We'll admit that we usually feel warm-and-fuzzily patriotic when we think about the actions of the U.S. of A. during the World War II era. But when we hear about the actions of the government when it came to the St. Louis, we start to see red.

We'll let Wiesel tell you what happened when the St. Louis reached American shores:

The depressing tale of the St. Louis is case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo—nearly 1,000 Jews—was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state-sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already in the shores of the United States, was sent back. I don't understand. (81-85)

That's right: the United States denied entrance to 1,000 Jewish refugees. Later, 254 of them died at the hands of the Nazis.

This, folks, is the perils of indifference made concrete. It's a stretch to call this a symbol—it really happened, Roosevelt really turned his back on 1,000 souls in need of refuge—but it does encapsulate Wiesel's thesis. As a direct result of indifference, 254 people died.

In 2017, software engineer Russel Neiss and rabbi Charlie Schwartz created a Twitter account to memorialize the murdered passengers of the St. Louis. You can scroll through and see what happened to these 254 people—and we suggest you do. It's haunting and sobering, but it's an antidote to indifference.