They could have survived...

Hanna Papanek is a member of the First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Bedford, Mass., and has recently published a book in Germany about her family's life as political exiles during the Holocaust. She is featured in "Heroes of the Spirit," the UUSC documentary about the founding of the Unitarian Service Committee.

She will deliver these remarks to her Bedford congregation on the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY 2007

This year, Holocaust Remembrance Day will be observed on Sunday April 15, but the events of what we call the Holocaust must be remembered every day of every year. It is a day to reflect not only on the horrors of those days but also on what we ourselves can do to prevent the ongoing horrors of today’s genocides, like the persecutions, rapes, and killings now going on in Darfur.

History may help to remind us of what needs to be done.

In Germany, the targeted destruction of Jews, Socialists, and Communists, of Gypsies and homosexuals, of the mentally ill, and others judged "unworthy of life" between 1933 and 1945 was the largest genocide ever systematically carried out by a government.

Most of the rest of the world turned a blind eye to these events, even as they became known. Courageous individuals, including a few American Unitarians, and many other organizations, helped to rescue some of the persecuted, but concerted government action, especially by the United States, could have made a much bigger difference!

One story from my own experience can make that clear: From 1939 to 1940, I lived in a Children’s Home in France with about four hundred other refugee children. About fifty of them had come from the S.S. St. Louis, the ship that had left Hamburg for Havana in early 1939, with one thousand Jews aboard, all with valid visas for Cuba issued by the Cuban government.

Most of the families had also applied for immigration visas to the US but they couldn’t yet enter the country because "their numbers had not yet come up." US immigration laws set a strict limit on the numbers of people who could enter in any one year. Applicants had to wait their turn, sometimes for several years.

Although a few hundred political refugees, including my own family, managed to get temporary Emergency Visitors’ Visas with the help of a small rescue effort organized by American labor unions and the Jewish Labor Committee, Congress was unwilling to change the immigration laws, even though tens of thousands of desperate refugees were trying to escape the Nazis.

The passengers on the St. Louis who had applied for US immigration visas had thought they would wait in Cuba for their visa numbers to come up. But by the time they landed in Havana, the Cuban government had changed its mind and refused to let them in.

Desperate attempts to persuade the US State Department to allow the thousand passengers into the US fell on deaf ears.

The ship turned back toward Hamburg, cruising along the coast of Florida, in full sight of Miami, while Jewish organizations and others begged President Roosevelt to let it land. But it didn’t happen. When the ship was halfway across the Atlantic, word came that four European countries, including France, would each accept 250 passengers, so they did not have to return to Germany.

In France, most of the families were split up: the parents were assigned to several small towns and the children came to our Children’s Home. We called them The Cubans. Children will do that.

In 1941, after France had been defeated by Germany and parts of the country were occupied, the Vichy French government started to register Jews; in 1942, registered Jews were rounded up, all on the same summer day, loaded into trains and sent to Germany.

A couple of years ago, I forced myself to look through the lists of those who were deported in the three weeks after that August day. I found the names of thirteen children I remembered from the Children’s Homes, along with the names of twenty-one of their relatives. Many were from the group we called The Cubans. Although many of the children from the Children’s Homes eventually made it to the United States, these thirteen did not. They were murdered in Auschwitz with their parents, thirty five in all.

Not very many, when you think of the total number of victims, around six million. But they were thirteen children whom I had known, with whom I had lived under one roof.

They could have survived....