In a particularly heinous act that 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, for their part, did not want to take the Jews back and the Turks, still neutral at the time, were careful not to risk alienating any country.
The nations of the world left the vessel to sit rotting in the water during one of the coldest winters in decades and with its starving and freezing passengers abandoned.
When the Turkish deadline for some international resolution of the “Struma problem” passed with no action being taken, the Turks 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 motor boats, 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, many passengers hung signs 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 Struma was torpedoed and sunk by the Soviet submarine Shch 213. Some 768 men, women, and children were killed, making it the largest exclusively civilian naval disaster of World War II. More than 100 passengers actually survived the original bombing, and 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 British government eventually decided to grant an exception and permit Stoliar to emigrate to Eretz Yisrael – over the 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 that had preceded it, became a rallying point for the Irgun and LEHI Jewish underground movements and their violent revolt against the British presence in Eretz Yisrael.
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, he did later reluctantly provide critical assistance to Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in their reconstruction of the Struma tragedy in their book, Death on the Black Sea (2003).
Although there have been a few claims by scavengers to the contrary, the wreck of the Struma has never been found. 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. There were no delegates from the former Soviet Union.
