In today’s crises, listen for echoes of our past mistakes

It is said that history does not repeat itself, but it echoes. I am reminded of that as I watch the tragic slow-moving caravan of migrants seeking asylum from their desperate and dangerous conditions in Central America.

Which is not to say that they should all be accepted into the United States without vetting. But neither should they be labeled as some invading force of criminals, nor vilified as the president has frequently done, making them a political issue to stoke fears and election turnout among the anti-immigration crowd.

For the most part they are families, parents of children in desperate search of safety from oppression and violence and looking for a safe haven to raise their young. Perhaps they cannot all be given sanctuary in this country, but neither do they warrant our antipathy and our insults.

Flash back to May 1939. Flash back to the SS St. Louis, an ocean liner carrying 900 Jews fleeing the horror and imminent bloodshed of Nazi Germany. They had secured passage by buying escape visas and hoped to reach the Western Hemisphere to find the safety of a friendly country and hopefully the United States. But they were turned away in Havana, Cuba, and not allowed to disembark.

They were repeatedly repulsed from other ports of call.

Many countries, including the United States, had imposed a quota on European refugees. Sound familiar? Just getting out of Germany was almost impossible by 1939, with the borders fast closing up.

The ship then headed toward the Florida coast, but U.S. customs authorities refused to allow the ship to dock. It circled in vain in the Atlantic Ocean for days before it was forced to return to Europe.

The St. Louis made its way to the Belgian port city of Antwerp more than four weeks after having lifted its anchor and steamed away from Germany.

Although not back in Ger- many, nonetheless over 250 of the Jewish passengers on the St. Louis were eventually rounded up and murdered during the Holocaust as the German army occupied large portions of Europe following the outbreak of hostilities later that year. Those travelers became part of Hitler’s Final Solution. Had they had been allowed asylum in the United States during those tragic and fateful days in 1939, those persons would have lived. They would have had children and grandchildren who today would be telling the inspiring story about how this great nation came to their rescue in their desperate hour of need. Instead they were turned away to meet their fate. A stain on American history to be sure.

My mother and her brother were luckier. Their parents in Czechoslovakia put them on a ship in 1937 to come to the United States to live with relatives, ironically in the city of St. Louis. They made it out while so many others could not. I am alive today because they were taken in. My mother never saw or heard from her European family again.

So here we are once more. This time the migrants seeking safe haven come by land and on foot from the south, not across the ocean’s expanse from the east. They speak Spanish, not German or Yiddish. But they seek the same thing as those Jewish refugees from 80 years ago. They seek the same thing our Irish neighbors did when fleeing the grinding poverty of their home country or the waves of immigrants seeking religious freedom from the centuries past.

History echoes. When will we care to listen?

Had they been allowed asylum in the United States during those tragic and fateful days in 1939, those persons would have lived. They would have had children and grandchildren who today would be telling the inspiring story about how this great nation came to their rescue in their desperate hour of need. Instead they were turned away to meet their fate.