Excerpt Chapter 2 “Surplus Jews”

Excerpt

Aw, the Holocaust—in Romania!  Nothing like the sweet smell of money!  Never mind the mounting stacks of Jewish corpses. 

If that reeks of vulgar bathos, consider that just weeks after the sinking of the Struma, the Antonescu regime went after the organizers, Greek shipping agent Jean D. Pandelis and the Italian “Commander” Stefano d’Andria—not to prosecute them for fraud and extortion, or worse.  Rather, the state was after its cut of the 250,000,000 lei (more than $1 million) in “earnings” of the two evazioniștilor (tax dodgers).[1]  Never mind that Pandelis and d’Andria in 1941 essentially auctioned off tickets on the rotten, overcrowded cattle barge to Jews desperate to escape Romania.

David never met Pandelis but he was sure his father must have.

“Otherwise, my father would not have bought me a ticket,” said David.

Exactly when Pandelis came to own, or at least take control of, the Struma isn’t clear.  He may have purchased it in 1941 through a front company, the Mediterranean Steamship Company, headed by the larger-than-life “Commander” d’Andria.  But it wasn’t d’Andria’s name on the bottom of David’s ticket.  It was Pandelis’s that appeared as the “Controller of the Voyage.”  David’s father paid Pandelis an extortionate 200,000 to 300,000 Romanian lei, roughly equivalent to $1,000 to $1,500, for his son’s passage. 

Pandelis and d’Andria were old hands in the immigration business.  Since Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, the Oxford-educated conniving chancer (with other people’s money) had been feeding off anxious Jews seeking escape.  Before the war in port cities like that of Constanța, long lines of Jewish émigrés from Poland, Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia queued up in front of makeshift travel agencies for tickets on vessels the British referred to as “coffin ships” in order to deter Jewish emigration.[2]  Pandelis specialized early on in such schemes.  Well known to Mossad agents of the Jewish Agency years before the Struma, Pandelis and d’Andria built a sprawling human smuggling operation with contacts throughout the ports of Romania and Bulgaria, an agent in Istanbul, and with the help of friends from Pandelis’s homeport of Piraeus, Greece.

Their business jumped September 6, 1940, when the Iron Guard and Marshal Ion Antonescu ousted royal dictator King Carol II and formed the National Legionnaire State with Antonescu as president.  Almost immediately, without a ship or much in the way of advanced planning, members of the Revisionist Zionist political movement in Bucharest, operating as the New Zionist Organization (NZO), began soliciting subscriptions for four-hundred tickets to escape the Nazification of Romania.  Together with its Betar youth wing, the NZO used as a business model the voyage of the Sakariya that Revisionist Zionists had organized earlier that year.[3]  Chartered by William R. Perl, the Sakariya had departed Sulina, Romania, February 1, 1940, tightly packed with 2,176 immigrants,[4] under the command of Eri Jabotinsky, son of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement.  Betarim scheduled work, rotated passengers on the coveted top deck, maintained order, prepared and distributed food, and provided for cultural and social activities.[5]  Two weeks after the embarkation of the Sakariya, the British H.M.S. Fiona captured the refugee vessel at the mouth of the Dardanelles and escorted it to Haifa, on February 13, 1940—the fastest such illegal immigration voyage with the largest load of refugees, to that date.  The British interned what they believed to be illegal aliens in camps at Atlit and Acre for six months at which time they were released.

The voyage of the Sakariya was the NZO’s template for that of the Struma.  Yet, even before they had the ship, the NZO ran into problems, starting with a lack of leadership.  Without William R. Perl and Eri Jabotinsky, among others, the operation in Bucharest fell into tatters.  With the war now raging, the British navy wasn’t likely to repeat its mistake two years earlier and escort another ship brimming with Jewish refugees from the Straits of the Dardanelles to the ancient harbor at Haifa as the Fiona had done with the Sarkarya.  Worse, with no ship, no departure date and no expertise in organizing the voyage, the NZO’s ticket subscriptions began to attract the attention of the Iron Guard.  

“We understood that originally this Comitetul ‘Alyia’ [the NZO’s Immigration Committee] was trying to get the Betar movement, the youngsters, out of Romania to Palestine, but they needed money.  So they decided, well, okay, these Betarim are going free of charge, right, because they don’t have any money.  So, by selling spaces to people like my father who can afford it, the money that comes in will compensate for the people that go free, which is the Betar,” David said. 

