A DOOMED JOURNEY
by Sarah-Honig
Published in THE JERUSALEM POST, Friday,
January 17, 1992, Daily. Page: 10
AT - Section: FEATURES
NW - Number of Words: 3441
KW - Keywords: Remembrance-; Death-; Romania-;
Jew-; Refugee-; History-; Maritime-; Immigration-; Holocaust-; Palestine-;
UK-
AB - Lead Paragraph:
For a full 71 days, during December
1941 and January and February 1942, when the Holocaust's monstrous
machinery was switched into high gear, the impotence, the total helplessness
and humiliation of the Jews, stateless and unwanted, was played out
before a largely indifferent world in the neutral Turkish port of
Istanbul.
For a full 71 days, during December 1941 and
January and February 1942, when the Holocaust's monstrous machinery
was switched into high gear, the impotence, the total helplessness and
humiliation of the Jews, stateless and unwanted, was played out before
a largely indifferent world in the neutral Turkish port of Istanbul.
There, a peanut-shell of a boat - the Struma - packed with 769 refugees
from Hitler's hell, was denied safe haven. One of those aboard
was Shmuel Gutenmacher, then barely 20 years old.
For weeks, his brother Shabtai Nadiv
had been awaiting him impatiently in this country. He, his wife and
a friend were then the only pioneers of the Betar Battalions left
in Galilee. Nadiv was regional commander of those battalions,
whose members, men and women alike, did heavy construction and agricultural
labor in places like Rosh Pina, Migdal and Tel Tzur.
But now the Revisionist pioneers were
gone, because, with World War II blazing, they heeded their leadership's
call to enlist in the British Army to fight the common foe.
Nadiv essentially remained a chief without braves. His fervent
hopes were now pinned on the Struma.
His brother, five years his junior, was part
of a group of 110 Betar youths due to replace the Galilee pioneers
gone to war. Later, maybe they, too, could contribute directly
to the Allied cause. But the beleaguered British Empire did not want
the help of these fit, dedicated, idealistic boys.
It also didn't want to know about the 103
babies and children on the Struma, nor, in fact, about any of the
refugees who boarded this tiny unseaworthy vessel, bound "illegally"
for Eretz Yisrael. It didn't care that they escaped the terror of
Romania's fascist regime, the pogroms and the ghastly Nazi atrocities
which had already struck cities like Jassy, where thousands of Jews
were assembled in the market square and mowed down with machine guns.
The Jews fled for their lives, but the British wished they didn't exist.
So much so, that they not only refused
to allow the Struma's human cargo permission to enter Mandated Palestine,
but they made sure no one else would allow them to go ashore.
In the end, nearly all on board perished. This was roughly
when the British Mandatory authorities allowed the return to Eretz Yisrael
of previously-banished Arab followers of notorious Nazi collaborator
Haj Amin el-Husseini, Jerusalem's mufti, who spent the war as Hitler's
guest in Berlin.
At the time, the Struma's fate shocked the
Yishuv and for a fleeting moment it made a bit of a stir in America.
But war news quickly overshadowed its story. Eventually this tragedy
paled against the enormity of the Holocaust.
Today, to most Israelis, the Struma
is a curious street name in some towns. Even those who associate
it with a boat hardly know the details. The Struma's unhappy
end never inspired best-selling authors like Leon Uris who romanticized
the Exodus.
Apart from the skeleton story, it is hard
to uncover more than sketchy details about the passengers or their
ordeal. Five decades later, the Struma is an esoteric subject.
But not to Nadiv.
For the historian and author, a retired senior
banker and for many years Ramat Gan city councillor, the story is
still alive, still a painful personal episode. He last saw his brother
in February, 1940 from the deck of another illegal Betar immigrant
boat, the Sakaria. It was to take Nadiv, who was then Betar
commander for Central Romania and in charge of organizing Betar's illegal
aliya from that country, to Eretz Yisrael.
