Fascists on parade: Young Italians—probably members of Istanbul’s own small Italian community—give the Roman salute as they march past the Republic Monument in Taksim Square.
MISBAH MUHAYYE
’S ACQUISITION OF the Pera Palace had been a stellar business deal in the 1920s, but after the bomb explosion in 1941, he had reason to rue his decision. The repairs were extensive, and the headline-grabbing blast was the last kind of notoriety that a hotelier wanted for his establishment. Muhayye tried to recoup his losses in whatever way his imagination could conjure. He cabled Winston Churchill demanding compensation. He sued Ambassador George Rendel for negligence in allowing the booby-trapped luggage to be brought into the hotel. He was eventually awarded hundreds of thousands of Turkish lira in compensation, but since an Istanbul court had no jurisdiction outside the country, the entire issue was largely moot.
Even before the explosion, the hotel’s fortunes had been declining. The brief boost provided by the Jewish boycott of its rival, the Tokatlian, couldn’t make up for the fading velvet, a certain griminess to the marble, a sense that the establishment as a whole, like talkative regulars at the Orient Bar, was making a living from past exploits and a few good stories. When the Pera Palace made headlines, the news was mainly about seediness and scandal. In 1935, a prominent Turkish diplomat, Aziz Bey, took out a room, placed some money on a table, which he instructed was to be used for his funeral, and then slit his throat with a razor blade. In 1939, a Yemeni man checked into the hotel, along with three Mexican female companions, and opened a tab by claiming to be a well-heeled Indian prince. It took the administration three months to realize he was penniless.
Social life in Pera had begun to shift northward, away from the Pera Palace’s immediate environs. At the southern end of the neighborhood, the Grande Rue frayed into narrow alleyways and stair-step streets that twisted past stationers, music shops, and glass dealers. Farther north in Taksim, the creation of the Republic Monument in 1928, followed by Henri Prost’s energetic reengineering in the 1930s, made the square into a focal point for the modern city. When schoolchildren gathered to honor the memory of Atatürk or local fascists goose-stepped down the Grande Rue, they invariably headed toward Taksim. Each footfall was one more step away from the Islamic empire and toward the republic.
The Park Hotel took advantage of this northward slide. Located not far from Taksim Square, on an avenue that wound down toward the coast road, it stood on the site of the old family home of the last Ottoman grand vizier, Ahmed Tevfik Pasha. With the German Consulate situated next door, the hotel’s dining room came to serve as an unofficial canteen for the growing consular staff, much as the Pera Palace had done for its own diplomatic neighbors: the American Consulate, housed in an old Ottoman mansion next door, and the British Consulate, just up Merutiyet Avenue near the fish market. The oscillations in Turkey’s foreign policy could once be gauged by whether there were more Turkish officials drinking at one end or the other of the Grande Rue—at either the Pera Palace or the Park. With the former temporarily out of commission, while its ground floor was being pieced back together and the elevator rehung after the fatal bombing, the latter seemed to have won the contest.
In the Park Hotel’s narrow lobby, American and British businessmen walked past Japanese, Bulgarian, and German officials. Diplomats arrived with their families, and the foyer often doubled as a playground for rambunctious children who had spent too many days on trains or ships. In the restaurant, the Japanese held court early in the evening before surrendering tables to the Germans, who would carry on with postprandials until midnight. Rumor had it that all the rooms were bugged, and everyone knew that the waiters had a habit of lingering too long after taking an order or lifting the plate cover from the main course. Anything they overheard would find its way to one consulate or another. But this mutual uncertainty created a balance of power in the hotel’s dining room. It kept the conversation light and the politics discreet. Just knowing your enemies was a certain kind of security.
That was why, in blustery February 1944, the place seemed so appealing to a raven-haired, round-faced Bloomingdale’s executive with a penchant for natty bow ties and unkempt pocket squares. Ira Hirschmann was new to Istanbul, and if circumstances had been different, he might have passed his time negotiating a deal for cloth shipments to New York’s Garment District or buying up intricate Ottoman inlay work. In another life, he might have been a music impresario. Wherever he went, he spent his free time organizing impromptu concerts with a promising local violinist or piano maestro. He had no qualms about correcting the tempo or tuning of any hotel-lobby orchestra he encountered. He was a born organizer, a big thinker, and supremely confident in his ability to make things happen.
