PM apologizes for 1939 refusal of Jewish refugees
OTTAWA — Survivors and families of 900 German Jews whose pleas for asylum Canada were ignored during the Holocaust received an official federal apology Wednesday, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed more federal help to combat anti-Semitic acts.
It was 79 years ago that the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King rejected an asylum request from an ocean liner carrying German Jews as it neared Halifax, forcing it back to Europe.
Most of those passengers from MS St. Louis scattered across the continent and more than 250 died in the Holocaust.
The decision to turn the country’s back on European Jews was “unacceptable then and it is unacceptable now,” Trudeau said in his speech on the week marking the 80th anniversary of what is known as “Kristallnacht” and the start of the Holocaust.
Before the apology, Trudeau met with Ana Maria Gordon, a St. Louis passenger who lives in Canada, to talk about how the country could fight anti-Semitism.
The St. Louis departed Germany in May 1939 with more than 900 Jews aboard, hoping to find refuge from Adolf Hitler’s Nazis and the policies that stripped them of their rights and fuelled violence against them and their businesses.
They first went to Cuba and, when the passengers weren’t allowed to disembark there, the United States. The ship came within sight of Miami but the U.S. Coast Guard turned the ship away.
A group of Canadians tried to convince the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King to accept their asylum plea, but federal officials rejected the request.
Four European countries offered to take in the asylum-seekers, but 254 died in the Holocaust, including Judith Steel’s parents at the notorious Auschwitz death camp.
Steel’s last memory of her father was holding his hand, being told to look off in the distance, and feeling someone else take her hand — saving her from the train the next day that took her parents to Auschwitz.
The apology “takes some of that heaviness away from me and I certainly appreciate that,” Steel said.
Between 1933 and 1945, Canada admitted the fewest Jews of any Allied country, Trudeau said. Of those Canada did let in, about 7,000 Jews were held as prisoners of war and jailed alongside Germans captured on battlefields, he said.