David Stoliar

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David Stoliar was the sole survivor of the torpedo-sinking of the Holocaust refugee ship, Struma, by a Soviet submarine, the Shchuka 213 in the Black Sea in the early morning of February 24, 1942. All of the other 781 Jewish refugees and 10 (mainly Bulgarian) crewmen perished. The nineteen-year-old Stoliar and the passengers fleeing Constanţa, Romania, onboard Struma were cited by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a January 26, 2005, speech to the Knesset:

The leadership of the British Mandate displayed... obtuseness and insensitivity by locking the gates to Israel to Jewish refugees who sought a haven in the Land of Israel. Thus were rejected the requests of the 769 [sic] passengers of the ship Struma who escaped from Europe—and all but one [of the passengers] found their death at sea. Throughout the war, nothing was done to stop the annihilation [of the Jewish people].

The sinking of the Struma might have been no more than a footnote as the single-largest civilian maritime catastrophe during World War II had it not been for Stoliar's remarkable survival and willingness, even today, to attest to the callous nature of mankind that resulted in the Struma tragedy.

The Struma was sailing from Romania to Palestine. Its engines gave out during December, 1941, the coldest winter on record. A Turkish military tugboat towed Struma to Istanbul harbor. Under close police surveillance, Struma languished for 71 days in the harbor, its passengers prevented by Turkish police from going ashore. Stoliar said he and the passengers would have died without the meagre shipments of bread and other food ferried from shore to the vessel by a single Turkish Jew named Simon Brod, working with Red Crescent and other Jews of Istanbul. Finally, at the insistence of the British Colonial Office and the Palestine High Commissioner, the crew of the Turkish military tugboat Aldemar cut the Struma's anchor chain, according to Stoliar, and towed the hapless vessel, without working engine, radio or anchor, and without adequate food or provisions, back into the Black Sea.

That night, a Soviet submarine commanded by Senior Lieutenant D.M. Denezhko and Political Commissar A.G. Rodimatzav, fired a single torpedo from a distance of 1,118 meters and sank the Struma. Stoliar survived the blast and clung to wreckage with the ship's First Mate Ivanof Dikof. Stoliar said Dikof told him, in Russian, he saw the torpedo before it sank the Struma. Dikof died slumped on the wreckage. The Turkish government did not launch a rescue effort for 24 hours. Six coastguards in a rowing boat rescued David after initial reports of the sinking of the Struma, apparently by a stray mine, had already appeared in The New York Times.

After his rescue, Stoliar was imprisoned in Turkey for six weeks. After an impassioned outcry and strike in Palestine, Turkish authorities released him to Simon Brod. Afterwards British authorities acquiesced and issued Stoliar travel papers and a visa to Palestine, Brod put him on the train to Palestine. Stoliar later joined the British Army and served with distinction in Egypt and Libya, then later in the Israeli Army in the 1948 war for Israel's independence. Later, he moved to Japan and then the United States. As of 2006, Stoliar was 83 years old and living in Bend, Oregon.