Shmuel and 20 other teenagers stood on the
dock below. They were all Nadiv's youth movement trainees, who wanted
to board the Sakaria too, but weren't on the passenger list, and
the boat was overloaded. Nadiv was ready to pull his gun to change
the captain's mind.
But he was dissuaded from doing so by the
boat's Betar commander, Eri Jabotinsky (the Revisionist leader's
son, who was imprisoned when the Sakaria was apprehended by the British.
Nadiv and other passengers did time in jail as well). The young
Jabotinsky promised Nadiv that all would be done to help Shmuel,
too, get to Eretz Yisrael.
That promise was made good in December 1941.
"By then, Jews already had tasted the bitters of grisly Nazi horrors,"
observes Nadiv. "The popular myth is that there was no real
Holocaust in Romania.
But in Bukovina and Bessarabia Jews were
deported to Transnestria, and in Transylvania to Hungary. In time,
they were exterminated. "In Central or Old Romania there were
no mass deportations but there were pogroms, starvation and disease.
Venerable old rabbis and Jewish community
leaders were impaled on meat hooks in town squares. Somehow, the
Betar office continued to operate for a while in Bucharest even after the
Jewish Agency facility closed. As all hell was raging at the
end of 1941, the Revisionists managed to secure permission to send
out an immigrant boat.
It was the Struma," Nadiv relates. "I
knew that boat well from the days I hired illegal aliya ships.
It had no business sailing the high seas.
It was a dilapidated 16-meter-long and
six-meter-wide sardine can, built in 1830! It was basically a Danube cargo
barge which mostly carried cattle. Even in comparison to the
rickety vessels which somehow made it to Eretz Yisrael, this one
was especially pitiful and tiny. The Sakaria, for example, was 3,000
tons with 2,400 passengers.
"The Struma was a mere 180 tons with nearly
770 passengers. For this journey the Struma was outfitted for
the first time with a motor. It was used and unreliable, but that's
all there was.
Wooden plank rails were constructed,
so more people could get in. The upper wood structure was so weak
that any brisk breeze threatened to demolish it. "Those were
desperate times.
There were no other means of escape
from hell. Besides Shmuel, who then headed the Betar branch in our
home town of Barlad, and the 110 Betar boys, ordinary Jews from all
parts of Romania, but especially from Bukovina and Bessarabia, filled
the boat. Whole families pleaded to go on the Struma.
They paid good money to get away.
"The captain was a Bulgarian named Pandellis and the ship was commanded
by my dear friend, the head of Betar in Dorohoi, Yona Berkovici."
Nadiv adds that "Yona was one of the best of his generation." Apart
from the many youngsters, the passengers included 269 women, some of them
pregnant. Five passengers possessed valid visas to enter Eretz Yisrael.
Also on board were 20 doctors, 10 engineers,
15 lawyers and 30 businessmen. Young and old, they all assembled
in the Romanian port of Constanza on December 8, 1941. For
four days, the Romanian customs officials "examined" their belongings.
In effect, they robbed all they saw - clothing,
underwear, jewelry and most important, food. The immigrants left
on the perilous journey with not enough food or clothing and no medications.
Somehow, "that overloaded river barge" chugged out of Constanza on December
12, 1941.
"There were problems with the motor
right off," Nadiv relates. He knows a good deal from the testimonies
of the five visa-holders who were allowed off the Struma at different
stages of its ordeal, and from letters Shmuel and Berkovici smuggled
to him. "No sooner was the boat out on the Black Sea than the motor
ominously sputtered and stopped dead.
The engineers on board helped revive it.
But already on its day of departure, still in Romanian territorial
waters, the Struma sent out an SOS." On December 13, a Romanian ship
came near and its captain offered to fix the motor for a hefty sum.
Finally he settled for $1,100 because that's all there was.
It was paid with the little cash in British
and American currency which the passengers had as well as wedding
rings, gold watches and anything of value which the Jews had managed
to hide from the customs officers. Now the motor would work for half
an hour and would go off for three. In this state, with no
lights or radio contact, the Struma, with its last sparks of energy,
dragged itself into Istanbul Harbor on December 16.