“They collected a lot of money where they had no vessel, they had nothing, and I did not know that.  Plus, you were in effect paying for the ‘free’ passage of the Betarim to Palestine.  I doubt that [my father] knew about that.  The only thing he knew is that to get a ticket, the later he waited, the more expensive the ticket gets.  And I know that he tried to find out [about] the vessel in Constanța.  Very unsuccessful.”

David learned about the NZO’s problems during one of his Sunday visits to the apartment of his girlfriend, Ilse Lothringer.  Her stepfather Sigmund Katz was one of the early subscribers.  He worried aloud about their emigration plans.

David also knew of the Struma from the Eisig family.  They too had signed up to purchase tickets for David’s best friend and classmate, Mircea Eisig, and his older brother Louis.  David and Mircea’s friendship dated back to the mid-1930s, when they played soccer and swam together, and talked for hours while chiseling each other across the ping-pong table at Maccabi Bucureşti sports club.

“Naturally, I wanted to go—was natural, with all of my friends, but it was not up to me,” David said.

In fall of 1940, under the policy of “Romanization” by the National Legionnaire State, the Iron Guard extorted the NZO’s ticket subscription funds.  The extortion took the form, late that December, of an NZO “donation” to the Iron Guard’s Ajutorul Legionar, Legionary Aid.  The NZO’s leadership frayed under mounting threat of violence but continued, at least for a time, to sell ticket subscriptions even before they had secured the retired cattle barge, the Makedonia, which lay in the Black Sea port of Varna, Bulgaria, and which would eventually be rechristened as the Struma.  

 “They ran out of money,” said David.

Besieged that winter of 1941 by irate subscribers desperate to escape, the NZO turned to Pandelis, a man of affable charm and grandiose dynamism who exceeded his avoirdupois, a man with an uncanny knowledge of shipping so long as the arrangements he made were with other people’s money.  And why not?  He had a resume.  His references included the Jewish Agency’s immigration arm and future spy organization, the Mossad.  The Mossad worked with Pandelis as did other rescue organizations and individuals.  Indeed, one of the ten undercover agents of the Mossad, Ruth Klüger (Hebrew name: Aliav), worked closely with Pandelis, a man so stout he needed two plane seats to fly.  The Mossad code-named him “Shamen,” Hebrew for “The Fat One,”—or in Pandelis’s case, “Yanaki the Fatty.”

The Mossad code-named d’Andria “The Gnome”—a reference to his look-alike resemblance to the frog-eyed, mid-twentieth century movie star, Peter Lorre.  D’Andria was perfect for the job.  He was a citizen of Axis Italy.  Because of his nationality, both Nazi Germany and the fascist Antonescu regime of Romania considered d’Andria a friendly foreigner.  He passed freely across the borders of neutral Turkey and Bulgaria, which was allied with Nazi Germany.  He spoke French faster than a Parisian taxi driver.  He could hold property titles, which he did in the case of the Struma.  And he shared Pandelis’s greatest interest: They both loved money.[6]

In her postwar memoir, Klüger described what it was like to negotiate with Pandelis, sipping brandy in his armchair, demanding ninety pounds of British sterling per head – three times the cost of a first class “legal” passage from Constanța to Haifa: “My price is a firm one,” Pandelis haggled.  “If your people prefer to pay the standard cruise fare, let them go on legal ships.”[7]  She appealed to his altruism, just as did the NZO and other rescue organizations.  But Pandelis scoffed disingenuously: “It is the beginning of craziness.  To sit here on a spring afternoon and listen to a beautiful girl talk about mass murder!  This is the twentieth century, mademoiselle.  We are no longer savages.  You surely can’t believe that the German Government intends to murder hundreds of thousands of human beings.  For no crime at all.  Except that their little boys have been circumcised.  Or their grandfathers recite the Torah on Saturday afternoons.  What, do you imagine the Germans will ask all Jews to line up in formation?  And shoot them down like bowling pins?  A million Jews you say?  Where would you bury a million bodies?”[8]

There was little to negotiate between Pandelis and the NZO.  Out of money, out of options, the NZO in April 1941 relinquished control of the voyage to him.  Pandelis immediately took control of the vessel from its Bulgarian owner and rechristened her, the Struma, the name of a popular whitewater river in Bulgaria

The Struma was not seaworthy.  Its only qualifications were that it had seen significant service in the Mediterranean and Aegean, and was available.  Sixty years earlier, Lloyd’s Register of Shipping listed her as the Xanthe, a beautiful three-masted schooner, sheathed with galvanized iron, powered by sail and a 40 horsepower Ernest Scott & Co. quadruple-expansion steam engine that turned a single screw.  Built in 1867 by Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Co. in Newcastle at the behest of a courtier to Queen Victoria, the Xanthe measured 134 feet in length, 18.8 feet in breadth and 9.9 feet in depth.  She underwent a name change to the Sea Maid and was relocated to the Greek Islands.  A vintage turn-of-the-century postcard features her as a two-masted pleasure yacht called the Kafireus, resting at anchor in the sunny Greek island seaport of Skiathos.  From there it was downhill for the vessel, renamed variously as the Esperos and the Makedoniya, and serving as a troop transport during the Balkans War and later as a coastal cargo transport.  The vessel was last regarded as seaworthy in 1934, after which, under the name Esperos, she disappeared for insurance purposes from Lloyd’s. 

