Plot
Based on actual events, this film tells the story of the 1939 voyage of the MS St. Louis, which departed from Hamburg, carrying 937 Jews from Germany, ostensibly to Havana, Cuba. The passengers, having seen and suffered rising anti-Semitism in Germany realised that this might be their only chance to escape. The film details the emotional journey of the passengers who gradually become aware that their passage was planned as an exercise in propaganda and that it had never been intended that they disembark in Cuba. Rather, they were to be set-up as Pariahs: an example before the world. As a Nazi official staets in the film, when the whole world has refused to accept them as refugees, no country can blame Germany for the fate of the Jews.
The Cuban Government refuses entry to the passengers, and as the liner waits off the Florida coast, they learn that the United States also has rejected them, leaving the ship no choice but to return to Europe. The captain tells a confidante that he has received a letter signed by 200 passengers saying they will join hands and jump into the sea rather than return to Germany. He states his intention to run the liner aground on a reef off the southern coast of England.
Shortly before the film's end, it is revealed that the governments of the United Kingdom, Belgium, France and the Netherlands have each agreed to accept a share of the passengers as refugees. As they cheer and clap at the news, footnotes disclose the fates of some of the main characters, suggesting that more than 600 of the 937 passengers, not making it to the UK, ultimately lost their lives in Nazi concentration camps.
The true death toll is unclear. The book of these events estimates a much lower number of deaths: By using the survival rates for Jews in various countries, Thomas and Morgan-Witts estimated 180 of the St. Louis refugees in France, 152 of those in Belgium, and 60 of those in the Netherlands would have survived the Holocaust. Adding to these the passengers who disembarked in England, they estimated that of the original 936 refugees (one man died during the voyage), roughly 709 survived and 227 were slain. (See the relevant article.) In 1998, Scott Miller and Sarah Ogilvie of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum traced the survivors from the voyage. The conclusion of their research was that a similar albeit slightly higher total of 254 refugees died at the hands of the Nazis.
Read more about this topic: Voyage Of The Damned
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