It couldn't continue. The motor gave
out completely and the boat was powerless. The journey which
should have taken 14 hours at the most turned into a hair-raising
four days.
It would have ended in calamity right there,
if not for the fortuitously calm seas. The hope was that, once
in Turkey, the refugees would be granted legal permission to enter
Eretz Yisrael as thousands of precious aliya certificates allotted the
Jewish Agency by the British went unused now, with Europe in the
throes of war. The captain requested temporary asylum from
the Turks, until legalities were sorted out with the British.
He explained that the boat was disabled.
There was no fuel, food or water. But the British told the Turks
that the refugees would under no circumstances be allowed into Palestine.
They pressured the Turks not to grant them
entry, lest that encourage more Jews to attempt the sea journey to
the Middle East. Obligingly, the Turks refused to let the Jews
ashore. The Turkish prime minister later remorselessly explained
that "Turkey cannot be expected to serve as a refuge or a surrogate
homeland for people who are unwanted by others anywhere else." The
most pressing need was to get food on board.
Minimal supplies, provided by local
Jews and the Yishuv, were at intervals allowed by the Turks after their
palms were greased with generous bribes. But the situation
was pitiful. In mail which reached Nadiv by circuitous routes,
Shmuel and the boat's commander described an appalling situation.
Shmuel wrote of people ill-clothed to
cope with the winter cold on the flimsy vessel. He described attempts
by the Betar youths to help "the civilians." They gave them some
of their own meager food rations, but that kept no one from going
hungry. Berkovici wrote of despair, disease, unspeakable sanitary
conditions, people dying, women giving birth on board and some losing
their sanity.
A sign saying "Help!" was suspended
over the Struma's side. One of the visa-holders who after weeks was
allowed off described the boat as a "floating coffin." Hundreds of
people were confined in a narrow unventilated space. The hull
below reeked, but the passengers were allowed up for a brief breath of
fresh air only by turns as there wasn't enough room on deck for all,
even if they stood huddled together.
Actually, there was no room for everyone
below deck either. There wasn't sufficient sleeping space or even
space for people to move around freely during the day. Worse
still, there was one makeshift toilet for some 770 people, with no
bathing facilities at all, not even for babies.
There was no way to do laundry and in any
case there were passengers without even a change of clothing, literally
with only the shirts on their backs. There was no separate
area for those who took ill and not even a galley, save for one little
corner used in lieu of a kitchen. There was only one hot meal a week.
Men, women and children were cramped
together, hungry, cold, stifled, unable to bathe or rest. There was
fear of epidemics, but thanks to the hard work of all those doctors
on board, there were "only" dysentery, respiratory infections and
a lot of fainting spells. The Jewish Agency in Jerusalem and Jewish
organizations in London and the US lobbied hard.
On January 19, 1942, an official Jewish Agency
request was forwarded to the British to allow all on the Struma to
enter Eretz Yisrael, stressing that they were refugees who fled the
most tangible threat of massacre. The Mandatory authorities didn't
even dignify the Jewish Agency with a reply. On the next day,
the Struma's 35th in Istanbul, the Wannsee Conference opened in suburban
Berlin to formally decide on "the final solution of the Jewish problem."
Hitler surely had not overlooked this latest demonstration of utter callousness
towards hapless Jews.
Historians agree that such displays encouraged
him to proceed with his bloody schemes. The British didn't
bother to answer another emotional Jewish Agency plea on January 30.
On February 10, the Jewish Agency announced that it was granting
aliya certificates from among the 3,000 it was given by the Mandatory
authorities to all refugees on the Struma.
The reply was that no one would be permitted
to enter the country except for four more visa-holders, who only at this
point were let off the boat. More news of the dreadful conditions
on the Struma now came out. Besides, the Turks, egged on and
emboldened by the British, began openly threatening to tow the crippled
boat out to sea, beyond their territorial waters.