Listed in 1940 at two hundred twenty-six tons, the Struma was little more than a rotting cattle barge tied up to a wharf in Varna, Bulgaria, too unsafe even for hauling livestock on the Danube.  Before Pandelis began working with the NZO in 1941, he had previously proposed its use to agents of the Jewish Agency’s Mossad.  His plan back then had been to pack three hundred and fifty Jewish refugees in the Struma and have the vessel towed behind another immigrant vessel to Istanbul.  His barge plan was thwarted, however, in January 1941 by the Iron Guard’s bloody pogrom in Bucharest.  On February 17, 1941, the prospective tow vessel he had in mind, the Darien, sailed off to Palestine without the Struma.  (The Darien would be the last major ship during World War II to successfully thread the needle, departing Romania, across the Black Sea, through the Bosporus, finally arriving in Haifa on March 19, 1941, with seven hundred ninety-two Jewish refugees.)

Within days of the NZO’s Immigration Committee turning over control to Pandelis, he dispatched Commander d’Andria to tow the Struma up the coastline from the Bulgarian port of Varna into Romanian waters and the port city of Constanța.  That May, he hired the Singros Brothers to repair the vessel and retrofit it for a lot of passengers.  He allowed them four months for their work and arbitrarily scheduled her departure date for September 30, 1941.  The Struma ought to be shipshape by then.  In Istanbul, his agent S.D. Litopoulos would meet the Struma and represent Pandelis’s interests from an office overlooking the harbor.

Pandelis also took control of the ticket subscriptions and cranked up his marketing machine in Bucharest.  David said that with a ticket came the implicit promise of an entry visa to Palestine—at least that was the arrangement he understood from his friends, Ilse and Mircea. 

Pandelis placed newspaper advertisements and dispatched travel agents to the killing fields in the eastern provinces.  That summer, he sold tickets faster than the Singros Brothers could retrofit the vessel with matching numbers of bunks.  The retrofit, recalled David, included construction of bunk space of no more than fourteen inches per individual.  Towards the end of that summer, Pandelis’s mounting concern was not whether the Struma would be seaworthy, but rather could the shipwrights create space in a jury-rigged superstructure tacked onto the top deck for another one hundred passengers?

Pandelis, d’Andria and their other partners and employees operated from an eighth-floor office at the fashionable address of 95 Calea Victoriei.  Located next door, at 100 Calea Victoriei, was another Pandelis property, Turismul Mondial, the World Travel Agency, operated by two Jewish businessmen whose surnames David remembered as Barasch and Brebu.  The offices of original organizers of the voyage, the NZO’s Immigration Committee (and the members of the Betar youth) were in the Jewish quarter at 78 Calea Mosilor.  The voyage, while frowned upon by the Nazis, was quietly “sanctioned” by the bloodless fascism of clerks in the Antonescu regime who looked the other way after being slipped the appropriate consideration.  David’s father Jacob had to weigh carefully in whom to trust; from whom to buy a ticket; and to whom to pay tribute that would get David released from the Poligon.

Jacob Stoliar wasn’t naïve, or unsophisticated, but he thought he was safe.  He was, he thought, too useful to the fascist Antonescu regime, working for them with his brother Abraham in the state-controlled uniform manufacturing plant expropriated from them a year earlier.

“He thought he could survive,” said David.  “My father was, shall we say, ‘necessary’.”

Jacob also believed he had some pull, perhaps even a little protection, by way of the his third wife Malvina’s family, the Alerhands, whose members included lawyers and people of influence who coexisted with the corrupt system of government in Romania.  What he feared most was that his son would be arrested and shipped out to one of the death camps rumored in the eastern provinces of Bessarabia and in Transnistria in the southernmost part of Ukraine between the Nistru and Bug rivers.  While the camps wouldn’t be as memorable in history as are Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald, they were just as deadly.      

“Maybe not those names, but concentration camps, it was no secret.  But there were no death camps in Bucharest itself,” said David.

