Alex's Wake: A Voyage of Betrayal and a Journey of Remembrance
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0306823225
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
On May 13, 1939, the luxury liner SS St. Louis sailed away from Hamburg, Germany, bound for Havana, Cuba. On board were more than 900 Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany. But an indifferent world conspired against them. After being denied landing rights in Havana, the refugees were turned away by the United States and Canada and forced to sail back to Europe, where the gathering storm of the Holocaust awaited them.
Two of those refugees were Alex Goldschmidt, a sixty-year-old veteran of World War I, and his seventeen-year-old son Klaus Helmut Goldschmidt. After their trans-Atlantic voyage, they landed in France. They would spend the next three years in one French camp after another before being shipped to Auschwitz in 1942.
Sixty-nine years later, Martin Goldsmith, Alex's grandson and Helmut's nephew, retraced their sad journey. Beginning in lower Saxony where Alex was born, Martin spent six weeks on the road and covered more than 5,700 miles, setting foot on the earth Alex and Helmut trod during their final days. Alex's Wake is Martin's eyewitness report.
The book offers a compelling history of the voyage of the St. Louis, including testimony from those on board, a tale of espionage, and the brave resolve of Captain Gustav Schroeder. It also offers a harrowing chronicle of the vast network of camps in France, many of which were organized by the French themselves with little or no encouragement from the Germans.
But Alex's Wake is also a contemporary travelogue and a heartfelt memoir of a second-generation American Jew trying to make sense of his heritage and to escape the burden of guilt and fear he long thought was his sole inheritance. Setting forth with the irrational, impossible desire to save two members of his family who were murdered ten years before he was born, Goldsmith concludes his journey by coming home to a moving symbol of remembrance at one of the scenes of the crime.
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After 2½ years of internment we would indeed be on the point of despairing, which is in itself quite possible after all this disheartening, bleak time, then your nice words would change nothing. I see nothing but words, nice words, suitable for a magazine that thinks it’s giving its readers encouragement. They are the same words I heard when I came home on furlough, spoken by those who had not heard the whistle of bullets during the First World War. But that you believe you have to give us that.
Hangout of artists and their hangers-on during the dancing decade of the 1920s. We agree wholeheartedly with Thomas Jefferson, who declared that “a walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and the very point of life.” We also stop at the Shoah Museum to see its Wall of Names, erected in tribute to the Jews who were sent to the East, a wall that includes the engraved names of Alex and Helmut Goldschmidt. We break away from the crowds surrounding Notre Dame to visit a sheltered.
“And we are here because Carsten and Monica decided to make a brave declaration by affixing a tangible statement of remembrance to this beautiful house . . . to their beautiful house. They did not have to do this, yet they have chosen to do it. They are among the people of Oldenburg who have made me and my family feel welcome, to feel as though we belong here and that when we pass within the boundaries of this city we are coming home. “Thank you, Carsten and Monica. Thank you for having the.
At sea,” insisted that the root of the issue was the root of all evil: not the failure to touch Cuban hearts but the “failure of touching Cuban palms. And we don’t mean trees.” Another telegram arrived at the White House addressed to President Roosevelt, this one from a number of Hollywood actors, among them Miriam Hopkins and Edward G. Robinson. It read, “In name of humanity urge you bring all possible influence on Cuban authorities to radio return of German liner St. Louis, now at sea returning.
Jews as the year they were expelled from Spain. But a century earlier, in 1394, the Jews were forced to leave the kingdom of France. Over the next four hundred years, about forty thousand Jews managed to make their way back into France, with most of them toiling in rural regions and only about five hundred allowed to make a life in the thriving capital of Paris. But then came the French Revolution, and to the astonishment, perhaps, of the Jews themselves, they learned that the Declaration of the.