It was the first time Ira Hirschmann had been to Istanbul, and if the circumstances had been different, he would probably have been here discussing the purchase of textiles for a company in New York. In another life, he could have been a music impresario. Wherever he went, he organised ad hoc concerts with up-and-coming local violinists or pianists, and he did not mind wasting time introducing hotel orchestras to playing. He was a born organiser and a deep thinker, and he believed in his own abilities to do what he set his mind to.
He now had to charter cargo ships in Istanbul and convert them into passenger ships, mediate with border guards and local police, and negotiate with port authorities on the content of ship’s certificates and documents. Before returning to his hotel at the end of the day, he always burned all the day’s working papers. No one in the hotel knew that he was the one dealing with the new wave of refugees who were supposed to have found refuge in Palestine. Incidentally, he was drawn to neutral Istanbul by an event that took place in December 1941.
The Struma, carried by the southern current of the Bosphorus, anchored quietly in Istanbul on 15 December 1941. The journey from the Romanian port of Constance to here was a terrible one. Before this voyage, she had been used to transport cattle and her engines had been procured from a scrap yard, where they had been brought from a sunken tugboat and more or less successfully trained to run. She was wooden, planked and unsuitable for driving in the winter gales of the Black Sea.
The decks and gangways were crowded with bodies, leather suitcases and wrappings were everywhere, and children were clutched screaming in the arms of desperate mothers. Eight hundred passengers were on board, not knowing what fate awaited them. They sailed through minefields, avoided other ships and feared the submarines patrolling the deep sea. Most of them no longer had citizenship, having been stripped of their citizenship as Jews by the satellite countries of the Nazi regime. Germany refused to allow Jews to leave the territories under its control and pressured Romania to do the same.
When the Struma docked in Sarayburn, the passengers were relieved to finally be in a neutral country and to hopefully make their way from here to Palestine. For them, the Bosphorus was not just a sea strait in eastern Europe, it was a gateway to freedom.
For weeks, the ship waited moored to the quay, not far from where ships carrying Russian refugees fleeing the October Revolution used to dock two decades ago. It was snowing heavily and ice clung to the iron railings. The port authority brought them water and food in boats, but did not allow them to disembark on the shore for fear of endangering the neutral position of their country. It also hoped that this would prevent the city from being overrun by foreign immigrants. The British Mandate authorities in Palestine, which restricted Jews from entering the territory, also refused to give Struma permission to continue on to the port of Haifa. The passengers were thus stateless – they seemed to come from nowhere, belong to no one and go nowhere.
A yellow flag flew on board, warning that the ship was under quarantine and all communications with the shore were strictly controlled by the Turkish police. Humanitarian organisations and individuals sent messages to the ship if they could bribe a Turkish officer. Simon Brod, a local Jewish textile merchant, provided sheets and other small items, while other members of the Jewish community tried to intervene with the port authority.
On 2 January 1942, six passengers from the Struma, who still had valid Romanian passports and transit visas for Turkey, Syria and Palestine, which had expired due to the numerous stops, managed to send a letter to the port police describing the impossible situation on board. They asked to be allowed to contact the consulates of these countries and ask for their visas to be extended.
The police did indeed let them ashore and they immediately contacted the Jewish Agency for Palestine – an organisation of Palestinian Jews that organised transports like the one with Strouma. The Agency immediately contacted the British authorities. It asked that, if the British were not already allowing the ship to proceed to Haifa, they should at least issue Palestinian visas for the 52 children on board, aged between 11 and 16. They are old enough to travel alone and, on the other hand, not old enough to pose a threat to any country. This proposal is intended to satisfy both the humanitarian and the rational interests of both Turkey and the United Kingdom, which have the fate of the boat passengers in their hands.
A flood of telegrams and phone calls on all sides followed, the end result being an agreement that only allowed the children to go to Palestine. The British Embassy in Ankara sent a letter to the Istanbul Municipality saying that the children had been granted entry visas to Palestine. The city administration is to send an order to the port police to collect the children’s passports and send them to the British consulate. However, the Lausanne police were afraid of doing something on their own and demanded that everything be confirmed by their superiors in Ankara.
While they were waiting for the certificates, orders came to tow the Struma back to the Black Sea, where the crew was to try to start the engines again and sail to the nearest port in Bulgaria or to Constanta in Romania, from where she had come. In this flood of bureaucratic orders – disembark the children or expel the ship from Turkey – the expulsion proposal won the day. After ten weeks of diplomatic wrangling and negotiation, the Turkish authorities decided to solve the problem in the simplest way for them – to simply have the ships removed from Turkish territory.
Thus, on 23 February 1942, the Turkish tug Struma moored to its stern and, overcoming the counter-current, sailed over the rocky slope where the narrow Bosphorus widened into the Black Sea. As the Struma sailed silently out of Istanbul, few observers could read the words “Save us” emblazoned on a large white sheet on its side.
