March 24



BOOK REVIEW:


USA:

Fleeing the Holocaust, Only to Find It Waiting at Sea
(By JONATHAN ROSEN)



On Feb. 24, 1942, a ship crowded with Jewish refugees fleeing Romania sank
in the Black Sea. Of the nearly 800 men, women and children on board who
had hoped to reach Palestine, only one man, a 19-year-old named David
Stoliar, survived. The ship was the Struma and its tragic story is the
subject of Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins's compelling book, "Death
on the Black Sea: The Untold Story of the Struma and World War II's
Holocaust at Sea."

Though largely forgotten today, the Struma was the worst civilian maritime
disaster of the war. When the ship went down it became a rallying cry for
Zionists who blamed Britain for refusing to allow the ship entry to
Palestine or to grant it a temporary resting place in a British colony.
But as Mr. Frantz, former investigations editor and correspondent for The
New York Times, and Ms. Collins, a journalist based in Turkey, make clear,
it was also the murderous indifference of Turkey, which set the ship
adrift in the Black Sea without a working engine, and the brutality of the
Soviet Union, which actually torpedoed the Struma, that share
responsibility.

And of course the story unfolds against the black backdrop of the European
war against the Jews. Tickets for the Struma went on sale on Sept. 3,
1941, the day the Nazis began experimenting with gas chambers at
Auschwitz. In Romania the Iron Guard had begun slaughtering Jews even
before the country entered the war on the German side.

Mr. Frantz and Ms. Collins offer a useful introduction to the peculiar
character of the Holocaust in Romania a country that had changed sides
three times during World War I and that had been awarded large holdings
from Russia and Hungary and Austria for finishing on the side of the
Allies.

The new acquisitions greatly enlarged the Jewish population of a country
that was the last European nation to grant citizenship in 1923 to its
Jews. Remarkably, roughly half of Romania's 750,000 Jews survived the war,
but the country's early, spasmodic acts of anti-Semitic violence stand out
even in the general inhumanity of the Holocaust: during a pogrom in
Bucharest in early 1941, Jews were forced to crawl through a
slaughterhouse where they were butchered like cattle, beheaded and stamped
"fit for human consumption."

The account of Romanian brutality helps explain the willingness of Jews to
risk their lives on ill-equipped, overcrowded ships. The Struma, which had
been a Danube cattle barge, was primarily carrying wealthy Jews who could
afford the exorbitant ticket prices, along with young men from Betar, the
right-wing Zionist youth group that helped organize illegal immigration.

Mr. Frantz and Ms. Collins pack a great deal into their account, and
rightly so, because to understand the complex interplay of elements that
produced the sinking of the Struma they have to write not only about
conditions in Romania but also about previous attempts to smuggle refugees
to Palestine, along with the debate within the Jewish Agency in Palestine
about illegal immigration. They write in detail about the attitude of
Britain, where the White Paper of 1939 effectively rescinded the Balfour
Declaration promising a Jewish national home in Palestine, and where
members of the Foreign Office sent cables coolly discussing how to
discourage "surplus Jews" from leaving Europe.

It was at the request of Britain that Turkey, which had towed the Struma
into Istanbul when its engine failed, refused to allow the ship to leave
port. Turkey, a tenuously neutral country fearful of angering the Germans
or the British, interned the Struma in the winter of 1941-42 while the
British debated its fate. The authors capture the pragmatism,
anti-Semitism, officiousness, fear of bad publicity and occasional spasms
of humanitarian feeling that informed those debates.

A last-minute plan to allow children on the Struma to enter Palestine was
finalized too late. The Turks wouldn't allow the children overland
passage, the British balked at finding another ship and, by the time the
details were worked out, Turkey following an earlier British suggestion
had towed the ship of half-starved refugees into the Black Sea, cut the
anchor and set it adrift. There were 101 children on board when a Soviet
submarine following Stalin's orders to sink all ships in the Black Sea to
prevent supplies from reaching Germany torpedoed the Struma, despite its
obvious appearance as a refugee ship.

Though only one man emerged from the water alive, there were others who
had embarked on the Struma when it sailed from Romania who lived to tell
their stories. A woman who suffered a miscarriage while the ship was
docked in Turkey was allowed to recuperate in a hospital, and there were
nine others plucked off thanks to the combined efforts of an American in
Istanbul, the Jewish Agency in Palestine and a heroic businessman named
Simon Brod who devoted himself to helping refugees.

The authors do a good job rebuilding, out of only fragments, a sense of
the individual humanity not only of the passengers, but of those few who
reached out to help them.

Less effective, though useful as a framing device, is a contemporary
narrative centered on a young British diver named Greg Buxton, whose
grandparents died on the Struma and who became obsessed with finding and
exploring the wreck and who, in the process, rediscovered an emotional
link to the past. The weight of history is too great to make the slender
quest for closure sought by a young diver enough of an answering
narrative. His minor bureaucratic setbacks are a faint, trivial echo of
the net that ensnared his grandparents and six million other Jews, and his
story is never comfortably integrated into the larger tale.

But Mr. Frantz and Ms. Collins have performed a vital act of reclamation.
By the time the reader encounters the appendix at the end of the book,
listing the names and ages of the passengers, it is impossible to think of
the Struma without sorrow and outrage and a vivid sense of the men, women
and children on board, victims of murder and murderous indifference.

(source: New York Times)