--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Sal Sunshine <salsunsh...@...> wrote: <snip> > And in fact, there was at least > one large boatload of Jews from Europe during WW2 > that attempted to land in the US but weren't allowed to, > so it returned to Europe where basically everyone on > it died.
The ship was the "St. Louis" of the Hamburg-America Line. The story was dramatized in 1976 in the film "Voyage of the Damned." Actually, of the 900-some passengers, "only" about 250 died in the Holocaust after they returned to Europe. The whole voyage turned out to have been a propaganda exercise by the Nazis designed to "prove" that no country wanted the Jews, so the Nazis shouldn't be criticized for finding their own solution to the "Jewish problem." Not only the U.S. but Canada and Cuba as well refused permission for the ship to land. When the ship returned to Europe, the passengers were allowed to get off in Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The three latter countries, of course, were ultimately invaded and occupied by the Nazis, so the passengers who ended up there weren't safe for long.
