Trudeau Apologizes for Canada’s Turning Away Ship of Jews Fleeing Nazis

TORONTO — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood in Parliament Wednesday and apologized for Canada’s decision to turn away a steamliner full of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany on the eve of the Holocaust 79 years ago, saying it reflected years of regrettable anti-Semitic foreign policy.

The Canadian government at the time, run by the same Liberal party that Trudeau leads today, refused to allow the steamliner, the St. Louis, to land in June 1939 after it had been blocked from docking at its original destination, Havana. The boat was filled with more than 900 passengers, most of them Jews who had fled Germany four months before World War II began.

“We apologize to the mothers and fathers whose children we did not save, to the daughters and sons whose parents we did not help,” Trudeau said.

The United States also refused the captain’s desperate pleas for asylum, as did Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Panama. In the end, the boat returned to Europe, but not to Germany. Jewish organizations secured them visas to Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. But, as Germany expanded its territory, some 254 were captured and killed in Nazi death camps.

“We refused to help them when we could have. We contributed to sealing the cruel fates of far too many at places like Auschwitz, Treblinka and Belzec. We failed them. And for that, we are sorry,” said Trudeau, wearing a red poppy on the lapel of his suit as is Canadian tradition in November to mark Remembrance Day.

Since he was elected three years ago, Trudeau has made apologizing a regular ritual, even by Canadian standards. The apologies, in large part, are a reflection of the country’s continued struggle to atone for its colonial and racist past, particularly when it comes to its treatment of First Nations people.

While some have begun to roll their eyes, other Canadians say they are proud the country is making amends.

Canadians today tend to think of their country as compassionate and tolerant. But its position on Jewish refugees before, during and after the war was infamously articulated by one government official at the time: None is too many.

Britain accepted 70,000 Jewish refugees between the rise of Hitler in Germany in 1933 and the end of the war in 1945. The United States took in 200,000. Vast and underpopulated Canada accepted 5,000.

Trudeau’s apology came less than two weeks after a gunman opened fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing 11 worshippers, and at a time when anti-Semitism is rising across North America. It was not lost on many that it was delivered the day after a U.S. election campaign marked by refugee-bashing.

“The rhetoric we are hearing across the border is very similar to the rhetoric we heard in the 1930s — the vilification of the other, the vilification of the press. It’s really scary,” said Danny Gruner, who attended Wednesday’s apology with his mother, Ana Maria Gordon, the sole survivor of the St. Louis living in Canada today.

Gordon, who met with Trudeau privately, was surrounded by many of her great-grandchildren and grandchildren.

Last week, Trudeau apologized to a British Columbia First Nation for the government’s treachery in inviting six Tsilhqot’in chiefs to peace talks 150 years ago. Instead of talking, the government arrested them, put them on trial and hanged them.

He apologized to Omar Khadr, the only Canadian who was held at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And he emotionally apologized to gay men and women targeted by homophobic laws.

“You will not remove the guilt from the perpetrators of the horror,” Gruner said. “But at least you can come to terms with what the country was at the time, and try to understand where we are at this particular time and where we want to be.”

On Wednesday, Trudeau mentioned the growing anti-Semitism that has bubbled up in Canada, as it has in the United States, and vowed to stamp it out.

“Canada and all Canadians must stand up against xenophobic and anti-Semitic attitudes that still exist in our community, in our schools and in our places of work,” he said.

That legacy continued as the country accepted around 50,000 refugees fleeing the Syrian war in recent years.

But after Trudeau tweeted that refugees were welcome in Canada, “regardless of your faith,” and asylum-seekers began to flood across the border from the United States into Canada, the topic of immigration has become politically heated in the country again.