The Tragedy Of The WWII Refugee Ship Struma – And The Story Of Its Sole Survivor

Photo Credit: Saul Jay Singer

Romania was already fervently antisemitic even before Hitler’s rise to power. The new government elected in 1937 not only sanctioned official antisemitic laws, but also acquiesced to widespread antisemitic violence in the country, particularly during the interwar period, and antisemitism on the eve of WWII was about as rampant in Romania as in Germany. On September 6, 1940, King Carol abdicated, and the passionate antisemite Ion Antonescu, who had been minister of defense in the previous government, came to power. His police were organized with the help of the Nazis and the S.S. and an ensuing period of antisemitic terrorism began with the confiscation of Jewish-owned shops and went on to arresting and torturing Jewish leaders and the mass murder of Jews.

With the Holocaust in full bloom in 1941, many Romanian Jews became desperate to escape to Eretz Yisrael. The Immigration Committee in Bucharest commenced registration for a journey aboard the Struma at the price of 30,000 Romanian leu per ticket (about $708 in today’s dollars), but the price rose as demand increased and, by September 1941, the fare had increased to 204,000 (about $4,800 in today’s dollars). Jews seeking passage on the ship hurriedly sold all their possessions, and passengers were guaranteed sufficient food, reasonable sleeping conditions, delivery to the shores of Eretz Yisrael, and immigration permits – and they were even told that the ship was equipped with a modern diesel engine.

However, 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 Eretz Yisrael under the British Mandate during World War II.

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Originally designed for about 150 passengers, the Struma was retrofitted to carry almost 800 people, such that 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 Romania tugboat returned the next day, its crew refused to repair her engines without payment. After a superficial examination of the engine, the mechanic declared that he was prepared to fix it for three million leu, an extortionate and unimaginable sum, particularly given that most the refugees on board had been robbed blind by customs officers and spent their last penny buying their way out of Romania and paying an exorbitant fee just to secure passage on the Struma.

He finally agreed to accept 250 gold wedding rings and other family heirlooms in lieu of cash but, on December 15, 1941, only three days later, 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.

In a particularly heinous act which earned him everlasting infamy – and which led the Jews to refer to him as “Haman” – Sir Harold MacMichael, the British High Commissioner of Palestine, not only refused entry to the Struma, but also urged the Turks not to permit the Jewish refugees to disembark. Consistent with their hateful White Paper (1939), the British remained determined to eliminate Jewish immigration to Eretz Yisrael; the Romanians did not want to take the Jews back; and the Turks, still neutral at the time, carefully walked the line so as not to risk alienating any country – particularly since most of the passengers bore Romanian, Hungarian, or Bulgarian passports, all countries hostile to Great Britain during the war whom the British claimed might be Nazi agents. The entire world left “the floating coffin” to sit rotting in the water during one of the coldest winters in decades and with its starving and freezing passengers abandoned. The situation became even worse for the Jewish refugees aboard the Struma, sailing under a Panamanian flag, when Panama declared war against Germany in January 1942.

When the Turkish deadline for some international resolution of the “Struma problem” passed with no action being taken, Turkish Prime Minister Refik Saydam sent a small party of police to board the ship on February 23, 1942, but the refugees repelled them. A force of some 80 police followed soon thereafter and, surrounding the ship with motorboats, forcefully overcame passenger resistance, boarded the Struma, and attached her to a tug, which towed her through the Bosporus and out into the Black Sea, where the Turkish authorities abandoned the ship without food, water, or fuel. As the vessel was being towed, passengers enthusiastically began singing Hatikvah and signs were hung over the sides and visible on the banks of the water that read “Save Us.”

No one did.

On the morning of February 24, 1942, the Russian commander of the submarine Shch-213, who had standing orders from Stalin to sink all neutral ships in the Black Sea to prevent supplies from reaching Germany, torpedoed the Struma. The ship – which had no life vests and was equipped with only two small decrepit lifeboats – quickly sunk, killing 768 men, women and children, making it the largest exclusively civilian naval disaster of World War II. More than 100 passengers actually survived the original bombing, as they clung to pieces of wreckage in the icy water, but no rescue came and all but one of them died from drowning or hypothermia. The lone survivor was 19-year-old David Stoliar, who hung on in the frozen waters for over 24 hours before a Turkish fishing boat appeared and picked him up. Unbelievably, after a week in an Istanbul hospital, he was transferred to a Turkish jail and was held for 71 days for being in Turkey “illegally.”