Once the two ships were deep in the Black Sea, the tug simply untied the rope and sailed back to Istanbul, leaving the Struma bobbing helplessly on the waves. The crew struggled in vain to restart the engines that had failed them so many times on the way from Romania. The ship rocked back and forth for a few hours before suddenly being rocked by a powerful explosion at dawn on 24 February 1942. The cold sea water immediately flooded all the compartments and gushed onto the deck. Within minutes, the stern broke in two.
The next day Joseph Goldin, one of the Jewish Agency’s representatives, telegraphed to Jerusalem: ‘The Struma sank in the Black Sea four miles from the Bosphorus. Stop. No details, number of survivors unknown. Stop. Probably many casualties.” Over the next few hours, he worked to compile a list of survivors. In the days that followed, he crossed out almost every name on the passenger list. Only nine passengers were allowed to go ashore before the tug tied her towline to the Struma and set sail for the Black Sea. Of the 785 Jews and six Bulgarian crew members on board, only David Stoliar survived the accident. He was found in the sea by a Turkish rescue boat and brought to shore.
After a while, it came to light why the ship exploded. All sorts of theories were floating around. It was sunk by a Soviet submarine, which had orders to sink any ship in the Black Sea that might bring aid to Germany or its allies. But few people in Istanbul cared what really happened to the Struma. The city’s inhabitants generally reacted to the disaster with silence. Refugees have come and gone in the city over the past decades and the local press has been more interested in other things, notably the assassination of the German ambassador in Ankara, Franz von Papen, by a shochet, just one day after the Struma sank.
A few weeks later, the Istanbul German-language newspaper published the official position of Prime Minister Refik Saydam. “The authorities did everything in their power to prevent the Strouma disaster, but it is clear that Turkey cannot be an alternative homeland for anyone or a refuge for the unwanted.” But the Strouma disaster was reported in newspapers all over the world, as it was the biggest refugee shipwreck in recent times, albeit only one in a long line of such tragedies, Don Quixote-esque exploits and missed opportunities linked to Jewish activities aimed at getting as many Jews as possible out of hapless Europe and into Palestine.
War Refugee Board
Fifteen months ago, the Patria docked in Haifa. All the Jewish passengers on board were declared illegal by the British authorities in Palestine because they did not have the proper immigration papers. The intention was to send the ship to Mauritius in the hope that the refugees would settle there. But before the ship left the port, Jewish activists planted a bomb on board, hoping to disable the engines and prevent it from sailing. The explosion was much more powerful than they had anticipated and killed 267 people. Just a month later, another ship, the Salvador, ran aground in a storm in the Sea of Marmara, south of Istanbul. More than 100 Jewish refugees died in this disaster.
The first almost epic journey, which attracted less attention in the world press but nevertheless showed how the fate of the persecuted hangs by a thin thread, began on 19 May 1940, when the ancient wheeled steamer Pencho set sail down the Danube from the river port of Bratislava. Four hundred Jews were on board. “Are you going to Palestine on this ship?” shook their heads at the port officials. “You will never get there.”
But at that time their main problem was not the steamer. Already at the Iron Gate, on the border between Yugoslavia and Romania, the International River Administration had banned them from the route. They had to return to Yugoslavia. The passengers spent the next six weeks in the extreme heat on a ship moored on the Danube, and it was not until August that they were ferried across the rapids of the Iron Gate by tugboat and rafts. In mid-September, after great efforts, they reached the mouth of the Danube in the Black Sea, where a real ship was waiting to take them to Palestine. But there was no sign of it, so they decided to continue their journey on an old paddle steamer, which had neither radio communication nor navigational aids. As soon as it was repaired, they set sail for Istanbul in the Black Sea. They sailed past it and arrived in Piraeus at the beginning of October, not knowing that the worst problems were yet to come. On their way across the sea to Palestine, they ran aground near an uninhabited island.
The only lifeboat the steamer had, five passengers set off in search of help, all helpless, and were picked up in the middle of the sea by an English warship and taken to Egypt. There they volunteered to join the Czech brigade and fought with the English until the end of the war, arriving in Palestine only five years later.
Meanwhile, the other castaways on the island waited in vain for help. Under pressure from the International Red Cross, Italian ships then brought them to Bari and put them in a camp. They were only rescued by Allied troops in September 1943, when Italy capitulated. But it was another nine months before the British issued them with permits to go to Palestine. They were taken by boat to Alexandria and put on a train. On 2 June 1944, they crossed the border at Rafiah and finally arrived at their desired destination. They cried and laughed and repeated: “We have come home.” Their journey took four years and fifteen days.
