YOUNGSTOWN Survivor of sinking recalls his flight from persecution

The Struma, the freighter that was torpedoed while carrying Jewish passengers from Romania, had sunk once previously.
By IAN HILL
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- David Stoliar spent 30 years trying to forget the events of Feb. 24, 1942.
On Tuesday, he asked an audience of about 100 at Youngstown State University to remember.
Stoliar was one of 769 passengers aboard the Struma, a freighter sunk by a Russian submarine. Most of the passengers, including Stoliar, were Jews fleeing persecution in Romania.
Only Stoliar survived.
Stoliar, 78, said he wanted people to remember the Struma so they could prevent future ethnic persecution. It was his first public speech about the Struma disaster.
Event: His speech was part of "Israel and the Pursuit of Peace," a daylong symposium sponsored by YSU Judaic/Holocaust Studies, the university's history department, and the Youngstown Zionist District.
Saul Friedman, coordinator of Judaic/Holocaust Studies, said he felt the speech showed how people's insensitivity could lead to disaster.
"Everyone has an obligation to help their neighbor," Friedman said.
What happened: Stoliar was 18 and living in Bucharest, Romania, when his father bought him a ticket for the Struma. At the time, the Romanian government was allied with Nazi Germany and drafting Jews to fight on the war's front lines.
The Struma was a wooden freighter built in the 1880s. Stoliar said the freighter was about 150 feet long, 18 feet wide, and designed to hold 150 people. It had sunk once in the past.
"It was something unbelievable," he said. "Basically, it was a mini-concentration camp, with the difference that this one was so small we could hardly fit into it," he recalled.
Stoliar's girlfriend, her family, and four of his classmates also were on the boat, which departed for what was then British Palestine in December 1941.
The Struma's engines failed one day after it left Romania. A tugboat crew agreed to tow the Struma to a port outside of Istanbul, Turkey. Stoliar said the crew took the wedding rings of Struma passengers as payment for the trip.
The Struma spent more than two months anchored outside of Istanbul while Turkish and British officials decided what to do. As time passed, the passengers lost hope that they would reach Palestine.
By February, Stoliar said, the passengers' mood was one of death. "It was a floating coffin," he said.
Eventually, the British decided to let 103 children between the ages of 11 and 16 enter Turkey. The order, however, either never reached Turkish officials or was ignored.
Attack: On Feb. 23, 1942, a Turkish tugboat cut the Struma's anchor and towed it into the Black Sea, where it was left to drift. Stoliar said he woke the next morning -- Feb. 24 -- when an explosion threw him out of his bunk and into the sea.
A Russian submarine had launched a torpedo at the Struma after mistaking it for a Turkish freighter. Stoliar said the resulting explosion was comparable to a cannonball's hitting a rowboat. The Struma had "completely evaporated," he said.
Stoliar spent the rest of Feb. 24 floating on a piece of the Struma's deck. When he was finally picked up by Turkish sailors Feb. 25, he was the only passenger who had not drowned or died of frostbite.
After spending a week recuperating in a hospital and nearly two months in a Turkish military prison, Stoliar was released into the custody of the leader of Turkey's Jewish community. He eventually made it to Palestine, where his father later joined him.
Today, Stoliar lives in Oregon. He said that for 30 years, he could not speak about the Struma.
"Who wants to remember the worst time of your life?" he said.
As time passed, he came to grips with the disaster. In recent years, he has appeared on national news shows to discuss the Struma, and he has been interviewed for an upcoming book on the disaster.