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By Associated press
TORONTO – Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau officially apologized on behalf of his country on Wednesday for the refusal of a ship filled with Jewish refugees trying to flee Nazi Germany in 1939.
The German ship MS St. Louis was carrying 907 German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. This ship had also been rejected by Cuba and the United States. Passengers were forced to return to Europe and more than 250 later died in the Holocaust.
Trudeau called the long-awaited apology.
Hitler "observed that we refused their visas, ignored their letters and banned them from entering," Trudeau told Parliament.
"There is no doubt that our silence allowed the Nazis to propose their" final solution "to the so-called Jewish problem."
He said lawmakers at the time used Canadian law to mask anti-Semitism.
"We let anti-Semitism settle in our communities and become our official policy," Trudeau said. "To have such hatred and indifference towards refugees, was to share the moral responsibility of their death."
In the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust that followed, the government took into account anti-Semitic sentiment and severely curtailed Jewish immigration. From 1933 to 1945, only about 5,000 Jewish refugees were accepted.
The ship arrived in Canada more than six months after the German Nazis attacked Jewish homes and businesses, burned 250 synagogues and killed at least 91 people, during a night christened Kristallnacht, "The Night of the Glass" breeze".
Before the apology, Trudeau met Ana Maria Gordon, a St. Louis passenger living in Canada, to explain how the country could fight anti-Semitism.
