Of the many heartbreaking stories to come out of the Holocaust perhaps the one that speaks the loudest about the cost of turning one's back on another person involves the SS St Louis. The luxury German ocean liner left Hamburg in 1939 packed with more than 900 German Jews trying to escape the Holocaust. The ship was destined for Cuba, but when it arrived in Havana, the Cuban government declared the passengers' visas invalid and the ship was turned away. Similar rebuffs were received as the ship travelled north up the eastern coast of the United States and Canada seeking sanctuary -at Miami, New York, and Halifax. Petitions for asylum were also turned down from Central and South America.

Captain Gustav Schroder, a non-Jew, refused to return his passengers to Germany and worked at getting them sanctuary in other countries. He achieved success finally when the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Holland agreed to admit some of his passengers. Relief for them was short-lived, however: the Jews came under renewed threats when Germany invaded Belgium and France a year later.

Sol Messinger was a young passenger aboard the SS St. Louis with his parents. He vividly remembers that voyage and the atmosphere of joy, then fear and panic that pervaded the ship as it was systematically turned away at every port in their journey.

Messinger's family ended up in Belgium, then France, and managed to evade the Holocaust. They eventually moved to Buffalo where they settled. A number of Messinger's relatives and friends back in Europe were not so lucky, and many of the people on the ship ended up in concentration camps. Though he was just seven years of age, the injustice of that voyage made an indelible imprint on him.

"The story of the St. Louis really has a statement to make, and that statement is that although the Germans did the actual killing there were a lot of other countries and people who - although they didn't kill - passively allowed this killing," Messinger said in an interview filmed in 1996. "I really am an American and I appreciate the United States probably more than most people who were born here because I've had all these experiences in other countries, but it's difficult to forgive the United States for not allowing us in at that time."

What ultimately enabled and facilitated the emigration to freedom of Messinger and his parents was the work of the French Resistance.

Today, on the Day of Holocaust Remembrance, Messinger is visiting McMaster University to view the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections material devoted to the Resistance. A considerable collection was acquired last year from Michel Brisebois, widely considered one of the most comprehensive collections of such material in the world.