Years ago I wrote about a project I was starting, investigating the March 1949 sailing of the McCormack line’s SS Marine Jumper from Hamburg to Boston. There were a number of ships in that year and the years following, carrying displaced persons, refugees from World War II to a safe place, to start anew.

Wait, you might say, 1949? Wasn’t WWII over years earlier? I would answer you and tell you that you were correct but the world was seemingly choosing to ignore these refugees, mostly Jews who were homeless and stateless, and living in Displaced Persons Camps because no one would take them in. Sound familiar?

I went to Elementary, Junior High, and High School with children who arrived in the U.S. from Europe in the 1950s. Some of their parents carried the tattoo scars on their forearms – the numbers that would erase their humanity by taking away their names. As I child, I grew to have some probably superficial understanding of what had happened in Europe.

As an adult, I became involved and engaged, developing curricula to teach in Jewish schools about the Shoah, the Holocaust, looking at the horrors by learning about individuals, not huge numbers or percentages – people.

About 15 years ago, a friend, now deceased, told me a story about how she was born in a DP camp, and came to the U.S. before her brother’s 1950 birth. She said she didn’t know where she was born, or if the date she knew as her birthdate really was. She wanted to know – she said she felt that she was somehow lacking a basic history by not knowing when and where she was born.

The details of how I found my friend’s vital details are for another post, but find them I did. I became focused on the other passengers on the ship that brought my friend and her parents to the U.S. I wanted to know who these people, the survivors were – what happened to them after they landed, but more than that, who were they and their families in Europe before the war? What about their lives and the names of their families could be restored to memory?

On March 1949 the SS Marine Jumper left Hamburg. Nine days later, it landed in Boston. Of the 549 people on the ship, 313 were Jews. There were also 76 Roman Catholics, 66 Greek Catholics, 15 Orthodox, 76 Protestants, and Baptists. I wanted to know about the Jews. I examined the manifests and looked at the destinations of each passenger, creating 138 family groups or single people traveling alone. At this point, with the exception of 11 people, I have found 127 families after their arrival and traced them back to their homes prior to the war, sometimes extending the families back by several generations. I have more to do and more to find out before I am ready to start writing.

I have the background information and now with my book Stories They Never Told Us in print, I am ready to embark on the next steps – more in-depth research, organizing my data, and writing about the 313 Jews who survived the war and arrived in the U.S. on 12 March 1949.