But Hirschmann spent most days in Istanbul as a detail man: leasing rust-bucket cargo ships, reoutfitting them as passenger vessels, and interceding with frontier officers, local police, and harbormasters over the minutiae of shipping regulations and manifests. Before he retired to dinner at the Park, he finished each day at the office by burning his working papers. What few of the other guests would have known was that Hirschmann was at the leading edge of yet another wave of exile. It would end in one of the single largest efforts to get Jews out of occupied Europe. His engagement with Istanbul had started in a roundabout way a few months after the Pera Palace bombing, but it involved a tragedy of a much grander scale.
Pushed along by the south-flowing top current in the Bosphorus, the Struma quietly dropped anchor in Istanbul on December 15, 1941. The journey from the Romanian port of Constan
a, nearly two hundred nautical miles away, had been horrific. A repurposed sailing vessel, the ship had been used most recently as a ferry for livestock. Its engine was a refurbished castoff that had been hauled from a sunken tugboat. The old wooden hull, covered with thin metal plating, was ill equipped to weather the winter storms on the Black Sea.
On board, the only thing that kept the passengers from being tossed around like dolls was the fact that they were packed tightly, filling the decks and passageways, women and men with leather suitcases and fur-trimmed overcoats, children with a favorite toy or storybook. Nearly eight hundred people were squeezed below decks.
They had passed through minefields and avoided surface ships and submarines patrolling in deep water. Most had been stripped of their citizenship by Nazi-allied governments. Germany had prohibited Jews from leaving German-controlled areas and was putting pressure on Romania, its Axis partner, to do the same. As they sat anchored off Sarayburnu, they were finally inside a neutral country, and from there they hoped to arrange passage to Palestine. The Bosphorus was no longer just a strait that defined the eastern edge of Europe. For the Jewish families pressed inside the Struma, it was an escape tunnel.
Week after week, the ship waited in Istanbul, not far from where Wrangel’s flotilla of refugee Russians had anchored two decades earlier. Snow fell. Gray ice ringed the Golden Horn. Port authorities ferried food and water in small boats. The Turkish government refused to let the refugees step ashore, for fear of upsetting its neutral balancing act in the war and setting a precedent that would flood Istanbul with destitute immigrants. The British Mandate authorities in Palestine, who had placed strict limits on Jewish migration, denied clearance to set course for the Palestinian port of Haifa. The passengers were thus both formally stateless and lacking an approved destination—from nowhere, belonging nowhere, and going nowhere.
The yellow quarantine flag was posted on the Struma’s mast, and communication with land was strictly monitored by Turkish police. Sympathetic humanitarians could occasionally pass messages back and forth to passengers, but this required waiting until a police officer who could be bribed was placed on watch. Simon Brod, a local textile magnate and Jewish humanitarian, worked to provide blankets and other small necessities. Other members of Istanbul’s Jewish community tried to intercede with the port authorities on the passengers’ behalf.
On January 2, 1942, six men on board the Struma—Emanuel and Edouard Ludovic, Israel and David Frenc, Teodor Brettschneider, and Emanuel Geffner—managed to pass a letter to the port police describing their circumstances. Most had Romanian passports and entry and transit visas for Palestine, Syria, and Turkey, but the period between receiving the visas and actually boarding a ship in Romania had been so long that the papers had expired. They asked the port police to allow them to make contact with the respective consulates in order simply to extend their travel papers.
