By Graham Kelly
Films that document the plight of Jews in Europe during World War II often leave us wondering if anyone could have done something to help; if the barbaric slaughter instituted by Hitler and his followers could have been stopped, or at least slowed.
The documentary film The Voyage Of The St. Louis written and directed by Canadian filmmaker Maziar Bahari, pieces together the story of one group of Jews that could have been saved from the fate suffered by so many others during the war. Instead, they were sent away, the majority to be decimated in Nazi gas chambers. The would-be saviours? The United States and Canada.
In 1939, just prior to the outbreak of war, Germany allowed some 917 Jews to buy their way out of Hitler’s grasp. They boarded the luxury liner St. Louis, equipped with Cuban visas and the promise of eventual immigrant status in the United States. The group arrived in Havana, ecstatic in their complete separation from Germany. But the ship sat in the harbour for days, the hopes of its passengers growing dim: “They said that tomorrow—manana—we would disembark, but manana never came.”
The ship’s captain finally decided to leave Cuba and attempt to find asylum for his passengers in the United States, and then in Canada—anything to avoid forcing them to return to Germany to face near-certain death. Both countries, for political reasons, rejected the Jews. Though the group did not return to Germany, they did end up in Europe. During the war, nearly two-thirds of the St. Louis passengers died in concentration camps.
The Voyage of The St. Louis raises some interesting issues. Generally the villain is clear in stories related to war-era Jewish persecution. This film illustrates that sympathy and support were difficult to come by on either side of the Atlantic.
In fact, the roles of protagonist and antagonist to go against our preconceptions of war figures. Where North America’s actions leave us in doubt, the St. Louis’ Captain Gustav Schroeder, a German decorated by the Nazis during the war and investigated by the Allies afterwards, stands out as a venerable hero. In the same manner as the much talked-about Oskar Schindler, he risks his own welfare to save the Jews, using every strategy (albeit unsuccessfully) to achieve this end. Ironically, Schroeder affords his ill-fated passengers a final taste of the high life—on the luxury ship they drink, dine and dance in style—before many are sent to the squalor and misery of the concentration camps to die.
Leave a Reply