Death on the Black Sea: The Untold Story of the 'Struma' and World War II's Holocaust at Sea
Douglas Frantz
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0066212626
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
On the morning of February 24, 1942, on the Black Sea near Istanbul, an explosion ripped through a ship filled with Jewish refugees. One man clung fiercely to a piece of deck, fighting to survive. Nearly eight hundred others -- among them, more than one hundred children -- perished.
From this dramatic prologue Death on the Black Sea unfolds as a powerful story of endurance and the struggle for survival aboard a decrepit former cattle barge called Struma. The only path to escape led through Istanbul, where the desperate passengers found themselves trapped in a closing vise between the Nazis and countries that refused them sanctuary.
The story of the Struma, its passengers, and the events that led to its destruction is investigated and revealed fully in two vivid, parallel accounts set six decades apart. One chronicles the diplomatic maneuvers and callousness of Great Britain, Romania, Turkey, and the rest of the international community, which resulted in the largest maritime loss of civilian life during World War II. The other part of the story recounts a recent attempt by a team of divers to locate the Struma at the bottom of the Black Sea, an effort initiated and pursued by the grandson of two of the victims.
A vivid reconstruction of a grim exodus aboard a doomed ship, Death on the Black Sea illuminates a forgotten episode of World War II and pays tribute to the heroes, past and present, who keep its memory alive.
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hundred or so people could be on deck at any one time, for fear of tipping the whole structure. So as it filled, the crew hurried passengers to the quarters below deck. There was the grimmest discovery yet. As the stunned passengers filed on board, they underwent yet another inspection, this time by agents who demanded their tickets and again weighed their belongings. Finally they were directed down a set of stairs near the middle of the ship. The stairs descended three flights to the dank bottom.
concern about public opinion, Lookstein wrote, President Roosevelt avoided referring to the “Jewish plight” and called the victims of Nazi persecution by “the bland term of ‘political refugees.’ ” By late 1941, the issue of Nazi spies hidden among the refugees had been used for at least a year by the British to justify restrictions on immigration to Palestine. In numerous cables, the office of the high commissioner in Palestine and his counterparts in the Colonial Office in London speculated about
going on. Everyone in Istanbul was suffering from shortages. The city’s Jewish community, dwindling in size and facing an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in the predominantly Muslim country, was reluctant to extend too visible a hand. “We kept away from them, including keeping a distance from the Struma,” Abudaram said. “We went to work. We went to school. The help came from a few people in each Jewish neighborhood who organized what they could. Mostly we kept our distance.” For six hundred years,
that seemed almost cataclysmic. People slept much of the day and all night, huddled together for warmth, numbed physically and psychologically. The acrid smell of urine and feces was everywhere. When the sun went down, the ship was blanketed in a darkness interrupted only by the flicker of the occasional candle that left people on the edge of the weak light, mothlike. Buffeted by winter storms and icy winds, and by the gyrations of their own hope and despair, they no longer called the ship by its
considerable amount of business in Germany in the 1930s, and its Vienna office had employed Adolf Eichmann as a traveling salesman. When war broke out, some company funds had been frozen by the American government. Walker had served Standard Oil throughout the Balkans for three decades, and he was an outspoken opponent of Nazi Germany. People who visited the German embassy or consulate were forbidden to enter his house, which was one of Istanbul’s most beautiful homes and the scene of many popular