The Ludovics were deemed not to have proper paperwork and were required to remain on board, but Brettschneider, Geffner, and the Frencs were allowed to leave the ship. They passed into the city and began making arrangements to travel by land to Palestine. The Jewish Agency for Palestine—a group of Palestinian Jews active in organizing transports such as the Struma—used this small opening to appeal to the British authorities. If the entire ship could not pass on to Haifa, perhaps the authorities would at least issue Palestine visas for the ship’s fifty-two children between the ages of eleven and sixteen—passengers who were old enough to travel on their own but not too old to represent a threat to any country. The suggestion neatly plumbed the thin line between humanitarianism and the rational interests of the two governments in control of the refugees’ fate, the Turkish and the British.
In a flurry of telegrams and telephone calls, Jewish Agency officials at last managed to secure an agreement allowing passage for the children. The British Embassy in Ankara dispatched a letter to the Istanbul city authorities confirming the children’s entry visas. The Turks were then to pass the order to the port police, requesting that the children’s passports be forwarded to the British consular official for stamping. However, the port police—wary of acting independently on such an important matter—insisted that the arrangements be confirmed by a direct order from their superiors in Ankara.
While they were waiting for the instructions to arrive, a countermanding order came through. The Struma was to be towed back out to sea, where the captain would be instructed to restart the engine and make for another port, either in Bulgaria or back to the point of origin, Romania. In the struggle between multiple bureaucratic directives—disembark the children or expel the ship from Istanbul—the easier and clearer order won the day. After ten weeks in diplomatic limbo, the Turkish government had decided to solve the problem simply by removing the ship from Turkish waters.
A Turkish tugboat secured a towline, and on February 23, the tandem vessels began fighting the current northward beyond the rocky headlands where the narrow Bosphorus widens into the open sea. As the Struma was pulled silently out of the harbor, Istanbullus could see a sign that passengers had painted on sheets and hung over the railings: “Save us!”
Once well into the Black Sea, the tugboat cut the line and turned back toward the Bosphorus, leaving the ship adrift. The crew struggled to restart the engine, which had failed numerous times during the outbound journey. The Struma bobbed quietly for a few hours, and then, around dawn on February 24, 1942, a massive explosion ripped through the hull. The ice-cold seawater flooded compartments and swept across the deck. In minutes, the Struma broke in half.
The next day, Joseph Goldin, one of the Jewish Agency’s representatives, telegraphed the news to his superiors in Jerusalem. “Struma wrecked blacksea four miles from bosphorus,” the operator tapped, “missing details disaster and number survivors stop fearing great number victims.”
In the hours that followed, Goldin worked desperately to compile a list of survivors. He first included the names of the Ludovics, who had tried to disembark with the other visa-holders, then penciled a question mark beside their names, then crossed them out. Over the days that followed, he drew a line through nearly every other name on the ship’s manifest. The Ludovics, whose visas had expired, and dozens of children whose papers had been preapproved by the British, had all perished. Only nine passengers had been allowed to exit the Struma before the tugboat reattached its line to the ship and pulled it toward the Black Sea. Of the roughly 785 Jews and six Bulgarian crew who remained on board—the exact numbers remain uncertain even today—only one survivor, David Stoliar, was found alive by a Turkish rescue boat and brought ashore.
Over time, the reason for the explosion emerged. The ship had been targeted by a Soviet submarine acting on orders to hit any ship on the Black Sea as a means of blocking aid to Germany and its allies. Few people in Istanbul, however, spent much time thinking about the Struma. The local reaction to the carnage was muted. Refugees had come and gone for a very long time, and headlines in local papers were taken up with what was perceived to be a much bigger story: a botched assassination attempt in Ankara against Franz von Papen, the German ambassador, which occurred the day after the Struma sinking. It turned out to be the handiwork of Leonid Eitingon, the same operative who had successfully managed Trotsky’s assassination eighteen months earlier.
A few weeks later, Istanbul’s German-language newspaper, the Türkische Post, carried an official statement by Prime Minister Refik Saydam. The authorities had done everything possible to prevent the regrettable Struma affair, he said, but in the end Turkey could not serve as someone’s surrogate homeland or “a refuge for the unwanted.” Saydam followed up by dismissing the Jewish employees of the Turkish state press agency, on the grounds that they had spread Jewish propaganda by reporting the sinking.
