by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

January 1, 2009

The first part of Scott Miller’s mission was to establish this fact: Almost all the 937 people who managed to escape Nazi-controlled Europe in 1939 aboard the ship the St. Louis ended up back under German control, and 254 died as a result. If they had been permitted to disembark when the ship reached the United States or Cuba, those people would have survived the Holocaust.

The second part of Miller’s mission has been to get out word of that terrible outcome, to make the modern world more mindful of its responsibility to refugees.

To further that aim, he will come to Temple Beth O’r/Beth Torah in Clark on Sunday morning, Jan. 11. Miller, the director of curatorial affairs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, will tell the story of the St. Louis passengers when he gives the annual Edith and Mark Lief Lecture.

Two years ago, Miller brought out a book about those doomed passengers that he coauthored with Sarah Ogilvie, Refuge Denied — The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust. He and Ogilvie, a fellow researcher at the museum, labored for 10 years to find out what happened to the 937 Jews on the boat. They searched through archives in Cuba, Israel, the United States, and European countries. They also tracked down and interviewed friends and relatives of the refugees.

“Finding out what happened to those who died was easier than finding out about those who lived,” he said. “The names of people who were deported were on lists, but many of those who survived changed their names.” In the end, the authors tracked every story. The passengers they met in person, he said, “were touched and surprised that we were interested in what happened to them.” They were also delighted to find out how many of their fellow passengers were still alive. “It’s created a kind of community,” he said.

The story of the St. Louis passengers might be just one tiny part of the picture of persecution and genocide, but Miller and Ogilvie regard their fate as representative of the world’s indifference to Europe’s doomed Jews. Miller told NJ Jewish News he and Ogilvie wanted to reaffirm the individuality of those victims and to remind modern readers of the consequences of the action or inaction of governments and individuals. “The story had added relevance for me,” Miller said, “because it represented an intersection between the American government and the Holocaust.”

Urgent issue

The St. Louis departed from Hamburg, Germany, on May 13, 1939. Virtually all its passengers were German Jews. When they were refused permission to come ashore in both Havana and Miami, the ship turned back to Europe and eventually docked in Antwerp, Belgium. After laborious negotiations, the passengers were allowed to enter Britain, Belgium, Holland, and France. Only those who ended up in Britain found safety. When the other three countries came under Nazi occupation, the refugees again found themselves trapped along with their fellow Jews and the Nazis’ other prey. Many were sent to concentration camps.

The St. Louis project began seven years after Miller started work with the Holocaust museum in 1989, four years before it opened to the public. Like a detective hooked on an unsolved case, he persisted with it while handling different positions. He was research historian for the museum’s Wexner Learning Center and then became program coordinator for its Research Institute. In 2001, he was appointed director of the Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. He also taught Jewish history at the American University in Washington and coedited with Randolph Braham The Nazis’ Last Victims: The Holocaust in Hungary.

Miller was surprised to discover how many of the St. Louis passengers did survive the war. “It might be because many of them had all their paperwork and their admission numbers for the U.S. or for Cuba, and eventually those numbers came up,” he said.

The publication of Refuge Denied, he said, was the culmination of an effort to uncover the fates of a group of Jews who were “literally within sight of freedom,” able to see the twinkling lights of Miami. He and Ogilvie said they hoped its publication would spur “new interest in the ship’s story and what meaning it has for us today.”

With hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes, and many countries — Israel included — faced with refugees’ requests for sanctuary, the issue is as urgent as ever.

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