Ira Hirschmann read about these accidents in the New York press. He knew that European ports very often refuse refugee ships or send them on fruitless voyages across the seas, because the ships almost never manage to disembark their passengers in Britain, America or Palestine. But the fate of Strouma has nevertheless deeply shocked him. The scale of the tragedy and the fact that bureaucratic obstacles prevented the rescue, at least of the older children, seemed unbearable to him.
In the months that followed, he increasingly read news of refugees trying to escape via the Balkans and Turkey, as these seemed to be the only routes still open for Jews to escape the Nazi horrors or similar measures by Germany’s satellite states. “It was a flood of bad news,” Ira later recalled.
Ira Hirschmann has made a career in non-operational fields. His father settled in Baltimore after emigrating from Latvia as a young man and amassing a considerable fortune as a cloth merchant. Hirschmann’s family was a very ambitious member of the upper middle class of the Jewish community. In their house you could hear the piano playing, the children went to good schools and played tennis, and they could almost count on succeeding in life.
Ira was also well on his way to becoming a successful businessman. He studied for a while at Johns Hopkins University, but dropped out to work in an advertising agency in Baltimore. He soon found this job too boring. His real talent was networking. In search of more exciting work, he left Baltimore for New York and, as a man of some standing, entered the circle of Jewish philanthropic and business organisations in New York and New Jersey. One of these was the Joint Distribution Committee, the largest American Jewish organisation.
It was at its events that he met Bamberg, the owner of Newark’s largest and most successful department store. He got a job with him, first in the advertising department, and then his career took off. He soon built a reputation as a retail specialist, changed jobs and ended up at Macy’s. As a pioneer of a new way of selling, he met mostly rich and powerful people and tried to win them over by offering them new business opportunities. He dined with Toscanini, had contacts with Felix Frankfurter, talked to Fiorello La Guardia, but it was the Struma disaster that brought him to international waters. He could not keep his cool when he read about it.
At that time, millions of people were fleeing persecution and advancing armies. The war and occupation destroyed entire communities in Poland and the Soviet Union. In Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, although the deportations of the Jewish population had not yet begun, Germany had already begun to put terrible pressure on the governments of these countries to participate in the German programme for the final solution of the Jewish question and to hand over to it all ‘their’ Jews.
Geographically speaking, Turkey was the one country through which it was possible to flee and save one’s bare life. Its neutrality allowed relatively unhindered movement, provided that the refugee rescue measures were not too visible to alarm the Turkish authorities. Thus, the ship was able to sail from Romania to Istanbul in two nights and the night train from Sofia to that city was still running. However, with the increasingly horrific stories of planned extermination camps and mass relocations of the Jewish population to labour camps coming from the occupied countries, public opinion in the Allied countries was also slowly awakening.
In New York, in the summer of 1943, a special committee was set up to deal with the Jewish population in Europe and to pressure the US government to take up this issue. Those in charge decided that it would be wise to send a man to Istanbul to investigate the possibilities of refugee emigration via Turkey. Ira Hirschmann immediately volunteered. A few days later, he and the Chairman of the Committee, Mr Bergson, met with the Assistant Secretary of State responsible for overseeing the refugee crisis in Europe.
The Undersecretary unconvincingly maintained that the American Government was doing everything possible to alleviate the fate of European civilians involved in the turmoil of war, and only when Bergson told him that the Committee intended to send a man to Istanbul to check the situation on the ground, did he agree to inform the American Ambassador in Turkey, Steinhardt, of the matter, ask his opinion, and, if the answer was in the affirmative, to ask him to co-operate with Hirschmann.The Undersecretary was not convinced that the American Government was not doing everything possible to alleviate the fate of the European civilians. Steinhardt soon indicated that he had no objection and Ira began to prepare for his departure in January 1944, visiting offices in Washington and briefing them on his mission.
In the midst of these preparations, he was awakened one morning by a telephone call from Oscar Cox, President Roosevelt’s confidant. He simply said, “The President has just signed the order.” Ira knew what this meant, because Cox had recently shown him the President’s order to set up a committee called the War Refugee Board, consisting of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and the Secretaries of War and the Treasury. He should immediately set to work to rescue as many persecuted ethnic, religious or political minorities as possible from the hands of the Nazi regime.
Hirschmann breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, a body whose sole task will be to rescue the civilian victims of war, so that tragedies like the one on the Struma do not happen again. He became the Foreign Office’s special envoy to Turkey and the Middle East and was given the task of implementing the mission of the new Committee on Refugees. He was no longer a private citizen on a humanitarian mission, but an official with powers.
The very next day he travelled to Miami and, after a week of waiting, managed to secure a seat on a C-54 aircraft bound for India at the end of January with a group of young officers. After five days of arduous travel, with stops in Puerto Rico, Brazil, Ghana and Egypt, a wait of several days in Jerusalem and a 24-hour train ride through the Taurus Mountains and half of Anatolia, he finally arrived in Ankara.