Jacob weighed his son’s options.  Sending David across enemy lines in any direction was out of the question—too dangerous.  Romanian newspapers had been dehumanizing the Jewish community since 1940, referring to them as the “Jewish scourge,” as if the nation were afflicted by a contagion that needed to be excised, though not necessarily with surgical precision.  Yet, there were Romanians sympathetic to their Jewish neighbors.  Jacob doubted his chances though of finding a safe haven for David in the home of some non-Jewish family, not in Bucharest.  Harboring Jews was effectively a capital offense.  Righteous gentiles were in increasingly short supply.  A non-Jewish family would have to be recklessly brave and exceptionally righteous to shelter David especially against the flood tide of anti-Semitic propaganda in wartime Romania.  Jacob mulled his other options.

“He never consulted me.  We were talking all kinds of things, except what I really wanted to know,” said David.

There were many “departure dates” for the Struma, starting back in late fall of 1940 with the NZO’s failed ticket subscription campaign even before they had a boat.  By late summer of 1941, David recalled rising panic in the Jewish community.  Four of his friends had already emigrated.  He missed their bridge nights together, Selle Salomonivitz, originally a Polish émigré, Gabriel “Gabby” Macoosh, a future grandmaster, and Ion Horovitz, a close friend whose family lived at 25 Romulus Street (Strada Romulus 25)—an eight-minute walk from David’s family home at 92 King Carol I Boulevard (Bulevardul Carol I 92).[9]  Ilse’s family and the Eisig brothers already had their tickets for the Struma.  If the ship sailed September 30, as scheduled, he would be left behind.  This worried him.

The Struma didn’t sail on its scheduled date.  Repairs and the retrofit of the ungainly superstructure had not kept up with ticket sales.  Pandelis pushed back the date.  David’s memory was that Jacob had not yet purchased his ticket.  Otherwise, his father would have had him packed and ready to go.

The police announced they would conduct raids to catch Jews who were absent without leave from the forced labor camps.[10]  David would show up for work at the Poligon. 

Ominously, the newspapers quoted reports by the DNB—the Nazi’s Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, German News Agency—that German military operations were going “planmässig” or “as planned.”  David’s stomach turned.

In such an environment, Jacob accepted with the finality that it nolonger mattered how it was to be done.  What mattered now was freeing David from the Poligon.  Then he could be spirited away, somehow, out of country.

The Stoliars followed the advertisements and news stories about the preparations for the voyage of the Struma that appeared regularly in Universul and other newspapers.  Jews perused those ads, clipped them, pinned them to their walls, dreamed and contemplated escaping before they smothered.[11]

Jews weren’t the only ones who saw the Struma as an opportunity.  Antonescu’s government was fully aware, and complicit, in the emigration effort.  They wanted the Jews to leave . . . and to pay through their teeth for the privilege. 

“There was no reason not to believe I would be allowed in Palestine,” said David.  He was unaware at the time of just how vehemently opposed the British Colonial Office was to Jewish emigration to Palestine.  He incorrectly assumed that if he could just escape Romania, the British would allow him to live in Palestine for both humanitarian reasons and because he wanted to fight the Nazis.[12]  Nineteen-year-old David’s mindset back then was, “What for is a Jewish Home if you couldn’t go there?”

It would turn out that David was naïve in his politics and, he admitted, overly dependent on his father.  He sieved out his naivety from reality when, in his eighties, David browsed photocopies of perhaps two hundred pages of declassified documents retrieved by freelance researcher Liz Evans from the British Public Record Office in the district of Kew[13] in greater London.  From a close reading, he realized how dim his prospects had actually been sixty years earlier for his immigration to Palestine in 1941.  From those photocopies, a picture emerged of the lords and knights in the British Foreign Office and the Colonial Office debating the “high policy” that was necessary to preserving the British Empire.  He had been a mere pawn on the chessboard of British politics.  With accepting good grace and a smidgen of humor, he concluded that to the long-dead diplomats who comprised His Majesty’s Government back in those dark years of World War II, David Stoliar was merely one of a flood of “surplus Jews” to be detained, interned and disposed of as a matter of survival against Nazi Germany and its allies.

~ ~ ~

Notes to Excerpt

[1] For Inspector General of Finance Dr. Ion Ghelase, Dominule Director General, Nr. 1080, June 9, 1942, and Nr. 1340, August 19, 1942, see USHMM, M.I. Inspectoratul Județean, Roll 13, Fond Documentar, Dosar Nr. 2844, vol. 1, part 39.  (USHMM’s collection comprises 800,000 pages of previously unpublished Romanian documents retrieved from the archives of the Supreme General Staff of the Romanian army (MSM), the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (RMFA), the Romanian State Archives (RSA), the Central Archives of the Republic of Moldavia, and the local archives of the Republic of Ukraine.)  Pandelis and d’Andria would never be brought to bear for their nefarious trade in refugees or their role in the Struma tragedy, and would survive World War II rich. 

