El buque St. Louis: Cuba y el Holocausto.

I feel a deep sense of shame. I was 10-year-old the first time I heard about the Saint Louis, a luxury ocean liner that set sail the night of May 13, 1939 with more than 900 Jewish refugees on board fleeing Nazi Germany for Cuba.

My grandmother, the daughter of Catholic Spanish immigrants, was pregnant with my mom when the ship arrived in Cuba. What happened there —and after they left the port of Havana— deeply impacted her, and she never tired of telling me all throughout my childhood that for the next 100 years Cuba would pay dearly for what it had done to the Jewish refugees.

For a week, they remained in front of the coast of Havana, ready to disembark. The world turned a deaf ear on the desperate screams of the refugees.

On June 2^nd, Cuban President Federico Laredo ordered the ship to leave Cuban territorial waters.

Desperate, the Jewish refugees returned to Europe. Some found asylum in the United Kingdom, France, Holland, Belgium. Only the 287 who were allowed to stay in England survived the ravages of war.

A fictional retelling of this tragic event, my novel, The German Girl is a story of loss, upheaval, diaspora and love. It is about our fear of those considered “other”, of the refugee, of the one who worships a different God or speaks a different language. This pervasive fear has deeply impacted my life ever since I left my home in Havana for New York in 1991.