Butler David - Voyage of the Damned: A Shocking True Story of Hope, Betrayal, and Nazi Terror

Universal Critical Acclaim For Voyage Of The Damned

Suspense, love, despair, unexpected acts of kindness mixed with treachery, Voyage of the Damned tells one of the most poignant stories in the long march to the furnaces of Hitlers Holocaust... an extraordinary human document and a suspense story that is hard to put down.

The New York Times

Riveting, written with passion, it should be widely read.
Publishers Weekly

Rich in detail... powerful in the writing.
El Pais

Everything about Voyage of the Damned has been touched with greatness.

New York Post

Detailed and meticulous, this admirable work is both an indictment and a thriller. One reads it with a mixture of excitement and anger.

Jewish Chronicle (USA)

Greed and isolationist world politics.

Jewish Times (USA)

Copyright 2010 by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

9781616080129

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

This book is dedicated to those who were the damned, on the St. Louis not only the passengers who are alive today and told their story to us, but all on board the ship, who were caught up in events they did not understand and could not control.

Those who survived the voyage and aftermath are today scattered throughout the worldNorth and South America, Great Britain, Australia, Europe, and, of course, Israel. And also Germany. Some are now wealthy, a few poor. Some still live in fear.

Almost everyone we approached was willing to meet us. One or two found that when the time came they could not bring themselves to recall and relive the experience. The minds of a few, in particular those who were young and impressionable in 1939, are now so cruelly scarred by what happened to them that their mental state led us, regretfully, to conclude their testimony was untrustworthy.

A few agreed to talk to us on condition that they not be quoted. We have respected this wish, understanding their desire for anonymity; what they told us was useful as background information and corroborative evidence. But they, and those unwilling or unable to meet us, were in the minority. For most, telling a stranger things they could hardly bring themselves to discuss with their closest friends seemed therapeutic, almost as if the experience was exorcised by the telling.

Inevitably, the passage of time, the insidious influence of propaganda, a confusion between what they have read and what actually happened, led some we interviewed to mix fiction with fact. We have tried to get around this by relying on interviews with survivors, crew members, and others directly involved with the voyage of the St. Louis, and consulting official archives, diaries, letters, and other eyewitness accounts written at the time.

Our responsibility to those living and dead was to tell the story as impartially and truthfully as the available sources and our combined talents allowed. Voyage of the Damned is not meant to be a crusading book, but it is, we hope, an honest and revealing one.

We thank especially those passengers whose names are listed below. Their experience has taught most of them to revere life, and to respect time. They told us something of the first, and granted us a precious proportion of the second. Without both, this book could not have been written.

Max S. Aber
Otto Bergmann
Rosemarie Bergmann
Hildie Bockow (formerly
Reading)
Meta Bonn
Richard Dresel
Ruth Dresel
Werner Feig
Alice Feilchenfeld
Hans Fisher
Herbert Glass
Herta Glass
Rita Goldstein
Frank Gotthelf
Herman Gronowetter
Lilly Kamin (formerly Joseph)
Carl Lenneberg
George Lenneberg
Gisela Lenneberg
Liesl Loeb (nee Joseph)
Fritz Loewe
Gertrud Mendels (nee
Scheuer)
Pessla Messinger
Frank Metis
George Moss
Thea Moss
Renatta Rippe (nee Aber)
Babette Spanier
Marianne Vargish
(nee Bardeleben)

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send those, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

INSCRIPTION BY EMMA LAZARUS
Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor

Yet there comes a time for forgetting,
for who could live and not forget?
Now and then, however, there must also
be one who remembers.

ALBRECHT GOES,
Das Brandopfer