voyage of the damned

Director: stuart rosenberg

Actor: faye dunaway,oskar werner,lee grant,sam wanamaker

Data Published: Mon Dec 20 1976

Genres: Drama,War

Key Words: nazi germany,travelling,journey,ocean liner,ship captain

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075406/

WIKI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_Damned

Description: Voyage of the Damned is a movie starring Faye Dunaway, Oskar Werner, and Lee Grant. The tragic 1939 voyage of SS St. Louis carrying hundreds of German Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany that seemingly no nation is willing to save...

Plot: Based on historic events, this dramatic film concerns the 1939 voyage of the MS St. Louis, which departed from Hamburg carrying 937 Jews from Germany, ostensibly bound for Havana, Cuba. The passengers, having seen and suffered rising anti-Semitism in Germany, realised this might be their only chance to escape. The film details the emotional journey of the passengers, who gradually become aware that their passage was planned as an exercise in propaganda, and that it had never been intended that they disembark in Cuba. Rather, they were to be set up as pariahs, to set an example before the world. As a Nazi official states in the film, when the whole world has refused to accept the Jews as refugees, no country can blame Germany for their fate. The Cuban government refuses entry to the passengers, and the liner heads to the United States. As it waits off the Florida coast, the passengers learn that the United States also has rejected them, leaving the captain no choice but to return to Europe. The captain tells a confidante that he has received a letter signed by 200 passengers saying they will join hands and jump into the sea rather than return to Germany. He states his intention to run the liner aground on a reef off the southern coast of England, to allow the passengers to be rescued and reach safety there. Shortly before the film's end, it is revealed that the governments of Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have each agreed to accept a share of the passengers as refugees. As they cheer and clap at the news, footnotes disclose the fates of some of the main characters, suggesting that more than 600 of the 937 passengers, who did not resettle in the United Kingdom but in the other European nations, ultimately were deported and died in Nazi concentration camps.