The Yishuv mourned the drowned refugees and felt anger towards the British, due to their policy of closing the gates of Palestine to Jewish refugees. Following the sinking of the Struma the Jewish National Council (the Vaad HaLeumi) declared a day of mourning, and an internal curfew. 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 9^th 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 Yishuv’s Petition

We are calling upon the people of Britain, their elected officials, and their government:

Provide refuge to Israel’s migrants and its refugees in their national home and their homeland.

Let the fate of those fleeing Nazi persecution not be like the fate of the people of the “Salvador” and the “Struma” – drowning at sea.

The story of the disaster must be investigated before a parliamentary committee.

Liberty must be declared for the people of the “Darien” and homecoming and redemption be provided to all the survivors.

My voice, along with the voice of my brothers, that are calling for refuge.

The Rock of Refuge

The Salvador, a ship carrying Jewish refugees from Bulgaria, was sunk in the Sea of Marmara on December 12, 1940, killing 204 Jews, including 66 children. Of the 123 survivors, 63 were returned to Bulgaria and the rest were on the immigrant ship Darien II, which was intercepted by the British on March 29, 1941 and were held in Atlit prison.

For months, the sinking of the Struma became a rallying cry for Jews worldwide and it generated protests, a general strike in Eretz Yisrael, death threats against British officials, and responses by Turkey and Britain that voiced regrets but denied responsibility. The British government eventually decided to grant an exception and to permit Stoliar to make aliyah – over the strenuous objections of the loathsome MacMichael, who argued that permitting the entry of the sole survivor of the Struma would somehow open the “floodgates” to Jewish immigration. In a public response to the tragedy, MacMichael stated: “The fate of these people was tragic, but the fact remains that they were nationals of a country at war with Britain, proceeding direct from enemy territory. Palestine was under no obligations towards them.” MacMichael had also been responsible for the deaths of 260 people on the Patria, who were killed by a mine in Haifa harbor after he denied them entry. The Struma sinking, along with the Patria disaster which had preceded it, became a rallying point for the Irgun and LEHI Jewish underground movements, encouraging their violent revolt against the British presence in Eretz Yisrael.

Stoliar (1922-2014) was born in Kishinev, Romania, to Yaakov, a textile manufacturer, and Bella (née Leichiman); the two divorced when he was ten. He moved with his mother to France and returned to Romania in 1937 at age 15 to live with his father. After graduating from high school, he studied for a year at the Polytechnic Institute before being expelled because he was Jewish. In the summer of 1941, the Romanian authorities sent him and other young Jewish men to a forced labor camp at Poligon on the outskirts of Bucharest and, after several months at hard labor, his father paid a bribe to secure his release and purchased a ticket for him to sail on the Struma to Eretz Yisrael.

On January 21, 1941, the Iron Guard had launched a pogrom against Bucharest Jews, looting and burning Jewish homes and synagogues and some 200 Jews were rounded up, tortured, and murdered in a slaughterhouse; others were hanged like cattle from the slaughterhouse iron hooks, tagged with signs reading “kosher meat,” and were chopped up while still alive. The sole survivor remaining after the Romanian mass murder of at least 13,266 Jews was Rav Zvi Gutman, the Rabbi of Bucharest. On the day that Stoliar left Bucharest for passage aboard the Struma, his father took him to visit Rav Gutman, who cried when he was asked for a beracha. As Stoliar tells the story (his testimony is preserved in the archives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem):

He blessed me to the effect that I would reach Eretz Yisrael safely. I was very moved by this encounter. When I left the provisional synagogue that the Rabbi had established, I didn’t say a word to my father, but we both felt that we had fulfilled a sacred duty to G-d… Something within me changed. Courage filled me, and my belief that I would indeed reach Eretz Yisrael strengthened.