[2] Zionism and Israel Center, Zionism and Israel—Encyclopedic Dictionary, “Aliyah Bet Definition,” at http://www.zionism-israel.com/dic/Aliya_Bet.htm (accessed on May 17, 2016).  News reports of desperate refugees fleeing persecution in Romania and the Balkans on “coffin ships” out of Constanța and other Black Sea ports was widely reported by the international news media, including The Associated Press, March 2, 1939.  In September 28, 1948, Romanian Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen alluded to “coffin ships” during a memorial service for the “Palestine-bound Jews, anxious to escape the terror of the Antonescu regime” who “were lured by unscrupulous ship-owners into boarding the unseaworthy ‘floating coffin’.”  See Jewish Telegraphic Agency achives for “Memorial for Jews Who Perished In ‘Struma’ Sinking Erected in Bucharest,” JTA Daily News Bulletin, September 29, 1948, page 6.  Also, JTA website: http://pdfs.jta.org/1948/1948-09-29_225.pdf (accessed January 3, 2019).

[3] British intelligence reported there were four disparate groups of passengers on the Sakarya: 801 from Prague and Vienna organized by Robert Mandler of Emigrations Hilfe; 530 organized by the Transport Bureau of Prague under the direction of the NZO; 530 persons organized by Auswanderungsbureau for Overseas Transport managed by Perl; and about 300 others from various parts of Europe, including some expelled from Bulgaria and Romania.  See TNA FO 371/2540 276 4588, cited in Perl, Operation Action—Rescue From the Holocaust, 335-6.

[4] See Perl, Operation Action—Rescue From the Holocaust, 337-8.  The voyage of the Sakarya was the largest single-ship rescue during the war with 2,175 people able to start life afresh.  (One passenger died of a heart attack and was buried at sea.)  In 1990, a fiftieth anniversary reunion of Sakarya passengers in Israel paid tribute to the organizer of the voyage, Dr. William R. Perl, who in 1940 was a young lawyer and follower of militant Zionist Revisionist Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

[5] Ofer, Escaping the Holocaust—Illegal Immigration to the Land of Israel, 1939-1944, 84.

[6] Avriel, Open the Gates!  The Dramatic Personal Story of “Illegal” Immigration to Israel, 146.

[7] Klüger, The Last Escape – The Launching of the Largest Secret Rescue Movement of All Times, 18.

[8] Ibid, 20-21.

[9] Before the war, the Horovitz family sold their piece goods shop at Lipscani Street in Bucharest and transferred their wealth out of the country.  They anglicized their name to Howard, bought a textiles plant in Leeds, England, and an apartment for “John” in Tel Aviv.  David would share that apartment until his friend joined the British army in the summer of 1942.  David remained in touch with his four surviving friends for the rest of their lives.

[10] See Ioanid, Holocaust in Romania, 26, for a description of how Jews were conscripted to labor camps under a decree issued by Antonescu’s Ministry of National Defense.  The legalistic decree wasn’t anchored in law.  Jews like David were compelled to forced labor, not detention, under the terms of Decree No. 3984, published December 5, 1940, as an alternative to army service from which Jews were exempt.  See Ancel, History of the Holocaust in Romania, 530-531, for a description how the Ministry of Labor working with the General Staff assigned Jews like David to camps operated by the General Directorate of Forced Labor Camps and Detachments headed by notorious anti-Semite Theodor Mociulschi.

[11] Virtually every page of Sebastian’s Journal 1935-44 describes in lucid detail what it was like to be one of those Jews in wartime Romania who dreamt of escaping and, in his case, specifically aboard the Struma.  Sebastian pondered the Struma in three Journal entries before the sinking, October 16, November 25 and December 15, 1941, and in three Journal entries after the sinking, February 26, March 2 and March 20, 1942. 

[12] Indeed, after the Struma David would go on to fight the Nazis.  British Major C.A. Nightingale accepted David’s enlistment, January 18, 1943, in the British 8th Army.  He served three years, two hundred fifty-six days in Egypt, Libya, Palestine and Iraq, advancing to the rank of squadron quartermaster sergeant.  He assisted in the postwar demobilization and was discharged September 30, 1946, with high praise from his commanding officer for his service.

[13] The Public Record Office (PRO) united in 2003 with the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (HMC) to form The National Archives (TNA).