Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Refugee, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Coming of Age
Injustice and Cruelty vs. Empathy and Social Responsibility
Hope vs. Despair
Family, Displacement, and Culture
Invisibility and the Refugee Experience
Summary
Analysis
Josef and some of the other children on the St. Louis take a tour of the ship’s bridge and engine room. Captain Schroeder demonstrates how to change the ship’s speed. Josef notices that the settings are on full, and asks if they’re going full speed because they’re racing two other ships to Cuba. The captain assures him that they’re just making the best speed because of the calm seas.
Josef’s hope starts to waver following the discovery that the ship may not actually allow them to find a new life in Cuba. But Captain Schroeder recognizes the necessity of keeping those hopes alive, and so continues to conceal that there may be trouble when they reach Cuba.
Themes
Another officer then takes Josef and the other children down below decks to the engine room. They pass a room where crewmen are drinking and singing. Schiendick, the crew member Josef noticed storming off as the portrait of Hitler was taken down for Joseph’s bar mitzvah, grows angry that passengers are being shown downstairs. Schiendick calls the children “Jewish rats” before staggering back and continuing to sing another Nazi song. Josef tries to block out the words, “When Jewish blood flows from the knife, things will go much better.”
Josef feels weak and upset through the rest of the tour, realizing that they haven’t fully escaped antisemitic hatred on the St. Louis. None of the other children are excited either, and the tour ends solemnly. Josef realizes that below the decks lies a different world than the one he has been enjoying above.
The hatred that Josef experiences on the tour only reminds him, and the readers, of the stakes of the trip. If Cuba does not let the refugees in, it signifies a return to a society that is more than willing to be unjust and cruel toward them.
Themes
