On Feb. 24, 1942, David Stoliar received a most unpleasant wake-up call. A torpedo tore apart the packed refugee ship he was sleeping on, sending him soaring into the chilly waters of the Black Sea.
“I was projected into the air and fell into the water. And when I came to the surface, there was no boat,” recalled a now elderly Stoliar in Simcha Jacobovici’s gripping documentary “The Struma,” which shows on HBO2 on Sunday.
There were 769 Romanian Jewish refugees on the Struma. Only Stoliar survived.
After setting forth from Romania, the rickety, 150-foot-long by 18-foot-wide refugee ship was supposed to dock in Turkey and make its way to Palestine. Its engines, however, gave out after only one hour, and the boat was towed to Istanbul. Diplomatic pressure kept the squalid ship docked under quarantine for two months before it was towed into the Black Sea and cut adrift, without engines. One day later it was gone.
In a powerful film replete with real-life heroes and villains large and small, Jacobovici delves into the sordid web of international diplomacy that led to the sacrifice of nearly 800 Jews. He also presents a seemingly watertight case as to who was directly responsible for the ship’s sinking.
(Since so few Bay Area residents have even heard of HBO2, let alone have it in their homes, spoilers will be revealed, further on down.)
In addition to delving into history, Jacobovici tagged along on British diver Greg Buxton’s quest three years ago to locate the wreckage of the Struma and place a plaque on the final resting place of his grandparents. Buxton’s effort is strewn with nearly as many diplomatic obstacles as the ill-fated voyage his grandparents took, though, thankfully, it meets a better outcome.
Jacobovici masterfully leaps back and forth through 60 years of history, as the drama of the international machinations that doomed the poor passengers of the Struma and the international machinations keeping Buxton from searching for it are meshed together. Never is the film more powerful than when sole survivor Stoliar recounts his harrowing tale during underwater footage of Buxton’s team delving through wreckage.
A wealth of international scholars and — most damningly — declassified top-secret Soviet documents, spread the Struma passengers’ blood onto numerous hands across many continents. A British expert claims that England’s MI-6 may have been responsible for sabotaging the ship’s engine in an effort to keep Jews out of Palestine, as it had done with other Jewish refugee ships.
Despite the fact that Palestine visas were obtained for 50 young children on board the ship, Turkish authorities towed them all out to sea to die with the rest. This made sense, explained a Turkish scholar quoted in Jacobovici’s film: Turkey did not desire to complicate its relationship with Germany by becoming a “highway for Jewish refugees.”
Finally, declassified Soviet documents obtained by Latvian submarine expert Gennadi Kibardin revealed that Stalin waged a secret war on the Black Sea from 1941 to 1944, destroying neutral ships in order to disrupt the chromium trade between Turkey and Germany. Kibardin claims his documents, which were only declassified in 1990, record the Struma as being downed by a Soviet submarine.
Meanwhile, Buxton faces roadblock after roadblock that the Turkish government throws into his way. A Turkish teams claims it has found the Struma, and therefore Buxton’s quest is unnecessary. Under government pressure, the Turkish sailors guiding Buxton incompetently sail in “Mickey Mouse-shaped” patterns and then refuse to take him out to sea altogether.
Finally, Buxton bribes a local fisherman $2,500 to take him to a site locals call “The Jew Boat.” Incidentally, the none-too-pleasant reaction of a fellow diver who had asked $50,000 for that information and then discovered he has been undercut is also captured on film.
It’s hard to imagine what else Jacobovici could have done with this documentary. He follows Buxton’s intrigue-packed attempt to locate the Struma down to his backroom dealings with locals sporting such names as “Mustapha the fisherman” and “Diver Ali.” He travels back and forth across Europe to make a convincing case as to who pulled the trigger that destroyed the Struma and who else was responsible for nudging the ship in its doomed position.
He even delves into the situation that prompted the Romanian Jews to flee their homeland, at one point interviewing an elderly survivor who had traveled in a train car specially designed to asphyxiate its inhabitants — a Romanian invention.
The only problem with Jacobovici’s film is that it’s showing on HBO2 and not HBO or some other venue in which it would receive the viewership it deserves.
“The Struma” shows on HBO2 at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, noon Oct. 22, 6:45 a.m Oct. 30 and 5:30 p.m.Nov. 11.