Summary
Isabel sees the lights of Miami, imagining them to be the gates of heaven. But her father’s foot pushes a crack in the hull and water streams in. To lighten the boat, Isabel and Amara scramble to remove the heavy engine and tip it over the side. Señor Castillo is angry, but they say they were going to sink otherwise. While they’re bailing, the US Coast Guard arrives and announces that they are in violation of US waters. In Mahmoud’s storyline, the Serbian taxi driver points his gun and demands three hundred euros from Mahmoud’s family, threatening to kill them if they don’t pay. With shaking hands, Mahmoud’s father counts out the money. The man then orders them out of the car. Mahmoud’s father says they’re an hour from the border to Hungary. They take a bus and find another refugee camp. The Hungarians have erected a fence with razor wire. While among the other frustrated refugees, someone sends a tear gas canister into the crowd. Mahmoud’s eyes burn and he feels he is going to die.
Pozner finds Josef and asks if he is ready; Pozner says they have arranged a distraction for Schiendick and his firemen on the D-deck. Josef joins the ten Jews carrying pipes and candlesticks. They begin the mutiny by holding the first officer’s arms behind his back and pushing him through to the bridge. Threatening the four men there with their clubs, the mutineers take the bridge. They get the first officer to summon the captain. They tell him they must sail anywhere but Germany. The captain takes control of the situation by insisting that he won’t do anything to take the ship off course; he knows the mutineers cannot operate it themselves. He agrees not to penalize the men if they stand down immediately. He says he will run the ship aground in England if it comes to that. Josef doesn’t believe him, but he and the others give up, accepting the deal.
As the US Coast Guard’s searchlight comes on, Isabel’s mother says the baby is coming. Lito insists he isn’t going to Guantanamo Bay. They realize the light is searching for someone else. While the light is trained on another raft of people, Lito gets the group to paddle for shore. Isabel uses the bailing jug as a paddle. The Coast Guard ship motor starts up as the light lands on them.
Amid the chaos, someone uses a plastic zip tie to bind Mahmoud’s hands. He is put in a van with his father, who lost track of Waleed and Mahmoud’s mother. The van unloads them and the other refugees at a prison-like immigrant detention center. When he can check his phone, Mahmoud’s father realizes they are only an hour from the border to Austria. A guard whacks Mahmoud’s father with a nightstick, calling him a parasite in Arabic and saying they don’t want their kind there. On their way to the processing guards, Mahmoud and his father see Fatima and Waleed in another holding area. The processing guard asks if Mahmoud’s father wants to claim asylum in Hungary. Mahmoud’s father is astounded after how they’d been treated and says he wouldn’t stay even if the country were made of gold. The guard says they will be sent back to Serbia and will be arrested if caught trying to come back to Hungary.
The St. Louis throws a party in celebration of the news that Belgium, Holland, France, and England are agreeing to divide the refugees among them. The ship has an empty feeling as groups leave the ship day after day with each stop in another country. Josef and Ruthie and his mother leave the ship in France. They settle there, Josef’s mother taking a job as a washerwoman and Ruthie and Josef going back to school. Within ten months, Germany invades France, and the three of them have to go on the run again. In Isabel’s storyline, Isabel and her family paddle fiercely toward shore while Isabel’s mother is going into labor. Lito says it’s happening again, explaining that he was a police officer when young. She learns he has been saying "mañana" because it’s what he had to tell the Jews who Cuba turned away, back to their deaths in Germany. A calm comes over him. He says that he was always waiting for things to get better tomorrow, but it never changed because he didn’t change anything. Not wanting to make the same mistake, Lito kisses Isabel and jumps in the water, calling out to the Coast Guard as he swims from the boat. He is trying to distract the Coast Guard so the others have a chance of reaching the shore. Isabel can’t paddle as she watches the Coast Guard steer toward her grandfather to send him back to Cuba.
Mahmoud and his family are brought to another refugee camp. Mahmoud looks at his broken family members and wonders how he is the only one who hasn’t been broken by the experience. He knows they can’t go back to Syria. He considers whether it is better to be visible or invisible, concluding that good and bad things happened either way. He wants to be visible: to stand up and to stand out. United Nations officials come in to document the Hungary-run camp’s living conditions. Mahmoud gets up and goes to the gymnasium door. The automatic rifle–bearing Hungarian guard raises her weapon to stop him, but stops when she remembers the UN observers. Mahmoud leads other children out the door to the green grass. Mahmoud tells Waleed they’re not waiting to go back to Serbia—they’re walking to Austria.
In 1940, Josef and Ruthie and his mother hide in a village schoolhouse in France. With the quick advance of the Germans, the only refugees from the St. Louis who were still safe were those who’d made it to Great Britain. When they see Nazi soldiers approaching across a field, the three run through the woods, bullets following them. Outside a house they can’t get into, Josef and his mother and Ruthie are held at gunpoint by the soldiers. Josef’s mother offers them the diamonds she has kept sewn into Ruthie’s coat. The men say it is only enough to buy one child’s freedom, and tell her to choose who.