Newspapers around the world carried the story of the Struma. It was by far the largest refugee disaster up to that time, but it was also part of a long line of tragedies, quixotic voyages, and missed opportunities associated with what Jewish activists called the aliyah bet—the project of getting Jews out of Europe and into Palestine.
Fifteen months earlier, the Patria had lain at anchor in the harbor at Haifa. The Jewish passengers on board were classed by the British as illegals, since they did not have the proper immigration papers. The plan was to send the ship to Mauritius, where the British hoped to make provisions for resettling the refugees. Before the ship could set sail, however, Jewish operatives planted a bomb on board, hoping to disable the engine and force the British hand. But a miscalculation led to a much larger explosion, which killed some 267 people. A month later, another refugee ship, the Salvador, ran aground in a storm in the Sea of Marmara south of Istanbul. More than two hundred people died.
Ira Hirschmann read about all these events in the New York press. He had seen other stories of ships being turned away from European ports or sent on long, fruitless voyages seeking permission to dock in Britain, the United States, Palestine, or elsewhere. But the Struma disaster affected him most profoundly. The sheer scale of the tragedy, along with the fact that bureaucratic paperwork had blocked an easy solution for at least the older children, seemed outrageous. As the months went by, Hirschmann paid more and more attention to reports of refugees attempting to flee via the Balkans and Turkey, the last routes that seemed to be open to Jews escaping from Nazi occupation or from roundups conducted by Axis governments. “It was an avalanche of sad statistics,” he recalled.
Hirschmann had made his career by getting things done in fields that he had little experience in managing. His father had immigrated to Baltimore from Latvia as a teenager and made his fortune as a men’s clothier and banker. The Hirschmann household was fueled by ambition and filled with the easy optimism of an upper-middle-class Jewish family, with a piano and music lessons, good schools, and taken-for-granted success. But Hirschmann himself was on the road to a solid career as a ne’er-do-well. He studied briefly at Johns Hopkins University but dropped out before choosing a major. He joined a Baltimore advertising agency but found the work tedious.
His real talent lay in what would now be called networking. He left Baltimore rather abruptly to seek more excitement in New York, and, as an outgoing young man of some standing, he fell into the circle of Jewish philanthropic and business organizations in New York and New Jersey. One of them was the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or the Joint, the country’s largest philanthropic association for American Jewry. Through social gatherings and activities sponsored by the Joint, he happened to meet the owner of one of Newark’s most successful department stores, Bamberger’s. Hirschmann parlayed the contact into a job as a low-level copywriter in the store’s advertising department. From there, his career skyrocketed. Identified as an up-and-comer in the retail world, he moved to Lord and Taylor and then to Macy’s, which had acquired the declining Bamberger’s, and eventually to Bloomingdale’s.
As one of the new lords of advertising, Hirschmann’s primary job was to know people: to solicit the wealthy and famous and to divine the hearts and minds of everyone else. He sought the advice of Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter. He stumped for Fiorello La Guardia. He lunched with Toscanini. It was the Struma affair that made him pay attention to international affairs, however. After reading about the disaster, his “pent-up feelings erupted,” he later wrote.
At the time, millions of people were fleeing persecution, pogroms, and advancing armies. Entire communities had been destroyed by war and occupation in Poland and Soviet Ukraine. In Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, large-scale deportations of Jews had not yet taken place, but these Axis allies were under increasing pressure to fall in line with the Final Solution and surrender their Jewish residents.
Geographically, Turkey was the obvious exit route for Jews seeking to escape. Its neutrality offered relative freedom of movement, provided that any rescue effort did not push activities too far into the open and create a public relations problem for the Turkish government. In two nights, a ship could sail from Romania to Istanbul; an overnight train ran from Sofia, Bulgaria. With new stories emerging from Europe about planned killing centers and mass expulsions of Jews to labor camps, the hope was that Allied governments would at last start paying attention. The Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe—a group formed in New York in the summer of 1943 to pressure the US government to deal with the Jewish refugee problem—had floated the idea of sending someone to Turkey to investigate the possibility of emigration via Istanbul. Hirschmann volunteered.
