Rotterdam (IV) Historical

SS Rotterdam — the fourth to carry the name — was built at Harland & Wolff in Belfast and entered service in 1908. At 24,149 gross tons, twin-funneled and twin-screwed, she served the Rotterdam-New York route for more than three decades: the prewar years, the First World War, the postwar recovery, the Depression, and into the years before the second war came.

In April 1921 she carried Albert Einstein to the United States. Einstein had been invited to lecture on relativity at American universities — the theory was still new enough to be controversial, the mathematics strange enough that most physicists were still working through the implications. He arrived in New York Harbour aboard the Rotterdam to a reception the ship had never previously produced: reporters and cameras and a crowd that had come to see the man whose ideas were rewriting the nature of space and time. Whether Einstein appreciated the crossing itself or simply endured it as the cost of being somewhere he needed to be, the record does not say. But he arrived, and what he brought with him changed physics.

The Rotterdam IV sailed for another two decades after that crossing, carrying ordinary passengers across an ocean that took six days and cost a week of your life to cross. Most of what a ship carries is unremarkable: people going from one place to another for ordinary reasons. The remarkable things are easier to name afterward. Hindsight is the only way to know what was important when it was happening. The Rotterdam IV carried a man with a theory, and the theory mattered.

— In the Wake editorial

My father-in-law crossed on the Rotterdam in July 1938 — eastbound, New York to Rotterdam, going back to visit family in Amsterdam. He was thirty-one years old. It was the last time he visited before the war closed the way.

He had emigrated to New York in 1929, the year the markets collapsed, and had built something from very little in the years since. He worked in a tailor's shop on the Lower East Side. He had become an American citizen in 1935. He had not gone back to the Netherlands since he left, and in the summer of 1938 he decided he had been away long enough.

He took the Rotterdam — Second Class, six nights — and arrived in Rotterdam at the end of July. He spent three weeks in Amsterdam. His mother was still alive. His brothers were there, two of them with children he had not met. He saw the city he had grown up in and noticed how it had changed and how it had not. He took the Rotterdam home to New York in August 1938.

The following May, Germany invaded the Netherlands. His mother survived the occupation. One of his brothers did not. He never sailed back to visit — he flew, once, in 1955, to settle his mother's estate. He kept a photograph of the Rotterdam on the mantelpiece in his apartment in Brooklyn for the rest of his life. We found it there when he died in 1979. The photograph was from 1938.

— Catherine V., writing about her father-in-law Samuel