The Friday after Black Monday, the stock-market crash of 1987, Jack Bonné ’63 attended Sabbath services with his wife at their local temple in Connecticut. Because Bonné, founder of Gateway Asset Management, is an investment manager, several of his friends asked him afterward how he was doing and whether he had survived the crash. “I was speechless because in my mind, the concept of survival is far removed from mere pieces of paper fluctuating in value,” Bonné says. It’s no wonder that Bonné, who escaped from Nazi Germany with his family on the eve of World War II, has been able to meet the ups and downs of the investment business with equanimity for four decades.
As an eight-month-old baby, Bonné was the youngest passenger aboard the SS St. Louis during its famous journey from Hamburg to Cuba in May 1939. Most of the ship’s 937 passengers — Jewish refugees hoping to immigrate to the United States by way of Cuba — had no choice but to return to Europe after they were refused entry by both Cuba and the United States. About half of them perished during the war.
In the late 1930s, as the United States was emerging from the Great Depression, unemployment was high and so was anti-immigration sentiment. A quota system limited the number of immigrants from each country, and the number of applicants from Germany far exceeded the supply of visas.
In September 1938 — two days after Bonné’s birth — his father went to the United States, leaving his family behind in Germany. “He took a ship from Hamburg to Ellis Island, but his immigration number hadn’t come up yet,” Bonné says. Someone suggested to Bonné’s father that he go to Cuba to wait for his U.S. visa. In Havana, while arranging for his family to travel to Cuba, he was advised through some political connections to obtain Cuban immigration visas for them.
As a result, Bonné and his mother and sister were among the 28 St. Louis passengers who were allowed to disembark in Havana. In October 1939, the family received their U.S. visas and moved to New York. Bonné’s sister, Beatrice Sichel, who celebrated her fifth birthday on the ship, still has memories of the five months the family spent in Havana.
Most of the ship’s passengers had purchased landing permits that the Cuban government refused to honor because of a complicated web of greed and political intrigue. After President Franklin Roosevelt denied the refugees’ pleas for asylum and negotiations with several Latin American countries fell through, the St. Louis returned to Europe. Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands offered the passengers haven, but as the German occupation spread across Europe, hundreds of them ended up in concentration camps.
Organized by the Nazis as a propaganda ploy, the voyage of the St. Louis was designed to show that Jews were unwelcome not just in Germany, but throughout the world. A few weeks before the ship arrived in Havana, the German government sent agents to Cuba to stir up anti-Semitic sentiment on the island. Banking on the isolationist, anti-immigration mood in the United States, the Nazis correctly guessed that if Cuba refused to admit the refugees, the United States would not open its doors either.
In May of this year, Bonné and 11 other St. Louis survivors gathered in Cuba to commemorate the 65th anniversary of their journey, which was documented in a 1974 book, Voyage of the Damned, and a 1976 movie of the same name. A Miami pastor organized the reunion in an effort to reconcile the Christian and Jewish communities and seek forgiveness from the St. Louis survivors.
During the week that the ship was anchored outside the harbor, from May 27 to June 2, 1939, the Havana waterfront became a familiar sight to the passengers. Many of them were women and children whose husbands and fathers were waiting for them in Havana. Each day, relatives of the passengers would ride out into the harbor on small boats to wave and shout greetings to loved ones on the ship.
The reunion’s first full day, Friday, May 28, began with a visit to the harbor — an emotional experience for those who remembered looking at Havana from the side of the ship during that long, agonizing week. One of the survivors read Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, and then each reunion participant tossed a rose onto the water.
On Friday evening, the group attended an ecumenical memorial service at a synagogue, where a local rabbi read Kaddish and a Catholic bishop gave a speech asking the survivors for forgiveness. Although the current Cuban regime has no connection to the St. Louis incident, a government representative delivered an apology on behalf of the Cuban nation.
A final gathering on Saturday offered “an opportunity for sharing, healing, storytelling,” Bonné says. “There were a number of people there for whom, even after 65 years, the wounds were still pretty raw. For some of them, they also had to deal with the guilt of those that didn’t make it.”
Jorge Díaz, pastor, brought the final meeting to a close by sounding the shofar, a ram’s horn traditionally used on the Jewish High Holidays. Originally used as an alarm or summons, the shofar is now sounded as a wake-up call to rouse worshipers to take stock of their lives, improve themselves and repair the world.
As the youngest St. Louis survivor, Bonné considers it part of his life’s mission to help keep the story alive as a reminder of the dangers of apathy and indifference in the face of oppression. “As we ended the concluding service,” he says, “Our battle cry as a group was ‘Never again!’”
Photos from left to right: picture postcard of the SS St. Louis; Jack Bonné in Havana during the summer of 1939; typewritten English translation of a message sent by the members of the SS St. Louis Passenger Committee to the Joint Distribution Committee in New York, thanking it for its efforts to find places of refuge for the Jews on board the ship.
Images of the postcard and message used with permission from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org.