The St. Louis: a ship no one was waiting for

In the spring of 1939, the liner St. Louis left Hamburg with more than 900 passengers, nearly all German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. In Cuba, the government refused to recognize their visas. The ship stayed off the American coast, but neither the United States nor Canada agreed to take it in. In June 1939, Ottawa closed the door, when the ship was only two days from the port of Halifax.

Yet on June 7, 1939, 41 citizens of Toronto, including the historian George Wrong, wrote to Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King asking him to offer the passengers refuge. Their appeal went unheard. The St. Louis returned to Europe, where its passengers were divided among the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 254 of them would die in the Holocaust.

On November 7, 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered an official apology in the House of Commons to the passengers and their families. Since 2011, a sculpture, the "Wheel of Conscience," has recalled their story at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax. History also remembers those 41 signatures: proof that even when a country shuts itself off, citizens can choose to reach out.