They were promised a homeland
“I have forgotten the old world,” he wrote in his diary, “and have arrived in a new one.” Turkey’s capital Ankara was young and it took some imagination to see it as a real city. The wide avenues and purpose-built government buildings looked soulless and cold. Hirschmann was fortunate that the American ambassador immediately invited him to a diplomatic reception at his residence. He was able to wander among the many guests and admire the residence, but all he wanted was to be able to talk to the Ambassador himself.
Apart from the fact that they were both descended from Jews, they had little in common. Steinhardt had the diplomatic career that Hirschmann might have wanted. He had been on missions to Sweden, the Soviet Union, Peru and now Turkey. Hirschmann was to remain in Turkey for as long as necessary, with the status of Special American Attaché to the Embassy. Orders from Washington gave him unprecedented powers. While other diplomats were forbidden by law to talk to agents of enemy countries, he was expected to contact enemy countries to rescue refugees. He was provided with embassy assistance in this regard, but was solely responsible for the transport, rescue, care and maintenance of the refugees.
Once he settled in Ankara and started to do a bit of asking around, he soon realised that everyone prefers to pass the buck; the embassy to the Turkish offices and the Turkish government representatives back to them. If he was already having a hard time finding out who was responsible for what, then what problems must the refugees have had.
The British agreed that a certain number of Jews could be resettled in Palestine, but in practice, due to bureaucratic complications, far fewer than the quota were resettled. In order to be legally settled in Palestine, the refugees needed certain paperwork – in particular an exit permit from the German satellite states, a transit visa through a neutral country and an emigration permit from the British Mandate Administration in Palestine. Even when it was difficult to provide transport for them, it was only with the cooperation of all the countries involved that the necessary papers could be obtained.
In mid-February, as cold winter winds howled through the empty streets of Ankara, Hirschmann realised he could forget about official aid. The only help he could get was from a man who lived in Istanbul and, unlike him, could afford to stay at the prestigious Pera Palace Hotel.
Unlike the newcomer Hirschmann, Chaim Barlas was an old cat in Istanbul. He could quickly get lost in the crowds that thronged the city streets. No one noticed him as he walked past in his ill-fitting raincoat and half-lidded eyes that resembled a moonbeam. He was inconspicuous, but he knew everyone who mattered in the city and many people in high positions throughout the country. Regular letters and notes arrived at his address from the American, French and British ambassadors, the Swedish military attaché and the consuls of Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania, the Czech Republic, Afghanistan, Switzerland and Spain. He carried files containing contracts, telegrams and reports from Turkish shipowners, businessmen and politicians.
He was probably the best-informed man in Istanbul, polite, rarely absent-minded and obsessed with precise information about every person he came into contact with. He was a rare combination of many skills and many people’s lives depended on how he used them. His official title was that of Commissioner of the Department of Emigration of the Jewish Agency in Palestine.
The former Ottoman territory of Palestine was given to Great Britain as part of the agreement to dismantle the Ottoman Empire after the end of World War I, following a decision by the League of Nations in Geneva. Part of this mandate agreement provided for the Jewish Agency for Palestine to act as the representative of the local Jewish community and to regulate jointly with Britain all matters relating to the life of that community. It was headed by David Ben-Gurion, had its own self-defence unit, the Haganah, and oversaw the social and economic development of its community. Eventually, it also took on the role of the authority which was to facilitate the resettlement of Jews in Palestine by issuing settlement permits. This was the organisation that eventually became the government of an independent Israel.
The resettlement of Jews in Israel was a fundamental desire of the Zionist movement. But it was also a way of changing the demographic reality of a predominantly Arab Palestine, which was gradually becoming the homeland of the Jews. Those who fled to Palestine were only dimly aware of the fate that the policies of the superpowers had been preparing for them for decades before. It began in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, when the Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, reflected on the fate of the crumbling Ottoman Empire: “If the Turks lose the Holy Land, into whose hands will it fall?”. Lord Salisbury replied, “Not into the hands of other powers, but into the hands of the Israelites.”
These were encouraging words for the Jews, but they should also be followed by action. Even then, research showed that there was a continuity of Jewish settlement in Palestine. In 19th century Ottoman Palestine, Jews lived mainly in the four ‘holy’ cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias, but they were still a minority in a sea of Islamic populations.
The demand for a Jewish homeland, and thus for a state, was decades old at that time. In 1896, a man attracted the attention of Jews by asking the rhetorical question, “Do we really have to get out, and if so, where should we go, can we stay and for how long?” He was asking whether the Jews should stay where they were, scattered and discriminated against, or go elsewhere.
