Hella Roubicek of Berkeley watched in horror as screaming parents shook their babies over the deck of the S.S. St. Louis in Havana harbor.
Hysterical because they couldn’t disembark from the luxury liner loaded with 907 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939, the parents sought the attention of anyone who could help them.
Upon boarding the ship in Hamburg, San Franciscan Ernest Weil was terrified by the loudspeaker announcement that anyone who brought more than 20 marks on the ship would be shot.
He dumped all the belongings from his pockets into the water.
Walnut Creek resident Miriam Michaelis, just 9 years old during the voyage, remembered that as the St. Louis sat in the waters outside of Cuba’s capital, her father rowed in a small skiff to the giant steamship and shouted consoling words.
Monday, in honor of Yom HaShoah, Michaelis and Weil will recall their voyage 60 years ago at a community service at San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El.
Roubicek will be in Washington to light a candle at the Capitol Rotunda and help inaugurate an exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum commemorating the 60th anniversary of the St. Louis crossing.
Although the voyage has been chronicled as a ticket to death, researchers at the Holocaust Museum have found that about half the Jews on the St. Louis survived World War II.
Instead of following orders to return to Germany, the ship’s captain arranged for the passengers to disembark in four Allied countries — Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Today, 100 ticket-holders are still alive; three reside in the Bay Area.
Weil, 74, born in a small town near the French-German border, was the son of a cattle dealer forced out of business by the Nazis.
On Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” Weil’s father was arrested and temporarily tossed into Dachau. After his release, the family planned its escape from Germany.
A visa to the United States required months or years of waiting. But Cuba was willing to accept landing visas. Weil’s father bought one for each family member at $160 a head. His parents bought Ernest a ticket on the St. Louis, scheduled for a one-time trip to Havana.
The ship left May 13, 1939. A Nazi flag flapped at the mast. Weil was 14 and scared.
“No one knew how we would be treated — it was a German ship,” he said. “To the surprise of our life, we were treated like any other tourist who goes on a pleasure ship. It was shocking and most remarkable.”
During the voyage, Weil hung out with people his age, played pingpong and stuffed himself with food. “It was wonderful just to be without having to fear someone was going to come and hit you,” he said.
After two weeks at sea, the St. Louis reached Havana harbor. The Cuban government nullified the Jews’ landing visas, issued by a corrupt director of immigration who pocketed the refugees’ money.
Aside from a few people with permanent visas, no one got off.
Weil’s brother, already in Cuba, rowed a small boat to the liner and brought two pineapples for Weil.
“When will the ship land?” Weil asked the crew. “Mañana,” they answered.
For each of the five days the ship waited, “tomorrow” was the stated time when everyone would get off.
The ship then turned to Miami for asylum. Weil could see the city’s high-rises. But the Coast Guard met the boat at sea and denied it entry. The captain had to return to Europe.
The boat dumped Weil in France and he was immediately sent to an orphanage. He returned to school and found himself in good care. A few postcards from his parents reached Weil as he waited for his U.S. immigration number to come up.
It did — two weeks before the Nazis invaded Belgium.
Weil took a French steamship straight to the Statue of Liberty. In 1940, the exhausted teen arrived in New York and scrambled to find a job.
Weil never harbored resentment at a country that had denied him entrance a year earlier. “I was much more an optimist than other people who had seen much worse,” he said.
“I was 14 and didn’t have that desperation other people had.”
In remembrance of the orphanage that once took him in, Weil has sent donations for the past 20 years to Frankel Center/Beit Ruth, a school in Israel that serves learning-disabled kids.
Like Weil, Roubicek already had a family member in Cuba when she boarded the St. Louis with her mother. Her father had fled to Havana a few months earlier. Arrested on Kristallnacht in November 1938, he was told he had six months to leave Germany.
Roubicek and her mother were required to purchase roundtrip tickets. “We had to pay for the return trip in advance, just in case. The boat company didn’t want to be out any money,” Roubicek, now 74, said.
An exuberant 12-year-old when she left Germany, Roubicek found the ship elegant and majestic. Every morning she swam in the pool. She helped deliver the ship’s mail to pass the time.
“This was not poverty,” said Roubicek, who was born in Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, a city 30 miles east of Berlin. “We only had three bucks in our pockets but the trip was paid in full. It was a very comfortable journey.”
The grandeur of the voyage came to a screaming halt in Havana, Roubicek remembered. When passengers realized they would not disembark, some went mad. Roubicek saw a man slit his wrists and jump overboard.
“Many of those on board were released from German camps on the condition they wouldn’t return,” she said. “They were panic-stricken.”
When the ship was “just a stone’s throw” from Miami, Roubicek remembers U.S. ships and a plane surrounding it at night. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee tried to convince President Roosevelt to let the Jews land.
Roubicek found out years later in a book on the St. Louis that a lawyer had botched negotiations to land the ship by haggling over a few thousand dollars.
Roubicek and her mother disembarked in the Netherlands and stayed for six months with a French woman in an arrangement worked out by the JDC. Roubicek’s father finally got a visa to the United States, and snatched his family out of Europe six weeks before Hitler tore through Belgium.
For Roubicek, much of the scrambling to get out of Europe was a blur. “There was a sort of a numbness, unawareness” during those years, she said. “I went on day to day and accepted what my parents told me, which wasn’t very much.”
On a trip about 12 years ago to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Roubicek came upon a section on the St. Louis. In a wall-sized picture, she saw her mother pointing down to the Cuban shores.
“It was very shocking to see,” Roubicek remembered. “There’s this woman saying, ‘Let me in.'”
Michaelis’ family had also been separated by the war by the time she boarded the St. Louis in Cherbourg, France. Born in Dusseldorf, Germany, she was sent to Holland after Kristallnacht to wait for a trip that would reunite the family in Cuba. Her father had escaped to Havana in December 1938.
She boarded the steamship with her sister and joined her mother and another sister who had left from Hamburg. They stayed in an enormous stateroom, dressed for parties and gorged on meals.
“The mood was festive and comfortable,” Michaelis, now 69, said in a written testimony. “As a 9-year-old, I was not aware that anything could go wrong. I anticipated being together again with my parents and that’s all that concerned me.”
She remembered the gay mood slowly souring as the boat was rejected from Cuba and then Miami. On the trip back, an “anguished fear” gripped the passengers, she said.
Michaelis’ nightmares had just begun. She docked in Holland and lived there until the Nazis trampled through. They interned Michaelis’ family in Bergen-Belsen. She was 11 and told to extract silk from silkworms.
In 1945, when the war front moved close to the camp, the family was shipped to Auschwitz. While they were en route, British and American troops intercepted the convoy. Michaelis and her sisters were freed, but her mother had died in Bergen-Belsen from disease and malnutrition.
The sisters arrived in New York in December 1945 to meet their father. Instead of holding a bitter grudge against a country that could have saved her life earlier, she was just thankful to be safe.
“I was grateful to finally make it,” said Michaelis, who now devotes her time to family and to sculpting marble and granite.
“I don’t think back; I just think what I have now. After many voyages I finally found my safe harbor.”