Some weeks later, Hirschmann and the president of the Emergency Committee, Peter Bergson, met with Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary of state in charge of overseeing US responses to the refugee crisis in Europe. Long insisted that the government was doing everything possible to provide relief for European civilians caught up in the war. Bergson mentioned that the Emergency Committee wanted to send a special representative to Europe and that Hirschmann had stepped forward to take on that task. Long was skeptical, but he agreed to send a telegram to Laurence A. Steinhardt, the US ambassador to Turkey, to seek his advice and his agreement to work with Hirschmann. Steinhardt cabled back that he had no objection, and in January 1944 Hirschmann prepared to make the rounds in Washington, arranging meetings with agency heads and getting up to speed on the business of refugee assistance.
In the middle of his preparations, he was awakened by an early morning telephone call. On the line was Oscar S. Cox, a confidant of President Franklin Roosevelt. “The president has just signed the order,” he said. Hirschmann knew instantly what he meant. Cox had recently shown Hirschmann the text of Roosevelt’s order creating a body called the War Refugee Board, composed of the secretaries of state, war, and the treasury. The board’s task would be to take immediate action to rescue from the Nazis as many members of persecuted minorities—ethnic, religious, or political—as possible. At last there would be a US government body whose sole mission was to relieve the plight of civilian victims of war—in other words, to try to ensure that there would be no more Struma affairs. Hirschmann’s role was to be the State Department’s special attaché for Turkey and the Middle East, Cox continued. His task would be to carry out the board’s work in that region.
Hirschmann was elated. He would now be an official representative of the US government, rather than just a private citizen on a humanitarian mission to aid displaced families. The next day, he boarded a plane for Miami. After a week cooling his heels waiting for a US Army transport plane for Turkey, he found a berth. At the end of January, the C-54 took off with a group of young officers bound for India and one middle-aged civilian hitching a ride. After five days en route, via air hops to Puerto Rico, Brazil, Ghana, and Egypt, several days in Jerusalem, and a twenty-eight-hour train ride across the Taurus Mountains and half of Anatolia, Hirschmann at last arrived in Ankara on Valentine’s Day, 1944.
“An old world seems slipping away from me,” he wrote in his diary, “and I seem to be racing into a new.” The Turkish capital had been willed into existence, and it still took an act of imagination to see it as a real city. The wide streets and purpose-built government buildings seemed soulless and merely functional. Hirschmann was happy to have a social invitation shortly after he arrived, to attend a diplomatic luncheon at the residence of Ambassador Steinhardt. Guests milled around the spacious residence, but as they made their way to their next appointments, Hirschmann lingered behind for a chance to speak with Steinhardt privately.
Besides their Jewish heritage, the two men had little in common. Steinhardt had had the kind of career that Hirschmann might once have dreamed of: a life of diplomatic adventure at missions in Sweden, Peru, the Soviet Union, and now Turkey. Hirschmann was flattered by the ambassador’s eagerness to talk.
Hirschmann was to remain indefinitely in Ankara, Steinhardt informed him, and to have the status of special attaché to the US Embassy. His orders from Washington included an almost-unprecedented power. Unlike other diplomats, who were prevented by law from conversing with agents of enemy countries, Hirschmann would be expected to engage with enemy powers for the purpose of spiriting refugees out of harm’s way. Support was to be provided by the embassy staff, but Hirschmann was to have main responsibility for the “transportation, rescue, relief, and maintenance of refugees” under his care. Americans were a people with a conscience, Hirschmann recalled thinking on hearing his orders for the first time, but now they “had a government with a conscience, as well as policy.”
As he made his inquiries around Ankara, Hirschmann found the buck being passed from one office to the next, from an embassy to a Turkish government agency, and from government officials back to embassies. He began to feel like a wandering refugee himself. The British had agreed to allow a precise quota of immigrants to come to Palestine, but the number had been persistently under-filled for a simple bureaucratic reason: Being legally admitted to Mandate Palestine required papers—an exit permit from a Nazi-allied country, for example, plus a transit visa via a neutral state, plus an immigration certificate from British Mandate authorities. Even if transport could be arranged—in secret or at great risk, as in the Struma case—papers were still the one thing that only governments could supply.
