BY SARAH STEPHEN
The SS St Louis left Hamburg, Germany in May 1939 with 937 Jewish refugees aboard. They had paid $150 each for permission to land in Cuba, a huge sum of money at that time. Most were on a waiting list for entry into the United States.
When they arrived, the Cuban government tightened its anti-immigration laws and refused all but 22 people the right to land. Police used spotlights on the harbour to make sure no one jumped overboard and tried to swim to relatives waiting in boats nearby. One man slashed his wrists and jumped overboard. Others attempted suicide.
When Cuba turned the ship away, the passengers pleaded with every country in the western hemisphere for asylum, but all the pleas fell on deaf ears. US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't even have the courtesy to answer their telegrams.
The ship sat in the harbour off Havana for two weeks. As the ship's captain sailed past Florida with frantic pleas that they be able to land, the US government gave orders that they be kept out of the country. The St Louis was followed by the US coastguard to make sure the ship didn't land.
The passengers couldn't even get visas to Australia, a delegate having told an international conference in 1938 that Australia "does not have a racial problem, and [is] not desirous of importing one".
Canada infamously responded "none is too many". The head of its immigration department said no country could "open its doors wide enough to take in the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who wanted to leave Europe; the line must be drawn somewhere".
When no country would take the refugees, the captain was forced to return to Europe where — at the last moment — Belgium, France, the Netherlands and England agreed to share responsibility for them.
Only the 288 Jewish refugees who went to England were spared deportation to Nazi camps, as Germany conquered the other three nations shortly after. By the end of the Holocaust, less than 450 of the original 937 passengers of the St Louis survived Hitler's concentration camps.