After being turned away by the Turkish government, a Bulgarian cattle ship carrying Romanian Jewish refugees from the Shoah exploded in February 1942. Some 768 Jews died. There was only one survivor.
Turkey, neutral during the war, had bowed to pressure from both the British and German governments. Already experiencing conflicts with Palestinian Arabs, the British were eager to halt Jewish immigration to Palestine, the final destination of the ship.
The tale of the vessel, the Struma, didn’t warrant a mention in most directories of maritime disasters. But it loomed large in Solly Border’s memory. He was 10 years old and living in Romania at the time of the disaster. Three of his cousins were killed on the ship. Their high-priced tickets for passage were paid for by Border’s parents.
“Their entire life until they died they kept inside the pain of saying constantly that if they had not paid for [the cousins’ tickets], they would not have stepped on that ship and they would have been alive,” the Sunnyvale resident said.
Border has written a new book, “Doomsday on the Black Sea,” which is his imaginative take on what his cousins’ experience on the ship must have been like.
Border, too, has experienced first-hand pain due to family loss. Decades after the Struma sinking, his only son, a graduate of West Point, was killed in a helicopter crash in Alabama. Border recounts the trauma in his earlier book, “I Won 1,000 Battles, But Lost the War!”
“I had a vision of my aunt, what it is to lose a child,” said the retired businessman. Out of that empathy came a desire to write about the Struma.
In researching the Struma incident, Border found it had been largely forgotten by history, memorialized only at Yad Vashem and the Bucharest cemetery. His book apparently has raised some interest in the incident — at least in post-“Titanic” Hollywood. Border said a producer recently contacted him about turning the book into a film.
Border begins “Doomsday on the Black Sea” by chronicling actual anti-Semitic incidents that may have led the shipload of Jews to leave Romania — the burning of a synagogue, the brutal murders of Jews by legionnaires.
There “was such desperation because it was a time when Romania was ready to go to war against the Soviet Union as an ally of the Germans. We knew already about the Holocaust in other countries,” Border said.
The ship, headed for Palestine, went first to Turkey, a one-day trip from Romania. The vessel didn’t have a decent engine or a competent crew, according to Border.
To this day, it is not known why the Struma exploded.
The survival of the Jewish people is a point of pride for Border, a proud — though not religious — Jew who has lived in the South Bay for 25 years. As a young boy growing up in Romania, he learned some Hebrew and went to a Jewish high school.
“We maintained the spirit without a high level of religious culture. Our pride was Jewish identity. We have learned to survive in a very adverse world.”