War is a Crime
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
Ernest Hemingway
David Stoliar, a strapping 19-year old teenager from Kishinev, lay fast asleep in his bunk. A passenger on the MV Struma, a squalid, leaky former cattle boat equipped with wooden bunks stacked 10 high from the floor, little food or fresh water, no kitchen and only eight toilets, Stoliar was one of nearly 800 Jews packed like sardines on the 150-foot steamer fleeing the Holocaust in Romania. When he was awakened, Stoliar was floundering in the freezing ocean, surrounded by people screaming and thrashing in waves strewn with debris.
On December 11, 1941, the overloaded Struma, whose passengers paid up to $1,000 each to a con man who lied about travel visas and the ship’s seaworthiness, departed Constanza bound for Palestine. Just a few miles out from port, the engine suddenly failed. The captain of a passing tug pulled alongside and offered to repair it in exchange for the passenger’s jewelry, including their wedding rings. Three days later, as the Struma limped toward Turkey, the engine failed again. Turkish tugs towed the groaning vessel into the Bosporus, the divide of Europe and Asia.
Neutral Turkey, whose leaders feared angering either Britain or Germany, interned the Struma offshore while its fate was considered. Istanbul’s Jews donated food, but conditions onboard deteriorated as talks dragged on. Britain, which had control of Palestine, limited Jewish immigration to avoid antagonizing the Arabs, and refused to let the passengers continue without visas. Finally, on February 23, 1942, after a 71-day quarantine and with her engine still inoperable and her refugee passengers still aboard, the Turks cut the Struma’s anchor, towed the ship back into the Black Sea and set it adrift.
At dawn the next day, February 24, a Soviet sub, with standing orders from Stalin to sink all neutral ships to prevent supplies from reaching Germany, spotted the Struma. A torpedo was fired. It struck amidships with an explosion that tore the Struma apart.
Blown into the water, Stoliar, clad in a heavy leather jacket, clung to a railing on a partly submerged section of the wooden deck. There was nothing to do but hang on. Hours passed, and the terrified cries of the shivering and sobbing survivors gradually faded as they succumbed to hypothermia and exhaustion. Soon birds appeared, flying over the corpses. In the afternoon, the Struma’s first mate floated by on a door. Stoliar pulled him onto his raft of wreckage. In the numbing cold, they were surrounded by floating bodies. No one else appeared to be alive as night fell, and in the morning the first mate was dead too.
Stoliar, alone and unable to feel his hands and feet, thought of giving up. He took out a jackknife to slit his wrists, but his fingers were too numb to to open the blade. A short while later, about 24 hours after the Struma had sunk, a large ship appeared in the distance. Stoliar waved frantically, and he saw figures on deck waving back. Soon a rowboat approached. Stoliar was pulled aboard, wrapped in blankets and taken to a Turkish fishing village. His hands and feet were frostbitten. He was hospitalized in Istanbul, then jailed for six weeks, apparently to keep him from the news media. Referring to the Turks, he said, “I was the only witness to their inhumanity, really, from the beginning to the end.”
Stoliar reached Palestine eventually and joined the British Army’s Jewish Brigade in 1943, serving in Egypt and Libya. He also fought with the Israeli Army in the 1948 war of independence. He became an oil executive in the early 1950’s and lived in Japan for 18 years before moving to Oregon in 1971.
For more than a half-century, David Stoliar remained a silent witness, the only survivor to the worst civilian maritime disaster of World War II. The doomed voyage of the Struma might have been a forgotten footnote to Holocaust history had it not been for Stoliar’s survival and the inquisitiveness of a Briton whose grandparents had died onboard and who had organized a success search for the vessel, which they photographed 250-feet below the surface of the Black Sea. “For 58 years, no one asked about the Struma,” he said in a 2001 documentary, “and I felt that no one cared. I carried the memories in my head as if it happened yesterday.”
David Stoliar died in Bend, OR on May 1, 2014 at the age of 91. The New York Times, which had prepared an obituary, only learned of his death last month.