THE HUNT FOR SURVIVORS OF A DOOMED SHIP (S.S. St. Louis)

by Lyric Wallwork Winik for Parade Magazine, December 7, 2003, pp.4-6.

Sarah Ogilvie and Scott Miller worked for nearly a decade on a remarkable detective story.

It was the moment when the Holocaust reached America's shores, and Americans chose to look away.

On May 13, 1939, at precisely 8 p.m., the S.S. St. Louis left its dock in Hamburg, (Germany). On board were 937 Europeans, most of them Jews, fleeing Nazi persecution. They included families with grandparents and grandchildren, as well as single men and children traveling alone. Some already had been in concentration camps. Many had spent $500 on individual tickets, plus more to buy the precious landing permits. Their destination was Cuba.

Fourteen days later, upon their arrival in Havana, the passengers discovered that a corrupt Cuban government had revoked their landing permits. The St. Louis pressed north to Florida. The ship circled the waters off Miami, close enough to see the city's bright lights. Urgent cables were sent to every level of the U.S. government, including two personal appeals to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, He never replied. Instead, Coast Guard boats patrolled to prevent anyone from swimming to shore.

On June 7. 1939, the St. Louis was forced to recross the Atlantic. England, France, Holland and Belgium agreed to divide up the passengers. But their safe haven did not last long. By the following May, the Nazis had begun to overrun Western Europe.

What happened to the passangers?

For nearly 60 years, it was assumed that most of the passengers had been lost among the millions of victims of the Nazis. At best, their fate was an unanswerable question.

But that did not deter a young Virginia-born historian named Sarah Ogilvie. Ogilvie was not Jewish, but her father, a World War II veteran, had served in a Displaced Persons camp after the war. "We had many dinner-table discussions about the Holocaust and why it happened:" she recalls. When her husband was offered a job in Washington, D.C., in 1989, Ogilvie took a research position at the soon-to-opened United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Ogilvie was made director of the museum's Survivors Registry--a database that documents the fates of individual European Jews caught up in the Holocaust. (The database currently includes more than 185,000 names and biographical records of survivors and their descendants.)

Many survivors came in person to register. One week, Ogilvie spoke to four people who said they had been on the St. Louis. It made her wonder about the fate of the 933 other passengers of the doomed ship.

The Hunt Is On

Working in her spare time, Ogilvie located the passenger list of the St. Louis and compared the names on it to those in the registry and other museum lists. Several hundred names matched. She prevailed on an intern to search further through immigration files. Twenty more names matched. Ogilvie pressed colleague after colleague to locate additional information. "When people saw me coming, many would turn and walk the other way," she remembers with a smile.

"I was one of those who turned the other way," says Scott Miller, now the director of the registry. "I thought almost all the passengers had perished." But following Ogilvie's lead, Miller placed a newspaper ad in Israel and was stunned to hear from a new St. Louis survivor the very next day. "I found not just a fate but a story," he says. His partnership with Ogilvie was sealed.

Over the next seven years, their search for survivors of the St. Louis would cover six continents. No thread was too slender. Ogilvie and Miller scoured data-bases and the Internet. They checked Social Security indexes. They looked at cemetery burial cards and pored over old phone books in cities across the U.S.

They found passengers in the unlikeliest places. One, Arthur Hamburger, was buried in Boise, Idaho; another, Hans Warschawsky, had fled to Chile and changed his name to Juan. A 14-year-old passenger named Karl Kirchhausen was drafted into the U.S. Army at the start of the Korean War. He was taken prisoner by the Chinese and was the first American POW to be exchanged in 1953. They even found a family--Leon, Johanna and Guenther Joel--that was related to the singer Billy Joel.

"We found close relatives who didn't know what had happened to each other." Miller recalls. One woman learned for the first time that her brother-in-law had had a twin brother who died in the Holocaust.

Thanks to Ogilvie and Miller, the fates of 935 out of the 937 men, women and children on the ship are now known. Of the 619 who were sent to France, Holland or Belgium and fell under Nazi occupation, about 260 were deported to killing centers. The majority of them died. The rest ultimately reached nations around the globe, from Argentina to Australia and the U.S.