In the middle of February, as the icy winter winds roared down Ankara’s avenues, it gradually dawned on Hirschmann that the person who would be key to his efforts was not in a governmental role at all. He was technically a private citizen living in Istanbul who had a penchant for making lists. Unlike Hirschmann, he could only afford rooms in the Pera Palace, which at this point had become somewhat desperate for customers. That fact gave him a telegraph code—the equivalent of an e-mail address today—that would become one of the most widely known of the entire war: “barlas perapalas beyoglu.”
Chaim Barlas was an old Istanbul hand, at least compared to the novice Hirschmann. He was easy to miss in a crowd: slight of stature, swallowed up in an ill-fitting overcoat, with hooded eyes that marked him as an inveterate insomniac. But he knew everyone who was anyone in the city and most people of rank in the country as a whole. His correspondence files included regular letters and notes from the American, French, and British ambassadors; the Swedish military attaché; the consuls of Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, France, Afghanistan, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy; and folders brimming with memoranda, telegrams, contracts, and reports from Turkish shipping magnates, business leaders, and political luminaries. He was probably the best-connected man in Istanbul, polite to a fault as a letter writer, solicitous in conversation, and obsessive about getting names, birth dates, and places of birth exactly right. It was a rare combination of gifts, and the lives of many people depended on how well he wielded them.
Barlas’s official title was Representative of the Immigration Department of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Both his title and his organization’s name gave little hint of the enormous role that both would soon play. By agreement of the League of Nations, the former Ottoman territory of Palestine had been placed under British administrative authority as part of the settlements governing the breakup of the sultan’s empire at the end of the First World War. Part of that mandate provided for the establishment of a Jewish Agency for Palestine to act as the official voice of the local Jewish community, or yishuv, and to liaise with the British authorities on any matters connected with the community’s affairs. Headed by David Ben-Gurion, the agency created its own self-defense unit, the Haganah, and oversaw the social and economic development of the Jewish community. As time went on, it became the body that facilitated migration by arranging entry permits for Jews seeking to move to Mandate Palestine. It was the organization that would eventually morph into the government of independent Israel.
Immigration lay at the root of the Zionist cause. It was a way of changing the demographic realities in Arab-majority Palestine and creating, literally one person at a time, a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. But with the advent of the Final Solution in Europe, migration also became a pathway to survival. The United States, Britain, and other European countries had begun to impose strict quotas on Jewish immigration after 1938, precisely at the time that anti-Jewish laws and attacks ramped up in central Europe. Like Turkey, these governments feared that Jewish refugees, pushed out of Germany and the Nazi-occupied regions of Europe, would seek to immigrate permanently, a fear stoked by widespread antisemitism in the receiving states. The Palestine option was thus a route to safety that more and more Jews were eager to take.
Sometime after arriving in August 1940, Barlas took up residence at the Pera Palace. The location was ideal. Not only were the Americans and British close by, but the hotel was also safely away from the Park and the Tokatlian, whose Axis leanings were well known. And since the Pera Palace had its own telegraph station, Barlas could almost treat the lobby as his personal office. Even after he managed to locate a larger, permanent office on the Grande Rue, runners were constantly going back and forth to send wires at the hotel.
Barlas and his associate Joseph Goldin were the only two individuals working openly as representatives of the Jewish Agency, but behind them lay a larger network of Jewish activists living in Istanbul as journalists and businessmen while secretly providing assistance to the rescue effort. Turkish authorities generally assumed that any foreigner was up to some kind of spy game, and they kept close tabs on the Barlas group. Surveillance could lead in bizarrely amusing directions. One of Barlas’s associates, Teddy Kollek, recalled being approached on the street by a passerby who overheard him speaking Hebrew. The man was a Jewish importer of dried fruits who had come to Istanbul to arrange a shipment of produce to Palestine. When his visa expired, he applied to the Turkish police to have it extended, but the police saw his real job as an unbelievable cover story. They insisted that he reveal which foreign agency he was working for, and when he protested that he wasn’t working for any of them, his visa was denied. Kollek managed to convince one of his contacts in British intelligence to claim the distraught businessman—falsely—as one of their own. That satisfied the police, and the fruit merchant was sent away with visa in hand.
