I had never heard of the "Struma" or of David Stoliar until a few months ago. The Struma was a ship carrying over 700 Romanian Jews from Axis-controlled Romania to British-controlled Palestine (Israel) in 1941-1942. The engine gave out in the Black Sea, and the ship sat at Istanbul while Turkish and British politicians tried to work out an agreement regarding the fate of the passengers. The British did not want such a large number of Jews to enter Palestine, and the Turks refused to let the passengers off the ship. An agreement could not be reached, and finally the Turkish government had the ship towed into the Black Sea and cast adrift. The night of February 24, 1942, a Russian sub mistook the Struma for a Nazi cargo ship and torpedoed it. 768 men, women, and children died that night, and only 18 year old David Stoliar survived.David has spent his life keeping the memory of those who perished on that night alive. Were it not for his survival and his devotion to the memory of the victims, this tragic event might be a forgotten foot-note, buried on the back pages of seldom read history books.
