WASHINGTON — “If you find any trace of my brother, would you drop me a note please?”
Leo Stark doesn’t know what happened to his younger brother, Paul. He is fairly certain that he was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 — three years after Cuban and U.S. officials denied him safe haven in 1939 as a passenger aboard the S.S. St. Louis. But Leo cannot be sure without proof.
Researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington have been driven for two years by the same desire to know what happened to Paul Stark — as well as the 935 other passengers aboard the St. Louis, most of whom were forced back to European soil a month before the war began.
The small corps of researchers is racing to meet a May deadline, when the museum plans to mark the 60th anniversary of the steamboat’s journey.
Since the project began, the researchers have traced the fate of most of the passengers.
In November, 40 passengers remained on the missing persons list. Two months later, with the help of a Yad Vashem researcher in Jerusalem and with calls prompted by a Jewish Telegraphic Agency article, researchers have crossed 20 more names off the list.
At the same time, Scott Miller, coordinator of the Holocaust museum’s St. Louis project, has added 17 names back to the list to further verify their stories.
“We’re being cautious,” Miller said. “We’d rather keep people on the list because it gives us more time to reach people and fill in the blanks.”
Most of the passengers gained entry to Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, which offered visas to many of them when the St. Louis steamer docked in Antwerp. But when the Germans invaded the latter three countries, Jews became their first targets.
Many passengers survived by hiding, which ironically, makes them harder to trace. The Nazis kept detailed records, meaning it’s easier to track the fate of a victim than of a survivor. Miller estimates slightly more than half of the passengers escaped the Nazis’ Final Solution.
But Miller said the goal is not just to determine whether people lived or died, “but to know how they survived.”
As the search narrows and sources begin to run dry, Miller said, finding people like Leo Stark makes the task worth every tough moment.
Although Stark couldn’t tell them what had happened to his brother, he did provide information on his grandmother, Helene Spira. The story of Spira, who was still a “missing person” when JTA published the list in November, is now known because a woman in Florida called the museum after a friend read the article.
Miller said the woman’s information led them to Long Island, N.Y., where Stark lives. Spira’s story of hiding in the attic of a pharmacist near Brussels and secret visits to see Leo in northern France during the war transformed her from a statistic to a person with a detailed, riveting past.
The story of the St. Louis will be the theme of the Days of Remembrance showcase in the Capitol Rotunda for a week around Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is April 13. A reunion is also planned for the survivors in May.