Free Republic

In 1942, a Soviet submarine in the Black Sea torpedoed and sank the Struma, a ship filled with almost 800 Jewish refugees headed from Romania to the Holy Land. David Stoliar, the lone survivor, agreed to share his story with SPIEGEL ONLINE. David Stoliar's neat house sits atop a hill on the edge of Bend, a small city in central Oregon. A few steps lead up to the front door. Stoliar's wife, Marda, opens, followed by a happy beagle. "Come in," she says cheerfully. "Come in." Her husband is waiting in the living room, surrounded by souvenirs and family photos....

Exactly 70 years ago – on February 24, 1942 – 19-year-old David Stoliar terrifyingly clung to bobbing debris in the Black Sea. At first he heard screams in the frigid waters but the voices died down. It eventually emerged that Stoliar was the sole survivor of the Struma, an un-seaworthy vessel chuck-full of frantic Jewish refugees. World War II was already in fever pitch. Against the enormity of the then-unfolding Holocaust, the loss at sea of 768 Jewish lives (103 of them babies and children) was at most blithely overlooked as a marginal annotation. Moreover, although these Jews fled the...

A little more than a week after Israel apologized to Turkey over the May 2010 Gaza flotilla raid, Likud MK Moshe Feiglin demanded on Sunday that Turkey apologize for the February 1942 sinking of the MV Struma in the Black Sea. … The Struma was quarantined in the Istanbul harbor for more than two months. On February 23, 1942, Turkey towed the ship and its passengers out to international waters in the Black Sea and abandoned it there, even though the Struma’s engine was not working. The next day, the Struma sunk, killing everyone on board except one. It is...