Summary
After a week of being told every day by the smuggler that their boat is coming the next day, Mahmoud screams in frustration. He wants to go back to Syria, unable to live with the uncertainty of their current predicament. His dad jokes that they have time to practice their Turkish. Upon returning to the mall, the family is told by men guarding the entrance that they have to pay rent of five thousand pounds a night—each. With nowhere to go, Mahmoud resorts to stopping cars and asking people to help them. He can’t believe his luck when he stops Samih, an Arabic-speaking man who says he can put them up at his car dealership. In the car, the man explains he knows what it is like because he is a Palestinian refugee, forced to leave his home in 1948, during the first Arab-Israeli war. Mahmoud’s father receives a text saying the boat is finally there. Samih drives them to the beach.
There is a party on board the St. Louis when they are one day away from Cuba. Aaron stays in his room, sure it’s another Nazi trick. In the morning, they stop far offshore from Havana because of the medical quarantine. The captain is angry when the medical examiner insists on checking every person on the ship rather than trusting the captain’s oath that everyone is healthy and sane. Aaron recalls what he saw at Dachau when he learns everyone is being gathered in the social hall. Worried about his father’s erratic behavior, Josef slaps him hard in the face. He tells his father that the doctor is a Nazi in disguise and will send him back to Dachau if he draws attention to himself. He orders his father to clean himself up, and his father obeys. His father passes the doctor’s inspection. Josef is relieved, but the emotion mixes with the revelation that all he sees in his father now is a broken man. After the inspection, the passengers are told they will be admitted to Havana tomorrow.
Isabel dives into the dark, churning ocean, which roars with bubbles and foam. She reaches an unconscious Señor Castillo and struggles to keep his head above water while the others turn the boat around. She nearly gives up but Iván jumps in to help. They get back into the boat, and Castillo retches up the water he’d swallowed. The engine is dead again and the tanker has passed. The refugees spend the night bailing out the boat. In the morning, Lito observes that the sky is red, meaning a storm is coming.
Mahmoud’s father is displeased to see their boat is an inflatable rubber dinghy with an outboard motor. With space for twelve people, it is taking thirty Syrian refugees, at a cost of one thousand euros per head, including children. Mahmoud’s father looks at a map on his phone, which he keeps in a ziplock bag found in the trash. The plan is to reach Lesbos, and take a ferry from there to Athens. During the ride, the driver tells people to watch for the coastguards. A hard and cold rain falls. Eventually someone yells that they see rocks, and the next thing Mahmoud knows, the dinghy pops and he is tumbling into the sea.
For three days Josef and his family are continually told they will be able to get off the ship “mañana.” While waiting, Josef witnessed another ship turn up after them and be admitted before them. The same happens with a French ship. Meanwhile, the St. Louis passengers grow restless, and so do the Nazi crewmen. Schiendick begins a “firemen” patrol that harasses passengers. He takes Josef one day to search his parents’ cabin. Inside are Rachel and Aaron. Schiendick says that for their safety, the room must be searched. He and his firemen ransack the room and spit on the floor, saying that’s what he thinks of them and their race. When they leave, Aaron tells his son that he said he would be safe. Josef reels back with the revelation that he’d lied to his father, making him believe he was back in Dachau, and he’d made a promise he couldn’t keep.
Isabel shovels water from the boat as rain lashes her. The motor hasn’t worked since the tanker passed them. She shivers in the cold wind brought by the storm. Sea spray stings her eyes. She thinks about the last time she saw her grandmother, Lita. It was during the cyclone that became known as the Storm of the Century. Lita was swept away. Isabel’s grandfather senses Isabel is thinking about Lita, and says he is too. He holds her. She goes back to scooping and thinks about how her life is a symphony, and this journey was a song within broader movements. The rain drumming on the boat sounds like a “mad conga solo.”
Mahmoud flails in the frigid water, the rubber dinghy having burst and sank. He sees a glowing cell phone in a bag bobbing along the water. The time is 2:32 a.m. He swims to his mother and baby sister as they struggle to stay above the water. His father swims to them, yelling that the life jackets are useless fakes. Mahmoud’s anger is displaced by the concern that they are all going to drown. Mahmoud’s father tells them to kick off their shoes to lighten their bodies. After hours of treading water, just as Mahmoud gives up, a dinghy comes at them from the darkness. He lunges for a handhold when he sees the boat will not stop. His mother does too. The people on board tell them to let go, saying they’ll call the coast guard for them. Mahmoud asks the woman on board to at least take Hana, which she does. Their fingers are pried loose. Mahmoud finds his mother in the water. His sister is gone, as are his brother and father.
