PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Saturday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the 79th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp during World War II.
Renate Breslow, now 93, was just 8 years old when she boarded SS St. Louis with her mother in 1939. They were trying to escape Nazi Germany but by then, global antisemitism had gotten so bad, the boat had nowhere to dock.
At Cedarbrook Middle School in Wyncote, she shared her story.
“No port wanted to take the Jews in and we purchased legal landing certificates to get legally into Cuba. And still, the Cuban government didn't let us enter,” Breslow said.
The United States also refused entry.
“All of the passengers were in a position to earn their own living,” she said. “We wouldn’t be a drag on the country, but we were Jews.”
After a month at sea, the ship, carrying nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees, was forced to return to Europe, where many of the passengers were eventually murdered by the Nazis they were trying to escape.
Breslow and her mom were taken to a Dutch detention camp.
“What I remember most is I was always hungry — just wasn't enough food and it was very filthy.”
She said they eventually managed to secure boat tickets to New York and escape death.
According to data from the Associated Press, 6 million European Jews and people from other minorities were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust. They say around 560,000 Jews lived in Germany in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power. At the end of World War II in 1945, their numbers had diminished to about 15,000 — through emigration and extermination.
“If there had been a state of Israel to go to, most of European jewry could have been saved,” Breslow said.
Sophie Don, with the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation, said it has taken until now to reach a pre-Holocaust Jewish population.
“Before 1933, before the Holocaust began, and before Hitler's rise to power, there were about 15.7 million Jewish people worldwide,” Don said, “and this past year, in 2023, is when the world's Jewish population was estimated again at 15.7 million.”
Breslow says she tries to raise awareness about the horrors antisemitism brings by sharing her story, but says in October, she witnessed a form of hate she never thought she’d see again in her lifetime.
On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 others to hold as hostages in Gaza.
Three months on, the Israel-Hamas war has killed more than 26,000 Palestinians, destroyed vast swaths of Gaza, and displaced nearly 85% of a population of 2.3 million people.
“I never thought in my lifetime I would witness anything that was worse than the horrific catastrophe that we went through in Germany,” Breslow said.