The Struma Disaster

August 26, 2015 6:47 PM

"[In May 2014] some 72 years after his ordeal in the Black Sea, David Stoliar, the sole survivor of the Struma explosion, died on dry land, in Bend, Oregon. He was among the hundreds of men, women, and children who had been abandoned to their fate by a confluence of war, hate, and international politics. In a strange confederacy, Nazis, Communist officials, British Foreign Office personnel, and Turkish politicians all played various roles in one of the worst maritime tragedies of the previous century."
posted by storybored (7 comments total)

I've been reading a lot of documents from that period on UNISPAL, which is a great resource although it doesn't cover 1942. It is amazing how cynical Britain was, and how thinly they disguised their Jew-hatred. Even at the end of the mandate, about a month before Britain's troops were to pull out, they insisted on keeping Jews in concentration camps in Cyprus and Kenya (!) rather than let them enter Palestine. The fact that thousands of people were rotting in their concentration camps didn't move them. Their prime concern was to insist upon Britain's right to seize German property in Palestine as war compensation, even after their troops pulled out.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:49 PM on August 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

Collusion with genocidaires continues today. And the Rohingya are learning it first hand.
posted by ocschwar at 8:32 PM on August 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

what a story...thanks for the post.
posted by OHenryPacey at 9:30 PM on August 26, 2015

And the Rohingya are learning it first hand.

Australia was a British colony once too, of course, and our government policy was closely aligned with Britain's until, say, the early sixties or later. There still seems to be a healthy dose of "this is how we treat people": when you read about our treatment of, say, Nauru, there's very little difference between that and the way British colonies were used and later dumped.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:12 PM on August 26, 2015

Whilst totally owning the anti-semitism that has been a part of British life, I should also point out that Jewish immigration to Palestine was a big problem to us since we needed Arab support. So even if we liked Jewish people we'd still probably have been reluctant to do anything to let Jewish people into Palestine.

The initial thinking at the end of the war was that displaced Jewish people would be treated like the millions - literally millions - of slave labourers and camp inmates all over Europe, and returned to their European nation state. So Latvian Jews to Latvia, Polish Jews to Poland, German Jews to Germany (!), and so on. The Zionists quite naturally agitated against this and encouraged a separate Jewish policy to get to Israel. We didn't like this because it caused huge headaches for our Middle East policy.

I'd have totally headed for Israel if I'd been a European Jew in 1945, I think, and taken every relation I had. And if instead I'd been a British Minister I'd probably have tried to stop me...
posted by alasdair at 2:25 AM on August 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

The reason Britain was in Palestine was because it secured a Mandate from the League of Nations, under which it pledged to "facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes." This is obviously exactly the opposite of what it intended to do, by the 1930s if not earlier.

Also, even though this was a few years before the signing of the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, that convention was created to address the wrongs that had been committed by Britain and other countries in capturing refugees and sending them back to be murdered. So it's not as if it were seen as a morally-neutral thing, even then.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:55 AM on August 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

The Zionists quite naturally agitated against this and encouraged a separate Jewish policy to get to Israel.

There was also the slight matter that Jews who went to the camps lost their homes to squatters (understandably enough - housing stock tends to get scarce in wartime), and those who tried to return to their homes were being murdered one by one and sometimes en masse.

Britain's Whitehall knew this. Whitehall gave not a single flying fuck.
posted by ocschwar at 10:37 AM on August 27, 2015