They had been imposed upon and asked to play
host for too long. All Jewish protests about the boat's unseaworthiness
were of no avail. The Jewish Agency's official February 13
communique warned that "the boat is in a state of total disrepair and without
any life-saving equipment.
Any sea journey for this vessel cannot but
end in disaster." Meanwhile, unconnected with this, there were negotiations
in London on a special rescue-aliya of children from Hungary and
Romania. The Jewish Agency pointed out that the children on the Struma,
being from Romania, qualified to enter Eretz Yisrael. This
time a reply did come.
Chillingly it stated that "even this
supposition about the Struma," i.e. that the children were from Romania,
"is doubtful and must be closely investigated." The British were
now openly arguing that since the Struma came from enemy territory,
all in it were suspected of being enemy agents. "The Jewish Agency
had to battle an assertion so preposterous that Yishuv leaders labeled
it satanic. The thought that the Germans' most hideously persecuted
victims would be their agents was beyond even the hypocrisy which the Yishuv
has come to expect from Perfidious Albion," comments Nadiv.
In a very long February 13 letter to the
Mandatory government, the Agency detailed the horrors which the Romanian
Jews fled. It stressed that "because they feared brutality
and extermination, they were willing to risk a journey on so feeble a
boat. The idea that the Nazis would use just such a rickety vessel,
loaded with women and children, to infiltrate agents seems beyond
imagination Commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael, the staunchest,
most unyielding opponent of any compromise on the Struma.
They noted that Britain was helping with much
fanfare to resettle in the Mideast thousands of Gentiles - Greeks,
Yugoslavs, Poles and Czechs - all of whom came from enemy territory.
More than any of them, the Jews had reason to be loyal to the Allies.
On February 15, the British announced that they would make an exception
in the case of Struma children aged 11 to 16.
All others on board were denied entry
because with wartime rationing there wouldn't be enough provisions for
them. Donning a humanitarian cloak, MacMichael stressed that
he would "not want to undertake the cruel task of choosing which
of the passengers should be allowed in," and so it was deemed kinder to
reject all outside the limited age-group decided upon. The
Jewish Agency started preparing for the arrival of the children and
a few days later secured agreement to allow younger ones in, too, "if proper
arrangements be made for their upkeep." At the same time, on February
20, it called for a review of the British decision on the adults,
noting that the American JDC had undertaken to provide for all the Struma's
Jews.
The Agency in another communique warned of
"grave danger if the Struma is forced out to sea, where it is likely
to drown or meet a wartime mishap because they were Jews." His Majesty's
Government's official reply was that it would not change its policy
of combating illegal Jewish immigration. In the Yishuv there was
shock and grief. Demonstrations were mounted and for one day all
work and commerce was halted and the population imposed a voluntary
protest curfew on itself.
Posters appeared on the walls everywhere bearing
MacMichael's picture and announcing in Hebrew and English that he
was "Wanted for Murder." The Struma's tragic end also marked the
effective end to all significant illegal immigration from Europe until
the conclusion of WWII. A few fishing and sporting craft and
sailboats briefly attempted the route. They carried a handful
of passengers each and some were sunk.
"Europe's Jews had no escape left," Nadiv
sums up grimly. "Embattled Britain took time out from the war
to make sure of grimly. "Embattled Britain took time out from
the war to make sure of IM
- Image Details: Photo.; Caption:
1. Following the sinking of the Struma and the drowning of some 760
Jewish refugees,
2. posters, like the one shown above, appeared around the Yishuv
denouncing the High Commissioner who had refused the boat entry.
3. Shabtai Nadiv with his friend, Yona Berkovici, who commanded the
Struma, before it sailed.
4. Nadiv's brother Shmuel Gutenmacher was among those who drowned.
5. Nadiv today.
6. David Stollier was the tragedy's sole survivor.;
By: 1. IDF ARCHIVES. 3.-5. GIL HADANI. 6. IDF ARCHIVES