The Amazing and Wonderful Small World of the Catholic Internet

The Amazing and Wonderful Small World of the Catholic Internet June 20, 2016

Was plowing through my email today and found a note from a man responding to one of my Mary pieces over at the Register. it was a very sweet note with an accompanying essay the reader had written about Our Lady, but what really got me was his biosketch. He was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Berlin in 1933 and he and his mother were aboard the infamous Voyage of the Damned when the German ship St Louis took hundreds of Jews and sought asylum, first in Cuba and then in the US, only to be turned away and sent back to Europe. Britain, France and Holland accepted the refugees, with the bulk of them going to the continent and, when the Nazi invaded, to the ovens. My reader and his mother chose Britain and so were spared the horror of the Holocaust.

I have read about this story all my life, but to actually get an email from somebody who survived the voyage of the St. Louis is amazing to me.

Eventually, he became a Catholic along with his Jewish wife (in 1963) and even became a deacon. A remarkable life. Thanks be to God for his strange and providential ways.


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