Holocaust Remembrance Week: Holocaust Remembrance Week

From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Early Warning Project.

In May 1939 more than 900 Jews fled Hitler's Germany on a luxury liner, the SS St Louis; they hoped to reach Cuba then travel to the US, but were turned away from both.

The increasingly desperate passengers were forced to sail back to Europe, where more than 250 of them were later killed by the Nazis.

Gerald Granston, who was six years old when he and his father travelled on the SS St Louis, recalls that frantic search for sanctuary across the Atlantic.

Dame Stephanie Shirley was among thousands of mostly Jewish unaccompanied children, who were sent by their parents to safety in the UK fleeing the rise of the Nazis in Europe. She was just five years old when her mother put her on a train in Vienna bound for London, not knowing if they would ever meet again. Dame Stephanie tells Witness History about the lasting trauma left by her mother's "fantastic act of love."

More than 1,200 ships carrying nearly 111,000 Jewish refugees arrived in New York between March 1938, when Germany annexed Austria, and October 1941, when Germany banned emigration.