‘Everyone died, except for me’
Today marks the 70th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Struma, the greatest maritime disaster in the history of the secret immigration enterprise and the worst civilian maritime disaster of World War II. The SS Struma was one of 141 illegal immigrant ships that made their way to Palestine between 1934 and 1948 carrying more than 100,000 people. Some 2,000 of those passengers drowned before reaching their destination.
‘Everyone died, except for me’
By Ofer Aderet
Haaretz
David Stoliar, 89, was the lone survivor of the torpedoing of the refugee ship Struma in the Black Sea in 1942. On the 70th anniversary of World War II’s worst civilian maritime disaster, he recounts the harrowing experience.
The illegal immigrant ship Struma, which made its way from Romania to Palestine in 1942, entered the history books under rather miserable circumstances. The 768 Jewish refugees on board drowned after the ship was torpedoed in the Black Sea. Only one individual survived. Today marks the 70th anniversary of the sinking, the greatest maritime disaster in the history of the secret immigration enterprise and the worst civilian maritime disaster of World War II.
“Early in the morning, a Soviet submarine fired a torpedo at us. The ship vaporized around me, some 500 passengers were killed immediately. I was thrown into the sea along with several hundred others … no one came to our aid. Everyone died, everyone, except for me,” David Stoliar, the lone survivor of the tragedy said this month. Stoliar, who recently turned 89, lives in the United States.
The SS Struma was one of 141 illegal immigrant ships that made their way to Palestine between 1934 and 1948 carrying more than 100,000 people. Some 2,000 of those passengers drowned before reaching their destination.
The Struma was in poor shape even before it set sail from Constanta. It had originally served to transport cattle along the Danube River, and was not supposed to carry more than 100 passengers. Sanitary and safety conditions on board were also atrocious. Nevertheless, on December 12, 1941, the ship departed Constanta harbor on the Black Sea coast of Romania, headed for the Land of Israel. The plan was to get to Istanbul and there obtain entry permits to Palestine.
Stoliar was 19 at the time. His parents had divorced when he was a child. His mother lived in Paris and his father in Romania. “She loved me so much and that is why she sent me to Bucharest to live with my father, because she thought it would be safer there. She was right,” he says. A few months later his mother was arrested and handed over to the Gestapo. Later on she was murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