Theodor Herzl sought a solution to the woes of European Jewry. He realised that they would never be able to find a place for themselves in the European community. A hitherto unknown Viennese journalist wrote that the Jews were a nation, that they had to be organised and behave as a nation, and that they had to have the external attributes of a nation, such as territory and sovereignty. His argument is enshrined in a document entitled ‘The Jewish State’. When he wrote it, he was only 36 years old. Eight years later, he was dead, exhausted from the effort to give his people a state. He was buried in a cemetery on the edge of the Vienna Woods. In his will, he wrote that he should be laid to rest there until the Jewish people buried him in Palestine. That is what happened in the end.
After the end of the First World War, Jews were convinced that Britain would allow them to settle Palestine with its former inhabitants. This led to the famous Balfour Declaration, named after the British Foreign Secretary. His intentions were indeed more biblical than imperial, because he grew up listening to Bible stories and, for him, the Jews were an exiled people who needed to be given back their homeland.
Although the Declaration was later declared non-binding, Jews took an oath to it. When Britain took over the Mandate of Palestine, it pledged to facilitate the creation of a Jewish homeland. Although the state was not mentioned anywhere, the term homeland was used, which was sufficiently vague to be open to interpretation in several ways. The British Mandate in Palestine was a failure from the outset and Balfour’s successors were less than enthusiastic about a ‘Jewish homeland’, and the Mandate administrators even less so. So in 1936, at the request of the British King, a special commission came to Palestine to report on what was actually happening there. At that time, there were already 386 000 Jews in Palestine and they had not succeeded in making peace with 900 000 Arabs.
To calm the situation, immigration of Jews was restricted by various decrees. In 1939, Winston Churchill, on the basis of information provided to him by a commission, temporarily banned the immigration of Jews, precisely at a time when Jews were most in need of refuge. This was not understood by the refugees who wanted to flee from Europe to Palestine. They just wanted to save their lives, and it did not matter to them at that moment that the creation of a state should be involved.
Bureaucratic routes
When the Nazis set out to “finally” resolve the Jewish presence in Europe, emigration to Palestine became the only way for many Jewish communities to survive. After 1938, America, Britain and other European countries also restricted the immigration of Jews into their countries by quotas, just at the time when anti-Semitic laws and persecution of Jews were becoming a regular practice in some European countries. These countries, like Turkey, feared that Jewish refugees expelled from Germany and later from countries occupied by Germany would remain permanently in the countries to which they had fled. This was nothing other than the result of the latent anti-Semitism that was widespread throughout the world. This made the move to Palestine all the more sought after and desirable among the Jews.
Barlas arrived in Istanbul in August 1940 and took up residence in a hotel known for its sympathy towards the Allies. Here he had his own telegraph station and even later, when he rented premises on Istanbul’s main street, his messengers had to run to the hotel to send and receive telegrams. Barlas and his assistant Joseph Goldin were the only people working publicly for the Jewish Agency, but behind the scenes they were aided by a wide network of Jewish activists who lived in the city as journalists, businessmen and artists, and who secretly helped the migration of Jews to Palestine.
The Turkish authorities assumed that any foreigner who moved into the country in these turbulent times was a spy and therefore kept Barlas and his agency under strict surveillance, which sometimes led to absurd situations. Teddy Kollek, who later became the long-serving mayor of Jerusalem, told of how one day a stranger approached him because he heard him speaking Hebrew. He was a Jewish importer of dried fruit from Palestine who had come to Istanbul to arrange for the transport of fruit. While he was making the arrangements, his visa expired and he approached the Turkish authorities to renew it.
The police were convinced that his story was too unbelievable and just a cover for the secret service. They asked him to tell them which foreign secret service he was working for and, as he protested and claimed he was not working for one, they refused to extend his visa. Kollek managed to get assurances through his contacts from the British intelligence service that it would guarantee that the unfortunate man was working for them. This was enough for the police to extend the trader’s visa.
Although the Jewish Agency was to some extent dependent on the help of British officials, it was Britain that was the greatest obstacle to the movement of Jews to Palestine. Soon after beginning their work, Barlas and his colleagues realised that they were caught in a double trap. First, the Jewish Agency had to convince the British authorities to allow Jews to move to Palestine in the first place. The British did allow it to issue certificates of migration to Palestine, but in the end it was up to British consular officials to decide.
After 1938, Britain was particularly strict in issuing final immigration permits. In fact, the previous emigration campaign led by the Jewish Agency had led to a large number of Jews moving to Palestine in the 1930s, leading to strong protests from the Arab population. The British response to this was the famous decree issued by the government of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, reaffirming Britain’s commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state ruled jointly by Arabs and Jews. In order to maintain demographic balance, it stipulated that only 75,000 new Jews could immigrate to Palestine in the four years from 1940 to 1944.
