Lessons on surviving hate
Ana Maria Gordon was 4 when she boarded the St. Louis, full of Jews escaping Germany in 1939. A new novel has brought its fateful journey back into the spotlight — as has the election of Donald Trump
Seventy-five years ago, little Ana Maria Gordon boarded the SS St. Louis in Germany with almost 1,000 Jews seeking shelter from the Nazis. Many countries, including Canada, rejected them, dooming hundreds to death in concentration camps. With intolerance again rising around the world, she explains why, when it comes to hatred, any is too much
Just 4 years old when she boarded the ship, Ana Maria Gordon remembers little about the actual voyage or the harrowing events that prompted it. But she hopes it is never forgotten. “It’s important, especially in times like these, that people know about the St. Louis,” the Toronto resident says, referring to far-right movements from the U.S. to eastern Europe.
The SS St. Louis, a transatlantic luxury liner, left the port of Hamburg on May 13, 1939 — four months before the onset of war — bound for Havana.
On board were some 937 Jewish refugees from Germany and nearby countries — all of them suffering persecution during the prelude to a coming Nazi genocide.
They sailed into heartache and infamy — on a doomed voyage that would ultimately lead most of them back to Europe and its death camps. The journey is recounted in a new novel, The Ger
man Girl, by Armando Lucas Correa. Earlier this year, Canadian writer Allison Lawlor published a historical account, The Saddest Ship Afloat.
Cuban-born Correa — editor of the popular U.S. Spanish-language magazine People en Espanol — dedicated the book to Gordon and several other St. Louis survivors.
Most of the ship’s passengers had bought, cajoled or begged for visas to enter the Caribbean nation and many had spent their life’s savings on those papers and their passage.
Gordon’s father, Richard Karman, was a travelling coffee wholesaler from Kosice, a cultural centre in what is now Slovakia, who used virtually all his modest means to get his family on the ship. It would be the last to carry Jews out of Germany.
And when Gordon, her parents and aunt and uncle came aboard in early May, they took up tourist-class quarters.
“But we had visas, we had immigration papers, they paid a lot of money for (them) and they were signed by the government of Cuba.” Under the command of German Captain Gustav Schroeder, the fleeing passengers were treated with a dignity being systematically denied them in their homelands.
“He was a wonderful man, a wonderful man,” says Gordon, 81. “He was a real captain who said ‘my passengers come first.’ ”
Like Oskar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame, Schroeder, who died in 1959, would be honoured posthumously with the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel. He insisted his crew extend all normal services and courtesies to the refugees during the voyage, providing them with the opulent trappings offered on any luxury cruise at the time.
Reports of the first few days at sea tell of ballroom dances, swimming lessons and black-tie dinners.
Soon, however, the blithe normalcy was doused by troubling rumours that overran the ship.
“As soon as the boat left Hamburg, the president of Cuba issued a decree saying that none of (the) visas were valid,” says Daniel Gruner, 59, the eldest of Gordon’s four children.
Gordon adds: “People heard things and started getting nervous, you felt the atmosphere was changing.”
Gruner, a chemical physicist, says the Cuban reversal was likely based more on greed than rank anti-Semitism.
“Basically what they wanted was more money, but nobody had any more money,” Gruner says, noting that German laws forced emigrating Jews to leave all but a pittance of their assets behind.
Thus, when the St. Louis arrived at Havana’s harbour on May 27, it was denied a docking space for six days.
“They didn’t let us off the ship,” Gordon says. Only about 30 passengers were allowed to disembark in Cuba, and pleas for the rest to enter the U.S. — where most had hoped to settle — were also denied.
So, too, were requests to the Canadian government, fully aware of the abuse the passengers faced at home, that this country take them in. The phrase “none is too many,” which came to describe this country’s Jewish immigration policies of the
1930s and ’40s, has become closely associated with the ship, which was forced back to Europe with 907 refugees aboard.
The phrase, and the ship’s history, has come up many times in the past 18 months during the debate over the country’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis.
Coincidentally, Cuba’s historical human rights record has also come under scrutiny following the death of Fidel Castro, including by critics of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s message of condolence.
In June 1939, the return journey to Europe was so fraught that the St. Louis crew had to beat back a mutiny launched by a group of young passengers.
But Schroeder, who refused to return them to Germany, helped negotiate asylum for his passengers in Britain, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, where Gordon’s family settled.
They were not settled for long. The German invasion of the latter three countries in 1940 placed the bulk of the St. Louis passengers back in Nazi crosshairs and an estimated 250 would die in the Holocaust.
Gordon’s father was sent to the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp west of Leipzig, while she and her mother, Sidonie, wound up in the Ravensbruck camp for women, north of Berlin.
Because he was married to a non-Jewish German, Gordon’s uncle was forced to choose between sterilization and camp internment. He picked sterilization.
Her relatives survived the war. Gordon’s father was liberated by Soviet forces, while she and her mother were freed by the Swedish Red Cross just before the war’s end.
Though her memories of the St. Louis journey are vague, those of her time in Ravensbruck, which she entered at age 8, are clear and painful.
“What do I remember? Too much,” she says during a recent interview at her elegant Moore Park apartment, near Yonge St. and St. Clair Ave. “I was there close to two years. It was awful, just awful.”
Taken to Sweden after the war, Gordon and her mother found her father’s name on a Red Cross list of camp survivors — which also placed him back in Holland.
“My father was thin as a stick,” she recalls of the Amsterdam reunion. “They had fattened (my mother and me) up in Sweden a bit.”
In 1946 the family joined an uncle who had escaped to Mexico before the war, and Gordon attended school, married a chemical engineer and raised her children in Mexico City.
After a divorce, she married a pharmaceutical manufacturer and moved with her new husband to Los Angeles, where she lived for 24 years. After her second husband died, she moved to this city seven years ago to join Gruner, who had come here in 1980 to do his graduate degree at the University of Toronto.
Asked if she still harbours resentments toward Canada and the U.S. for turning back her boat, Gordon answers softly.
“At this stage after so many years, you know . . .” she says before trailing off in a shrug and a sigh.
“But you never forget and you shouldn’t forget.”
Remembering is particularly important now for Gordon, who hears fraught drumbeats of her childhood in the ultranationalist movements emerging in Europe and the U.S.
“These things happen . . . and I’m afraid that they can happen” again, she says.
She points to the U.S. election, where Donald Trump rode a nasty nationalist wave to the presidency.
“It’s quite scary the way he talks.”
“These things happen . . . and I’m afraid that they can happen (again.)” ANA MARIA GORDON WHO SURVIVED A NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP