We embarked on the St. Louis...
on the 14th of May of 1938--
uh, '39.
And, of course, you know, it was a beautiful ship, I guess.
I think the ship had been commissioned less than 10 years before that.
So it was a new ship. It was a cruise ship.
It was very nice.
I remember the dining room.
It was a large dining room.
We traveled certainly not in first class or second class.
I guess we were in third class. I remember we were in the lowest part of the boat.
But we had a porthole, and I remember I could look out...
and I could see the sea, and that was kind of nice.
We arrived in Havana, Cuba on the 27th of May.
I remember it because it was my mother's 34th birthday-- the 27th.
And--
But there had been-- I don't know.
There was some disquiet...
among some of the passengers.
Apparently, there had been rumors...
towards the end of the trip that there were going to be problems.
Don't ask me how those rumors started, or why they started.
I have no idea. But there was a certain disquiet.
And, of course, you know, children feel this.
I realized that there was some-- It wasn't the way it was at the beginning of the trip.
And this was accentuated,
because we didn't actually dock at a pier in Havana Harbor.
We just stayed in the harbor.
And people started saying, "Why aren't we docking?"
Well, at first they said,
"Well, we can't dock until morning."
It was-- I believe it was a Friday evening.
Anyway, the next morning,
the 28th of May, we didn't dock again.
And then,
I don't know exactly when it came out, but we were told...
that the visas which had been issued to the passengers on the St. Louis...
had been declared invalid.
Well, pandemonium broke loose in the ship.
I mean, I just remember some scenes vaguely,
but I remember my parents being extremely upset.
My mother was crying, you can imagine.
And, of course, because my parents and everybody else was upset, I was upset.
I understood. I understood that we might not be able to get off the boat.
Of course, many of these people on the boat...
had relatives in Cuba already.
So what these relatives started doing...
was they hired little fishing boats.
And these fishing boats...
started sailing around the ship...
trying to find-- get a glimpse of their relatives.
And that's where I learned my first Spanish word, which was manana.
Everybody was yelling "manana," which meant, of course, "tomorrow."
"Tomorrow, you'll disembark. Tomorrow, tomorrow."
And there were--
It was a scene, a real scene,
all these fishing boats, you know, just circling around.
A week later-- I believe it was on the 31st--
No, it was June 1, I think.
We started sailing out of Havana harbor.
I don't know if you can imagine...
what people felt.
I mean, here we were. We had left Germany, where it was so terrible.
And here we were, you know,
a few hundred feet away from safety,
and we weren't being allowed to land there.
Well, you know, there was--
The mood on the ship was horrible.
People did threaten to commit suicide.
So the captain apparently told this committee of the passengers...
that what he would do was not sail directly back to Havana--
I'm sorry-- back to Hamburg,
but that he would sail along the coast of Florida...
while more negotiations were going on with Cuba,
so that maybe Cuba would change its mind and we could just go back there.
Also, that we could make representations by telegram and so on...
to the United States Government,
as well as other governments in the Western Hemisphere.
Certainly, the Jewish groups in the United States and Europe...
continued to try to find someplace for us to go...
besides going back to Germany.
And, indeed, I think it was two days...
or one day before we were actually supposed to land in Hamburg...
that we got word that four countries had agreed...
to split up the passengers on the ship-- on the St. Louis--
and those four countries were...
England, France, Belgium and Holland.
We were going to actually...
land in Antwerp.
And then, people who were assigned to the various countries...
would be taken there one way or another.
Now, we ended up in Belgium.
How-- Why we ended up-- How they picked people to go where,
I have no idea.