Another problem was getting a Turkish landing for a transit visa through Turkey, both for rail and boat travel. The Jews thus found themselves caught between the British government’s decree and the Black Sea. Neutral Turkey has, since the beginning of the war, sought to maintain good relations with all belligerents. Not only with the Great Powers, which were tempting her to enter the war on their side, but also with her own past.
Tusk immigration laws are supposed to have impeded the influx of refugees during the war, not prevented the return of the exiled minorities who left Turkey in the 1920s. The legislation was so strict that American sailors with Greek names were not allowed to enter Turkish soil because they were feared to be former residents of Istanbul returning to reclaim their confiscated property. This fear was reinforced by the belief that local minorities were a potential fifth column that could be exploited by the enemy. Everyday anti-Semitism and crude nationalism thus became commonplace. Anti-Semitic cartoons in the Turkish press portrayed local Jews as parasites reaping wartime profits and incoming Jews as unscrupulous money-grabbers who, in their eagerness to flee Europe, would casually take Turkey’s last Turkish lira.
In France and elsewhere in Europe, some Turkish diplomats did try to save Jews with Turkish citizenship from the horrors of concentration camps. But although Turkey has demonstrated its collective heroism after the war thanks to these shining examples, only one such case can be credibly proven. Selahatin Ulkümen, the Turkish consul on the island of Rhodes, prevented the Nazis from deporting forty-six Jews, most of them Turkish citizens. Many more could have been saved if the Turkish State had intervened more vigorously on behalf of those who remained trapped in Nazi-occupied lands, most of whom were Turkish citizens.
But the treatment of Jews in Turkey was only part of a wider system by which the state pressured minorities, nationalised their property and encouraged non-Muslims to emigrate. In November 1942, the Turkish government thus introduced a special tax on “exceptional gains”, a very vague formulation that was, of course, open to many interpretations. This new tax was mainly intended to raise funds in case Turkey had to enter the war and to curb war profiteering by those who were allegedly profiteering from inflation and general shortages.
114,368 individuals and companies were visited by special commissions and issued with decisions that could only be appealed in Parliament. The bulk of this additional tax fell on Istanbul, on Greek, Armenian and Jewish-owned businesses. “This is a revolutionary law”, boasted Turkish Prime Minister Saraçoglu, “it will finally prevent foreigners from controlling our economy and open up the Turkish market to Turks”.
Many families and businesses have not been able to cope. At the time, the Americans estimated that Armenian families alone would have to pay a tax 232% higher than the value of their property, compared to 179 for Jews, 156 for Greeks and only 5% for Muslims.
These bureaucratic hurdles have now had to be overcome with great diplomatic skill by Chaim Barlas. As soon as he managed to open one door that would have meant salvation for some of his compatriots, another closed. The Turkish Government agreed to the Red Cross distributing food parcels containing raisins, figs, margarine and dried meat to Jewish communities while they awaited permission to emigrate to Palestine. However, due to the domestic situation, these could only contain pork, which was not in great demand at home.
Similar problems have been encountered in transport. Turkey eased the conditions for refugees travelling in groups in February 1943, but closed its borders to large groups two months later. Barlas appealed to the Foreign Ministry in Ankara and demanded that Turkey change this policy, instead allowing individual families to transit through the country rather than requiring them to be part of a pre-formed group. This was a brazen request and, of course, it ran up against the problem that was feared in Turkey; the arrival of individual families who, once they had entered the country, would be difficult to monitor and virtually impossible to control. In such cases, the authorities would not know whether they had really left the country and gone to Palestine or not.
The response from Ankara was apparently positive, but it had new limitations. Only nine Jewish families were allowed to travel in Turkey each week, and until they had all left, the new nine were not allowed to travel in Turkey. Ira Hirschmann calculated that it would take two hundred years to get all those who wanted to flee Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria through Turkey. In December, Barlas informed the American ambassador that only 1,126 Jews had gone to Palestine via Turkey, but 2,139 Turkish Jews, so that the number of Jews in Istanbul was rapidly dwindling. Turkey wanted to get rid of its Jewish population in this way.
Hirschmann’s arrival in February 1944 gave new impetus to Barlas’s efforts. Ira began to bring together different organisations whose work sometimes intersected, he had the mandate of the US administration and, very importantly, he brought money with him. The American Committee for the Distribution of Relief had been the channel in America for the American Jewish community to help people in need, and now it became the most important financier of Barlas and Ira Hirschmann’s efforts. The US Treasury also facilitated financial transactions to countries that were under German influence. Nearly three quarters of a million dollars were earmarked for operations in Turkey, in addition to the thousands and thousands of dollars spent on transit trips from Hungary and other countries to Turkey.
End of the Balkan route
Hirschmann, Barlas and US Ambassador Steinhardt, together with the Jewish Agency and American philanthropists, managed in a relatively short time to work out an informal system that would allow as many Jews as possible to be brought to Palestine via Turkey. Barlas was convinced that nothing could interfere with his work. But as the winter of 1943/44 turned to spring, he still had one problem. The Nazis were killing Jews at an accelerated pace, and in such numbers that even sceptical Allied observers realised what was happening and realised that the only way to save as many people as possible was to save them in groups.