Josef’s father Aaron stacks furniture against their cabin room to make a barricade following Schiendick’s ransacking. Josef’s mother leaves to ask the ship doctor for a “sleeping draught” to help calm Aaron. Josef worries he’ll think Aaron is mentally unwell and not let them in the country. His mother says she’ll say it’s for her. When she returns, she passes out, explaining that she had to drink it herself in front of the doctor. Josef realizes he is suddenly the man of the family. Aaron’s father suddenly talks about how the guards in Dachau would slowly drown a man every night and make the other prisoners watch. Josef leaves to get his sister from the pool. Back in the room, his father is gone. He runs out to the deck just as someone calls "man overboard." He realizes his father has jumped into the sea.
Isabel’s group has kept the engine going following the storm, but her mother is ill, and they lost their aspirin overboard. Iván spots a shore up ahead, and they steer the boat toward land. The sight of white people in luxurious lounge chairs excites Isabel. However, when they land, they learn they are in the Bahamas. A man explains that Bahamian law prohibits illegal aliens, so they will be deported to Cuba if they come on shore. Lito wants his daughter to get medical attention even if it means being sent home, but his daughter refuses to have her baby in Cuba. The group decides to stay on the water and aim for Florida. Tourists rush to buy them snacks and bottles of water, tossing to the refugees more supplies than they began the trip with. Isabel finds a woman to throw them aspirin for her mother.
Mahmoud’s mother howls about having given her baby to a stranger. Mahmoud reassures her that Hana is safe now and won’t drown. The rain falling on them feels like tears they are drowning in. They come across a dead man from the dinghy; his blue life jacket works properly, so they cling to him. Mahmoud says a prayer as he unclips the dead man from the life jacket and lets him slip under the water. He puts his mother in the jacket. He holds on and still kicks, but doesn’t have to kick as hard as before. He hopes that in the light of day he’ll be able to see land and swim for it—if they can survive the night.
Analysis
After finding no support or trustworthy people in Izmir, Mahmoud reaches his breaking point, screaming out in frustration when his family is denied passage by the smuggler once again. Things become worse when the family is displaced from the abandoned mall they’d been staying in by people hoping to profit off the refugees’ desperation. However, when Mahmoud makes his plight visible by appealing to passing cars for help, he finds a supportive former refugee from Palestine. Having been displaced from his home with the establishment of Israel in 1948, Samih Nasser sympathizes with Mahmoud’s family’s struggle.
Despite having attained visas before their voyage to Cuba, the refugees on the MS St. Louis are met with a supposed medical quarantine upon arrival. In a scene that builds on the theme of trauma, Josef realizes his father’s post-Dachau mental state may compromise their chances of being admitted to the country. Having to become the adult in the situation, Josef slaps his father and shouts at him to behave normally. Exploiting his father’s paranoia, he even lies, saying the Cuban official is a Nazi who will punish him if he doesn’t pass the inspection. While Josef’s survival strategy works well enough that Aaron listens, Josef’s new authority over his father is wrapped up with grief over having lost the man he once knew.
The theme of self-sacrifice arises with Isabel’s split-second decision to dive in the water to rescue Señor Castillo, the man who built the boat they are on. While the Cuban refugees are relieved that Castillo is alive, a storm soon overwhelms their tiny craft. While bailing, Isabel recalls her own traumatic memory of her grandmother being swept out to sea in the worst cyclone Cubans had seen in a century. In a rare moment of vulnerability, Isabel’s grandfather joins Isabel in processing the memory and their grief.
In an eerie echo of the Turkish smuggler’s repetition of “tomorrow” to the Bisharas, the refugees on the MS St. Louis are continually told by Cuban officials that they will be allowed on shore the next day—“mañana.” The theme of trauma arises again when Schiendick and his “firemen” ransack the Landaus’ cabin on the phony premise of keeping the other Jewish passengers safe. This abrupt act of terrorism reignites Aaron’s trauma, and he runs out of the room to leap off the ship, choosing a suicide attempt over Nazi torture.
In Mahmoud’s storyline, the theme of survival comes up with his family’s attempted crossing to Lesbos, Greece. The rubber dinghy the smuggler runs is too full of people, and the boat captain is willing to risk everyone’s lives by running the crossing in the dark. When the dinghy capsizes after popping on exposed rocks, Mahmoud and his family fight to survive by treading water. In a grim instance of situational irony, they learn too late that their life preservers are fake, and will not keep them afloat.
Although Mahmoud and Fatima grab onto another boat, the people on board refuse to help them, knowing it risks their own survival to bring any more people on the small craft. In a moment of desperation, Mahmoud believes baby Hana will have a better chance at survival if they give her to a woman on the boat. Mahmoud has to make another tough survival decision when he encounters a dead man in a working life jacket. Taking the jacket as respectfully as he can, Mahmoud says a prayer while unclipping the corpse in the desperate hope that with something to grab onto, he and his mother will survive the night.
