In the wolf’s hour of February 24, 1942, an Allied submarine in the Black Sea torpedoed a dilapidated cattle barge called the Struma. All but one of the eight hundred Jewish refugees fleeing fascist Romania died in the blast. The Struma tells the movie-mythic story of the “nasty beasts” who tried to kill nineteen-year old David Stoliar, and the “angels” who saved him. And then the Turks threw David in prison.
David was a stateless refugee. His story blurs time and place as he transits a wartime world of Greek pirates, Romanian fascists, British spies, crusading Americans, heartless Turks and intransigent British diplomats. Set largely in wartime Istanbul—a true-life Casablanca—years before “Holocaust,” “Shoah” and “genocide” acquired their meaning of today, The Struma tells the timeless story of a young man forced by fate to figure out who he is, who he wants to be. By his own account, he was an indifferent Jew, hardly a poster boy for the creation of a Jewish homeland. Ravaged by doubt and plagued by the loss of his childhood identity, David sets out on his own crooked course—a journey that would be his alone.
In 2002, David agreed to a book proposal about his quest, but on the single condition that he be quoted in his broken English, “as I speak it.” He endured ninety-two hours of taped interviews, followed by twelve years of research and reflection. This is his story, in his own words.
Overview
The Struma tells the story of David’s Holocaust, drawn from his own words, in his English, fractured by his fluency in Russian, Romanian and French. David’s quest begins with his escape from fascist Romania aboard a retrofitted cattle barge called the Struma packed with almost eight hundred Jewish refugees. Bound for Palestine, the Struma’s engine failed repeatedly. Drifting near rocks and a minefield in the mouth of the Bosporus, the Struma was rescued by a Turkish tugboat on December 15, 1941, and towed to Istanbul harbor where it was placed in quarantine the next day by circling police boats.
For ten weeks, Turkish police restricted David and the passengers to the Struma while they waited for the British Mandate to issue visas to Palestine. The visas never came. Concerned about exceeding immigration quotas and inflaming the lukewarm alliance they had with the Arab population in Palestine, Great Britain suggested neutral Turkey return the “surplus Jews” to the Black Sea. Turkey complied. The rest is history.
Soviet submarine Shchuka-213 vaporized the Struma sometime around 2 a.m., Tuesday, February 24, 1942, instantly killing almost everyone. David’s memory is of a hundred or so survivors with him in the light chop of the Black Sea. They flailed to stay afloat or clung to wreckage, or one another. Injured, in a state of shock, they hoped and prayed for rescue. None came. All of them perished, save one.
Mid-morning, Wednesday, February 25, 1942, at about the same time The New York Times was reporting that the Struma had been blown to pieces by a “stray mine” with no reports of survivors, a squad of Turkish coast guard, scavenging for war booty amidst the wreckage, lucked onto the nearly frozen carcass of a survivor. They pulled David into their lifeboat and rowed him ashore to the Turkish fishing village of Sile.
So traumatic was the disaster that David buttoned up about “his” Holocaust. When he learned after the war that his mother died at Auschwitz, he began to wonder whether the Struma was even part of the Holocaust. Muted by survivor’s guilt, he dodged the “accusing” eyes of passengers’ descendants. He avoided the press. His second wife had to discover his secret for herself; his first wife never even knew. David wasn’t even sure he was a Jew.
David’s healing began in his old age. With touching humor and his signature sarcasm, David describes in broken English his imprisonment for being an "illegal alien" in Turkey. He introduces us to Simon Brod, a one-man Jewish relief agency in Istanbul who sacrificed much in his life to save refugees like David. Also, for the first time, David describes his imprisonment by Turkey after his rescue and, two months later, his release from the jail. The Epilogue recounts his difficult transition in Palestine; his ironic decision to enlist in the British 8th Army for the duration of World War II; and his enlistment in the Israeli Defense Forces to fight in that nation’s 1948 War of Independence; followed by a long and productive life.