Struma disaster

Struma disaster
Photo believed to show Struma in Istanbul harbor, 1942
Coordinates	41º23'N, 29º13'E Coordinates: 41°23′N 29°13′E / 41.383°N 29.217°E / 41.383; 29.217
Date	24 February 1942
Target	The ship Struma, carrying Jewish refugees from Romania to the British Mandate of Palestine
Attack type	Ship sinking
Weapons	Torpedo
Deaths	781 Jewish refugees, 10 crew members (5 Bulgarian, 3 or 4 Jewish, one Hungarian)
Perpetrators	Soviet Navy

The Struma disaster was the sinking on 24 February 1942 of a ship, MV Struma, that had been trying to take several hundred Jewish refugees from Axis-allied Romania to Mandatory Palestine. She was a small iron-hulled ship of only 240 GRT that 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 791 refugees and 10 crew were crammed into her.

Struma's diesel engine failed several times between her departure from Constanţa on the Black Sea on 12 December 1941 and her arrival in Istanbul on 15 December. She had to be towed by a tug both to leave Constanţa and to enter Istanbul. On 23 February 1942, with her engine still inoperable and her refugee passengers aboard, Turkish authorities towed Struma from Istanbul through the Bosphorus out to the coast of Şile in North Istanbul. Within hours, in the morning of 24 February, the Soviet submarine Shch-213 torpedoed her, killing an estimated 781 refugees plus 10 crew, making 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, 19-year-old David Stoliar, survived (he died in 2014).