Stoliar’s identity papers and belongings were punctiliously checked before he could join the other “illegal” immigrants on the train from Bucharest to the port of Constanța on the Black Sea. As he later described it:

Sometimes, the inspector would wickedly take something out of the backpack and turn to his friend, asking, “Perhaps you have some newspaper to wrap up these shoes? I just got them as a present.” People didn’t protest, and let themselves be humiliated… It wasn’t important. At that moment, they were leaving the firetrap of Satan, whose reach had spread over all of Europe… They boarded the trains… The cries of those parting from them – Write as soon as you arrive! Take care that you don’t catch cold on the ship! Be well! – were swallowed up in the rattling of the wheels. Almost 800 people were leaving the land of their birth, their homes, their childhood and adolescent dreams, to escape the chilling threat of death.

The passengers underwent further inspections at Constanța. The security police checked their names in the joint passport, and they had to hand in their Romanian documents. Only one man, whose name had been removed by mistake from the list, was turned away. In vain he cried and begged them to let him travel, but the border personnel didn’t give in – he received his life back as a gift! The passengers’ luggage was examined again by the tax officers, who confiscated many items, and by clerks from the Romanian National Bank, who appropriated money and jewelry. The passengers were undressed, and painstakingly examined. There was a ban on taking precious metals out of Romania, and they were only allowed to take their wedding rings with them. The amount of money permitted to take out of the country was also confiscated.

As Stoliar describes the journey to Istanbul, the passengers were instructed to try to keep the vessel in balance and not to move, lest too many people on one side of the deck endanger the ship. As such, there was no way for them to wash themselves or to clean up, with the situation getting increasingly worse as time went on. When the ship reached Turkey, the authorities refused to permit the passengers to disembark, leaving them on board in dire conditions for ten weeks. According to Stoliar, the passengers began to get used to the misery, dirt, overcrowding, lack of food and the cold, and they would remove bugs from their shirts with a knife or razor because they no longer had any change of clothing. Thanks to Dr. Hora Löbel, whose pregnant wife stayed behind and planned to join him in Eretz Yisrael after their child was born, a group of thirty doctors and nurses was organized that provided all the sick passengers’ needs, as far as was possible in light of the lack of basic medical materials, but the diabetics’ plight became particularly dire because the Turkish authorities forbade anyone to bring insulin to them.

The Turks permitted nine passengers to disembark, eight of whom had entry permits to Eretz Yisrael and, after much pleading, one female passenger who started to severely hemorrhage was taken off the ship and brought to a hospital.

Describing his personal experience on the Struma, he says:

We were eight km from the Turkish coast… Shortly before 9:00 a.m. we heard the thunder of bombardment and saw flames coming from the Turkish coast, and a second later, everyone on deck saw a torpedo speeding towards us. A deafening explosion ripped through the ship… I only remember that a superhuman force lifted me into the air; after a few moments I fell back down and landed in the water. From the moment of impact, no more than a minute passed before the vessel disappeared without a trace. It was literally swallowed up by the waves in the blink of an eye… Just a few planks of wood floating on the surface remained of the Struma… There were a few dozen people in the water, men and women who tried to save themselves, but the screams and cries for help dissipated and vanished amidst the vast expanse of the sea… The waves were cold as ice, and my limbs lost all feeling… I managed to lay my hands on a large piece of driftwood and to climb up onto it… Not even four hours had passed before I comprehended that I was the only one who remained.

Spotting a floating piece of the ship some 40 yards away from him, he exerted the last vestiges of his strength to reach it. When night fell, he found the ship’s second officer, Bulgarian Lazar Ivanof Dikof, floating near him in the water, and he lifted him up onto the float:

[Lazar] says that the only way we can survive is really by us shouting all the time so that we don’t fall asleep, because if we fall asleep we will never wake up. So we were sitting back to back and yelling all night. And as the day came along, we were already exhausted of yelling. And then we stopped, and then I felt that he is not any longer on my back. I turned around and his head was in the water, like on his belly. In other words, he could not possibly breathe any longer. He was dead… but he was very close to me, but just a corpse.

