, afraid to leave and yet afraid to go below. Our feeling of being trapped was too overwhelming whenever we went below.
At last, we saw the ship’s launch returning with Captain Schroeder. He immediately ordered the police to stand down, saying that this was still his ship. “I deeply regret that this had to happen,” he told the crowd. “Now you need to disperse please.”
“Is it true that we’re going back to Hamburg?” someone asked.
“I will meet with the passenger committee, and then they will inform you.”
