Shown here is a flyer distributed throughout Eretz Yisrael in the wake of the sinking of the Struma:
With the frightening news we have received of the sinking of the Struma and the refugees on it, the National Committee has decided to declare a general work stoppage and internal curfew throughout the land, today, Thursday, the 9th of Adar [February 26,1942]:All agriculture, industry, and trade work – from noon; and all transportation from 1:00 p.m. The following workers shall continue to work: army camps, health services, electric company, post office, telegraph, and train system.
The Jews shall be confined to their homes and shall not go out to the street from 1:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. No work until midnight.
On this day, the Yishuv expresses its heavy mourning for the hundreds of sacrifices of our immigrant brothers who drowned at sea, and our strong bitterness at the hardening of the heart and disinterest from the higher Jewish institutions in Jerusalem and London, who were warned of the expected dangers to those Jewish refugees who successfully escaped from the claws of the Nazis; and [expresses] our strong demand to all the nations with whom the Jewish nation together stands in the war against the evil government of Hitler and his partners, to recognize their duty to extend a saving hand to the escapees and to facilitate the reception of the refugees into the Jewish Yishuv.
The Struma, a small iron-hulled ship only 148.4 feet long, had been built in 1867 as a steam-powered luxury yacht. Restructured with an undependable second-hand diesel engine, it was carrying cattle on the Danube River under the Panamanian flag in the 1930s when the Mossad LeAliyah Bet first considered using it as a refugee ship. That plan was abandoned when the Germans entered Bulgaria, but the manifestly unseaworthy vessel was ultimately commissioned by the Revisionist Zionist organizations in Romania, particularly Betar, to carry 769 passengers fleeing Axis-allied Romania to British-controlled Eretz Yisrael during World War II.
Originally designed for about 150 passengers, the Struma was retrofitted to carry almost 800 people; its sleeping quarters lacked space for the passengers to even sit up. The ancient engine had been recovered from a wreck on the bottom of the Danube River and the vessel was little more than a pile of junk. As such, it could not have come as a monumental surprise that when the Struma set sail from the port of Constanta on the Black Sea on December 12, 1941 – as the last vessel to leave Europe to escape the Holocaust – her diesel engine died several times before her arrival in Istanbul, including a failure on the very day she set sail. A tugboat had to tow her out of Constanta and, since the waters off the coast were mined, a Romanian ship shepherded her clear of the minefield before abandoning her to her fate, as she drifted overnight while the crew tried, but failed, to start her engine.
The Struma broadcasted distress signals but when the Romanian tugboat returned the next day, its crew refused to repair her engines without payment. Most of the refugees on board, who had spent their last penny buying their way out of Romania and paying an exorbitant fee to secure passage on the Struma, contributed their few remaining possessions of value, including treasured family wedding rings and heirlooms, and the tugboat men finally repaired the engine. However, on December 15, 1941, the engine died again near the shores of Turkey, so the Struma was towed into the quarantine section of Istanbul harbor – where she sat anchored and isolated for more than two months. There, the refugees learned for the first time that a reprehensible fraud had been perpetrated upon them and that the immigration certificates into Eretz Yisrael that had been promised to them never actually existed.
