Struma disaster

The Struma disaster was the sinking on 24 February 1942 of a ship, MV Struma, which had been trying to take nearly 800 Jewish refugees from the Axis member Romania to Mandatory Palestine. She was a small iron-hulled ship of only 240 GRT and had been built in 1867 as a steam-powered schooner but had recently been re-engined with an unreliable second-hand diesel engine. Struma was only 148.4 ft (45 m) long, had a beam of only 19.3 ft (6 m) and a draught of only 9.9 ft (3 m) but an estimated 781 refugees and 10 crew were crammed into her.

Struma's diesel engine failed several times between her departure from Constanța on the Black Sea on 12 December 1941 and her arrival in Istanbul on 15 December. She had to be towed by a tug boat to leave Constanța and to enter Istanbul. On 23 February 1942, with her engine still inoperative and her refugee passengers aboard, Turkish authorities towed Struma from Istanbul through the Bosporus out to the coast of Şile, in North Istanbul. Within hours, on the morning of 24 February, the Shch-213 torpedoed her, killing 781 refugees and 10 crew, which made it the Black Sea's largest exclusively-civilian naval disaster of World War II. Until recently, the number of victims had been estimated at 768, but the current figure is the result of a recent study of six different passenger lists. Only one person aboard, the 19-year-old David Stoliar, survived (he died in 2014).