Isabel’s baby brother is born as the makeshift boat reaches the shore, pulled along by Señor Castillo, Luis, Amara, and Isabel. The US Coast Guard ship bears down on them, but refugees on board cheer the Cubans who have reached the shore. Isabel runs ahead with her baby brother in her arms. In Mahmoud’s storyline, Mahmoud leads the twelve-hour walk to Austria. Cars make way for the procession of refugees. Soon news helicopters fly overhead. Mahmoud knows they will be arrested if they stop moving, so they must move forward. They arrive later that night, passing through the unprotected border. They stop on the other side to pray. Austrians who’d seen them on the news come to greet the refugees with food and beverages and clothing. Mahmoud’s family travels to Vienna via train, and from there they take another train to Munich, Germany. They are greeted by Germans with supplies, like in Austria. A Turkish-German official approaches the family with a clipboard and asks if they are seeking asylum in Germany. Mahmoud’s father says, “A thousand times yes.”
After landing at Miami Beach, Lito’s brother, Guillermo, takes Isabel’s family in. Her father and the Castillos all find employment. Isabel starts the sixth grade, finding other Cuban and Cuban-Americans she can speak Spanish with. She gets a new trumpet and learns to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” anthem with an offbeat salsa rhythm. When she plays for her family, she finally discovers the clave beat hidden beneath the rhythm everyone is clapping along to. Lito was wrong—she has found the clave, even in America, where it has followed her.
After four weeks in Munich, Mahmoud and his family are carried in a van through the streets of Berlin, by far the biggest city he’s ever seen. They arrive at the host family’s A-frame home, where they will live until they get on their feet. There is an Arabic-written sign in the window saying Welcome Home. Mahmoud is surprised that the host couple, the Rosenbergs, are elderly. Through a German support worker’s translation, the woman—Ruthie—explains that she was a Holocaust refugee. She says she survived the Holocaust because her brother Josef volunteered to go to a concentration camp in her place. After the soldiers left her alone in the woods, a French woman took her in and claimed she was her daughter. Her mother and Josef died in the concentration camps and her father died in Cuba. She insists to Mahmoud that they will find his sister Hana. Mahmoud is filled with gratitude as he takes in a photograph of Josef, who died so Ruthie could live and one day welcome Mahmoud’s family into her house. The novel ends with Mahmoud absorbing the comforting atmosphere of the home.
Analysis
Gratz returns to the theme of survival with the latest development in the Isabel storyline. The already incredibly fraught trip proves even more dangerous when her father accidentally kicks a hole in the boat hull. To avoid drowning or being attacked by sharks, the refugees lighten the weight in the sinking boat by removing the engine and letting it sink. In this instance of situational irony, the thing that will propel them the rest of the way to Florida is also the thing that’s threatening their lives. Without the engine, the refugees are left to paddle.
Things are also increasingly difficult for Mahmoud and his family, who are robbed at gunpoint by a Serbian taxi driver and encounter a razor-wire fence barring their entry into Hungary, and violence from the prejudiced Hungarian border officials. While Gratz depicts the citizens of countries like Greece, Austria, and Germany being supportive of Syrian refugees, his depiction of the less well-off nations of Serbia, Hungary, and Turkey includes people who are cruel and opportunistic. In these countries, dire economic circumstances lead to desperation among the citizens, who may feel less sympathetic to the plight of the Syrians when struggling to meet their own daily survival needs.
Gratz builds on the themes of prejudice, support, survival, and visibility with the Bisharas’ experience in Hungary. Despite the fact they are refugees seeking asylum from a civil war, they are treated as criminals in the country, which has prison-like immigrant detention centers set up to deal with the influx rather than supportive services. The message the Bisharas get from the violent Hungarian border agents is that the country doesn’t want them, so it comes off as preposterous when they are offered asylum. After seeing his father’s spirit crushed following a racially motivated beating, Mahmoud realizes they will be stuck in the limbo of refugee camps unless he alerts the world to what is happening to Syrian refugees.
To attract media attention, Mahmoud leads a procession of refugees out of the Hungarian refugee camp gymnasium and walks twelve hours to the Austrian border. His plan proves successful, as the Hungarian police are unwilling to use violence to contain the refugees when the world is watching. He also finds that people in Austria have come out to support the refugees, whose inspiring march has been playing on the news.
The theme of self-sacrifice arises once again in Isabel’s storyline when Lito has an epiphany: After mulling over his remorse for having sent the refugees of the MS St. Louis back to Europe, Lito realizes he has been too passive. Contrary to earlier opinions he offered about the inevitability of change, Lito now understands that if he wants to see positive change, he has to take action. For him, this means diving into the water to divert the US Coast Guard, giving his family a chance to make it to US soil. In this way, Lito’s inefficacy in 1939 is redeemed in an effective selfless gesture in 1994.
At the end of the novel, Gratz continues building on the theme of self-sacrifice by weaving the three storylines together. In another instance of situational irony, the German host family that takes in the Bisharas is headed by an elderly Ruthie Landau. Because Ruthie’s brother Josef selflessly went to a concentration camp so that Ruthie could be free, Ruthie is alive to welcome the displaced Syrians into her home in 2015. Having survived the trauma of war, prejudice, and displacement herself, Ruthie feels compelled to offer material and emotional support. With this full-circle moment, Gratz shows how political and economic conflicts have displaced people throughout world history, and regular people have been there to offer any help they can.