Left alone and desperate, Stoliar tried to commit suicide by slitting his wrists but, lucky for him, his fingers were too numb to release the blade from his jackknife. After some 24 hours in the freezing water, he was spotted by a Turkish boat – Stoliar maintains that they waited until they could be reasonably certain that all of the Struma passengers were dead and he specifically remembers that the sailors seemed amazed to find a survivor – and taken to a small fishing village, where he was wrapped in blankets. Following two days in which he teetered between life and death, he was interrogated by Turkish policemen, during the course of which he fainted and was taken to a hospital by ambulance:

I was in hospital for 14 days. On the first day, I was visited by Mr. Simon Brod, President of the Istanbul Jewish community, who had received special permission to come and see me. [Brod was deeply involved in locating Jewish refugees, rescuing and caring from them, and working to gain their entrance into Eretz Yisrael.] He visited me every day, sometimes twice a day… Two days later he came with a Jewish doctor, who immediately gave the order to bandage my fingers and toes with camphor dressings and to change them several times a day. Thanks to the prompt and dedicated treatment I received, my fingers and toes were spared gangrene and amputation.

Stoliar was incarcerated in a small cell, where he was held as a political prisoner for 48 days and interrogated daily until he was finally released on April 23, 1942, when Brod informed him that all his papers were ready, including the British permit; thus, of the 770 permits that would have had to be issued were it not for the disaster, one permit was issued. Stoliar departed the next day under Turkish guard for the Syrian border, and Brod helped to transport him to Eretz Yisrael, organizing a train to Aleppo, Syria and a car from there to Tel Aviv. A few months later, on September 1942, Stoliar’s mother, Bella, was deported from France to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.

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Exhibited here is an incredible rarity, the Palestine emergency document issued on July 1, 1946 to Stoliar the sole survivor of the Struma Affair disaster, after he was released from duty service in the British army. The document includes his original photo and signature, as well many stamps. Listed at 5’11” with blue eyes and fair hair, his profession is listed as “soldier” and his residence as Jerusalem.

In 1943, approximately a year after he reached Eretz Yisrael, Stoliar, who was fluent in eight languages, enlisted in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army and fought as part of the Eighth Army of the British Army on the North African front, serving in Egypt and Libya. In 1945, he married Adria Nachmias, a Jewess born in Alexandria (1924), in the synagogue in Cairo and, upon his release from the British army in 1946, he and his wife came to Israel, where he lived in Haifa, joined the Haganah, and fought in Israel’s War of Independence as a machine gunner on the northern front. After the war, he worked for the Esso oil company (now Exxon) and helped his father, who had survived the Holocaust, and his stepmother to make aliyah. Following Esso’s closing shop in Israel, he became vice president of the Japanese Mitsubishi Shoji, an import-export firm, living in Japan for 18 years and, after the death of his wife and his remarriage, they founded a shoe manufacturing company (that, in its early years, dominated a new show company called Nike) and opened a bakery and baking school in Oregon.

The story of the Struma has, sadly, been largely forgotten. MGM considered making a film about the story, but decided against it when Stoliar, the sole survivor, declined to participate. However, after years of silence, he told his story in an interview with the New York Times in 2000; he appeared in a 2001 documentary about the Struma by Canadian director Simcha Jacobovici; and reluctantly provided critical assistance to Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in their reconstruction of the Struma tragedy in their book, Death on the Black Sea (2003). His second wife, Marda, reported that every time her husband reluctantly agreed to be interviewed about the Struma Affair, he would spend the following week plagued by nightmares that kept him screaming in his sleep.

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Interest in the Struma was revived in 2000, when Greg Buxton, a Briton whose grandparents had died on board the ship, organized a successful search for the vessel, although others question whether this was actually the Struma. On September 3, 2000, a ceremony was held at the site to commemorate the tragedy, with attendees including 60 relatives of Struma victims, representatives of the Turkish Jewish community, the Israeli ambassador and prime minister’s envoy, and various British and American delegates. (Stoliar could not attend because he was suffering from cancer – although he fought hard against the disease and lived for another 14 years.) Not surprisingly, there were no delegates from the former Soviet Union. Today, there are several streets in Israel named for the Struma, as well as a synagogue in Beer Sheva which bears the ship’s name.