In theory, if one had all the necessary paperwork, there was no problem in not being able to enter a neutral country like Turkey. But theory and reality are often not in agreement. In the summer of 1938, the Turkish government officially closed its doors to Jews coming from countries with anti-Semitic laws. Ankara believed that these people, although in dire need, were likely to stay in Turkey. Thus, it soon became clear that, after Germany had begun to transport the Jewish population en masse to concentration camps in Poland, the only remaining way out was to transport Jews en masse to Turkey by special ships or trains. As always, the devil was in the bureaucratic details.
The whole process started with Barlas. As a representative of the Jewish Agency, he was mandated by the British Mandate authorities in Palestine to draw up a list of candidates for resettlement on the basis of information obtained by his agents or directly from family members who were still in the satellite countries of Germany. This information was most important, but the war made it difficult to collect. Sometimes it took several weeks to compile a complete list of names, dates, places of birth and their addresses for a group large enough to fill a ship or a train.
Once the list was compiled, Barlas sent it to Palestine, where the British authorities reviewed it and removed from it those people they considered unsuitable to come to Palestine. The final list was then sent to London for approval. All this took at least three weeks. The British Passport Control Department was then instructed to draw up its own priority list. Once this was done, there was a consultation on the details with the British Embassy in Ankara.
The file eventually ended up in the Turkish Foreign Ministry, which then sent it to its consular section. The Consular Section forwarded it to the Turkish consuls in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia, who are authorised to issue transit visas. If all went well and without complications, the Jewish family waited for at least two to three more months before obtaining a Turkish transit visa and a permit to settle in Palestine. The wait was often even longer. Only then did Hirschmann step in and organise transport by boat or train.
For those waiting, it was a time of suffering. Abraham Slowes emigrated to Palestine in 1930 and had a solid career as an engineer in a power plant. His parents, Moshe and Malka, were respected dentists in Vilnius. In March 1941, Abraham received a telegram from his father asking him to send certificates for him, his wife and the Fiksmans family. The son replied that he was doing everything in his power to send him the papers to enable him to transit through Turkey and enter Palestine.
In the months that followed, the family’s situation deteriorated markedly. Germany and the Soviet Union were still allies when Abraham sent the telegram to his father, and enemies three and a half months later. The German invasion of the Soviet Union pushed the family almost into the front line. Abraham now redoubled his efforts, sending telegrams to everyone he thought could help him. He even wrote to the Swedish consul in Jerusalem and to the Vatican. The Swedish consul soon wrote back and suggested that he send a request to the Swedish consul in Haifa. Most of them wrote back to say that, unfortunately, they no longer had any contact with the occupied territories.
In March 1942, more than two years after the first application, the British visa department in Istanbul was ordered to issue the family with immigration papers for Palestine. Moshe and Malka were told to report to Istanbul. The first problem was, of course, to inform the parents of the good news, because the situation in Vilnius was dramatic. The Wehrmacht had already driven the Soviet troops out of the city in the first days of the invasion in the summer of 1941 and immediately imprisoned all the Jews in the ghetto. All this and bureaucratic complications added to the problems. When Abraham asked the Red Cross to find someone living at his parents’ last address, he was told to fill in a form first. He did so and added a postage stamp so that the Red Cross could start making enquiries immediately.
Then he remembered that maybe it would have been better if he had contacted someone closer to the action. Early in August 1944, he wrote to the British Embassy in Moscow, asking the staff to tell his parents about the approved move to Palestine. A few weeks before, the Red Army had driven the Germans out of Vilnius (Vilna) and Abraham hoped that this would make access to his parents easier. In November, the British attaché in Moscow wrote to him: “In connection with your letter of 8 August, in which you made enquiries about your parents, I regret to inform you that a letter sent to the address you gave came back with a note that the addressee was dead.”
A follow-up letter sent the following spring said more. The family was probably murdered immediately after the Germans occupied Vilnius four years ago. So the people who were finally approved for resettlement in Palestine were already dead when the process for their resettlement was actually just beginning.
On 12 February 1943, Barlas received a telegram from the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. In it, he asked him to contact the papal delegate in Istanbul and ask him to intervene, as the Jews in Italy were in grave danger. There was no plan to bring Italian Jews to Istanbul, but only a request that the papal delegate contact the Vatican and remind it of its Christian duty to help those in need.