"These people did not just disappear into the mists or the ovens of history", says Ruth Mandel the vice chair of the Holocaust Memorial Council, who was an infant on the St. Louis. "Each landed some where and was rescued or persecuted. Unfortunately, the horrors of human behavior still have not disappeared."

"I hope that our project's legacy is a greater understanding of the human toll that results from the decisions made by governments and even individuals," says Olgivie.

A Blank Spot in Their Hearts

What moved Ogilvie and Miller most was hearing from the St. Louis survivors themselves--and from people who had known them. They heard stories of escape, like that of a man and his 5-year-old daughter who walked across the border to Switzerland.

And they heard poignant stories of passengers who had hidden from the Nazis. Judith Koeppel had been a baby on the St. Louis. "She remembers her parents giving her away before they were deported to Auschwitz," says Miller. "Her father held her hand and brought her to a spot in their internment camp in France. Then he let go of her hand. A stranger reached down and took it. That was the person who helped hide her." Koeppel later emigrated with other orphans to the U.S. She was 8 years old. "A document couldn't tell that story," Miller adds.

Like Koeppel, at least 460 passengers eventually arrived in the U.S. Ruth Mandel and her parents, who had been sent to England. were among them. "My parents never forgot that they were turned away here," she says, "hut I didn't hear bitterness. They were very grateful to those who opened their doors to them."

But not everyone feels that way. "Nearly all the survivors have been relatively successful here," notes Miller, "but there's a blank spot in their hearts, a sense of being double-crossed."

He cites a woman named use Marcus, now 88 and living in Washington Heights, N.Y. "She had been a new bride on the St. Louis," says Miller. "Her husband and parents were killed. She never remarried, and her bitterness is still palpable."

Herbert Karliner, now of Miami, was 12 when the St. Louis sailed. "I had always wanted to come to the U.S.," he says. "We couldn't understand why a big country like the U.S. wouldn't let in 937 people. Watching the lights of Miami Beach burn at night, I said to myself, 'Someday I'm going to come back here."'

Karliner and his brother survived the war hiding in France. Their parents and two sisters died at Auschwitz. After the war, the brothers reached the United States, and Herb became a baker. He remembers when the U.S. Coast Guard rescued 125,000 Cubans in the Mariel boatlift of 1980. "It hurts," he says. "We were 937. My parents and my sisters could have been alive."

Do You Know What Became Of These St. Louis Passengers?

The Survivors Registry at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is still seeking testimony on the fate of the St. Louis passengers, particularly these two who remain unaccounted for:

ANNA GOLDBAUM (maiden name: Marien), born Dec. 12, 1875, in Wrietzen, Germany. She was a widow and was sent to Belgium. Her son, Eric Goldbaum, was born January 15, 1899 in Berlin. He came to the U.S. in the 1930s, changed his last name to Godal and worked for Pictorial Publications in Manhattan. After the war, he returned to Germany as a graphic artist using the name Guy deLaurence. He died in 1969.

ROSALIE MOSER (maiden name: Moses), born April 12, 1877, in Horn, Germany. She and her husband, Edmund. who was born in Helmstedt, Germany lived in Prague and were Czech citizens. After the St. Louis returned to Europe, the Mosers were sent to France. Edmund survived the war, arrived in New York City, in 1947 and died in 1948.

The museum also is seeking more information on these passengers:

ALFRED BEIFUSS, 5/7/1 890, of Laasphe, Germany

HEINRICH GABEL, 10/15/1910, of Berlin, Germany

FRITZ GOLDSCHMIDT, 5/4/1907, of Kitzingen, Germany

MERCEDES, RAMIRA AND ZEZA MENENDEZ, ages 15, 14, and 13 in 1939, all residents of Cuba (traveling from Lille, France)

HANS MEYERSTEIN, 3 /21/1 935, of Halle, Germany

FERDINAND RYNDSIONSKI, 1/31/1916, of Stuttgart, Germany

JOSEPH SINGER, 4/11/1927, of Leipzig, Germany

WALTER SCHUEFFTAN, 37 in 1939, of Brieg, Poland

ISTVAN WINKLER, 27 in 19391939; last residence was Budapest, Hungary.

If you can help, e-mail smiller@ushmm.org or write: Scott Miller, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, S.W., Washington, D.C. 20024.

For more on the S.S. St. Louis, visit www. parade. corn on the Web