Struma disaster

The Struma disaster was the sinking on 24 February 1942 of a ship, , which had been trying to take nearly 800 Jewish refugees from the Axis member Romania to Mandatory Palestine. She was a small iron-hulled ship of only and had been built in 1867 as a steam-powered schooner but had recently been re-engined with an unreliable second-hand diesel engine. Struma was only long, had a beam of only and a draught of only but an estimated 781 refugees and 10 crew were crammed into her. Strumas diesel engine failed several times between her departure from Constanţa on the Black Sea on 12 December 1941 and her arrival in Istanbul on 15 December. She had to be towed by a tug boat to leave Constanţa and to enter Istanbul. On 23 February 1942, with her engine still inoperable and her refugee passengers aboard, Turkish authorities towed Struma from Istanbul through the Bosphorus out to the coast of Şile, in North Istanbul. Within hours, on the morning of 24 February, the torpedoed her, killing 781 refugees and 10 crew, which made it the Black Sea's largest exclusively-civilian naval disaster of World War II. Until recently, the number of victims had been estimated at 768, but the current figure is the result of a recent study of six different passenger lists. Only one person aboard, the 19-year-old David Stoliar, survived (he died in 2014). The Struma disaster joined that of SS Patria, which was sunk after Haganah sabotage while she was laden with Jewish refugees 15 months earlier, as rallying points for the Irgun and Lehi revisionist Zionist clandestine movements, encouraging their campaign against the British colonial government. Romania during World War II Struma had been built as a luxury yacht but was 74 years old. In the 1930s, she had been relegated to carrying cattle on the Danube River under the flag of convenience of Panama. The Mossad LeAliyah Bet intended to use her as a refugee ship but shelved the plan after the Germans had entered Bulgaria. Her Greek owner, Jean D. Pandelis, instead contacted Revisionist Zionists in Romania.