Survivors take apology to heart for 1939 refusal of asylum for German Jews
OTTAWA — Judith Steel remembers holding her father’s hand, being told to look off to the right for a moment, and feeling someone else take her hand.
Her father was turning her over to an organization that was rescuing children from Rivesaltes, a military camp in southern France where Jews were sent before German forces took them east into the Reich. The next day, her father and mother would be loaded on a train, destined for the Auschwitz death camp in Poland.
“I never saw my parents again,” Steel said Wednesday morning.
They were among the 254 passengers of the MS St. Louis who would die in the Holocaust, a fate Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said could have been avoided had the Canadian government not closed its ports to the ocean liner 79 years ago.