Pope Pius XII chose a calculated neutrality during the war, even though he knew the horrors that were taking place and could not hope to intervene decisively. Monsignor Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the Papal Delegate for Turkey and Greece, was in Istanbul at the time. His position was very delicate. He had no diplomatic status and, unlike the Papal Nuncio, could not speak for the Vatican, nor did he have administrative power over the Catholic bishops. His power lay in moral suasion and direct contact with the Vatican, which is why the Turkish authorities considered him a complete civilian.
It is not known what Barlas and Roncalli discussed during their first meeting. But in June, Barlas reported to Jerusalem: “Today I met with His Highness, who is doing his best.” Barlas asked Roncalli not only to use his connections to influence the Vatican to take a stronger stance on the persecution of Italian Jews, but also to help with the eviction of individual families. But this intervention was not particularly successful.
Meanwhile, the situation of the Jewish population in Hungary has become more acute. Although Hungarian Jews were discriminated against, there were no major deportations. However, with the arrival of German troops in Hungary, accompanied by the infamous Adolf Eichmann, this changed radically. Preparations began for the mass deportation of Jews to concentration camps. With Eichmann’s permission, two Hungarian Jews, Joel Brand and Andrea Gyorgy, travelled to Istanbul in mid-May 1944 with a strange proposition. Eichmann was ready to trade. In exchange for 10,000 trucks and a certain amount of food, he was prepared to allow a limited number of Jews to emigrate from Hungary.
Although the Allies rejected this offer, Barlas saw that the door to help the Jewish population was not completely closed. In fact, Roncalli had learned from various contacts with church dignitaries in Budapest that a certain number of families could only be allowed to leave Hungary. But this would have required emigration certificates for Palestine, which could only be obtained in Istanbul. The Jews at risk, of course, could not get there to collect them, so the only option was to take the papers to Hungary. Here Barlas and Hirschmann relied on the apostolic delegate.
On 5 June Roncalli informed Barlas: “I am pleased to inform you that the certificates for Hungarian Jews which you gave me have been taken to Hungary by a reliable person.” Roncalli had thus, of course, exceeded his powers as papal delegate and had taken the side of the persecuted. In July Hirschmann wrote in his diary: “We have sent thousands of certificates for Palestine to Hungary and I am already preparing ships to take people across the Black Sea.”
In July 1944, the first ship to arrive from the Black Sea was the Kazbek, with 758 passengers on board. The Turkish authorities quickly took the passengers across the Bosphorus to Haidar Pasha station, where a train was waiting to take them to Anatolia and beyond. They did not allow contact with the inhabitants of the town, some of whom were Jewish. Then the ships arrived in regular succession.
But the journey across the Black Sea was still fraught with danger. So on 3 August, a convoy of three ships – the Morina, the Bulbul and the Mefkure – set sail from Constanta in Romania. The ships travelled separately and had no contact. On 5 August, a Soviet submarine probably opened fire on the Mefkure. A fire broke out on board. The Turkish captain and crew escaped in the only boat on board. A few dozen passengers jumped into the sea, the rest sank half an hour later with the burning ship. Five passengers survived by clinging to a large piece of wood, but 320 drowned. The remaining two ships docked in Igneada, a Turkish town near the Bulgarian border, and the passengers arrived in Istanbul by train. The next day, they were on their way to Palestine.
In the summer of 1944, rumours spread that Turkey was about to declare war on Germany. German representatives and their families began to prepare to leave. German Ambassador von Papen travelled by train to Berlin and before leaving waved goodbye to the few Germans and Japanese who came to the station.
At the end of the war, Barlas and Hirschmann could be satisfied with their work. With their help, 13,101 Jews travelled to Palestine via Turkey. Chaim Barlas returned to Palestine and became head of the immigration department of the Jewish Agency. Ira Hirschmann took up a vice-presidency in a large company in New York. Angelo Roncalli also left Istanbul and became Papal Nuncio to France, and in 1958 was elected Pope John XXIII.
Meanwhile, the war in Europe is over. More than 60,000 Jews survived the horrors of the camps and are now beginning to prepare to leave. But where to? To Erez Israel, to the Land of Israel, from which no one will be able to drive them out. They were accompanied by sympathisers from all over the world, only the British acted as if Balfour had not promised them a homeland of their own decades ago. Finally, in 1945, London set a monthly quota of 1 500 Jews who could move to Palestine.
As early as March 1945, the Jews set up two new independent and clandestine organisations, Bricho (escape), to send Jews to European concentration camps in southern Germany, from where they would then be sent to French and Italian camps and on to Palestine, and Haapalo (immigration), to bring refugees to Palestine. The members of the Bruch, who had branches in Berlin, Hastedt and Friedland, suspected that the day would soon come when the borders between European countries would once again be sealed and one would not be able to travel without a passport. A new era of Jewish migration to the homeland from which the country had finally emerged had begun. “The ‘Balkan route’ via Istanbul and Turkey had thus lost its meaning and passed into oblivion, and the attention of the world public was now focused elsewhere.