While Jewish Agency representatives were in some ways dependent on the help of British officials, the same government also provided their greatest roadblock. At the beginning of their work, Barlas and his associates realized they were caught in a double bind. To begin with, the Jewish Agency had to work to convince the British authorities to allow Jews into Palestine. While the British had delegated to the agency the right to vet Jews for entry, full approval still depended on British consular authorities’ making the final call. Since 1939, however, the British had placed strict limits on Jewish entry. An earlier migration campaign organized by the yishuv had led to a massive influx of Jews in the 1930s while also sparking resistance from local Arabs. The British response was a famous white paper issued by the government of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. The policy paper committed Britain to supporting the transition toward a Palestinian state jointly governed by Jews and Arabs, but in order to maintain demographic balance, it capped new Jewish immigration at 75,000 people over the five years from 1940 to 1944.
The other problem for Barlas was gaining Turkish assent for Jews to transit via Istanbul, either by rail or by ship. Jews quickly found themselves trapped, as Hirschmann once quipped, between a white paper and the Black Sea. Since the beginning of the war, the Turks had been playing a delicate balancing game—not only with all the major powers that were courting them to join the war but also with their own past. Turkish immigration law had been crafted less as a way of forestalling a flood of refugees during war—although that was how Turkish officials explained their behavior—and more as a way of preventing the return of minorities who had fled the country in the 1920s and 1930s. The regulations were so strictly enforced that American sailors with Greek names were sometimes refused permission to step ashore in Istanbul, for fear that they were secretly ex-Istanbullus returning to reclaim the family estates.
Old habits were reinforced by wartime fear and the persistent belief that local minorities were a potential fifth column that could be put to use by enemies. Everyday antisemitism and racialized nationalism were becoming commonplace. Antisemitic cartoons, a mainstay of the Turkish press, portrayed local Jews as parasites eager to profit from the war-ravaged economy and immigrant Jews as unscrupulous wealth-mongers who would strip Turkey bare in their race to get out of Europe. In France and elsewhere, individual Turkish diplomats made attempts to prevent Jews with Turkish citizenship from being deported to Nazi camps and death facilities. But while these examples were later highlighted as evidence of Turkey’s collective heroism, only one unambiguous case of genuine rescue seems plausible: the effort by Selahattin Ülkümen, the Turkish consul on the island of Rhodes, to prevent the Nazis from deporting forty-six Jews, most of whom were Turkish citizens. Many more might have been saved had the Turkish government intervened more energetically on behalf of people trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe who also happened to be Turkish citizens.
The treatment of Jews in Turkey was part of a broader pattern of squeezing minorities, nationalizing the economy, and encouraging non-Muslims to leave. In November 1942, the government enacted a one-off levy on “wealth and extraordinary profits,” an intentionally vague wording. This new “wealth tax” was intended in part to raise funds in case Turkey were forced to enter the war and in part to crush war profiteers who had supposedly benefited from inflation and scarcity. Some 114,368 individuals and businesses were assessed by specially appointed commissions, with no right of appeal except directly to the parliament. The bulk of the tax burden fell on Istanbul, but none of the major Turkish-owned hotels, including the Pera Palace, seems to have been much affected. The reason is that the largest tax assessments were handed out to Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. “This law is also a law of revolution,” said Prime Minister Saraco
lu at the time. “We will in this way eliminate the foreigners who control our market and give the Turkish market to the Turks.”
Families and minority businesses found it impossible to meet the requirements. According to a secret report by the OSS, the tax assessments for Armenian property owners amounted to 232 percent of their property’s real value, 179 percent for Jews, and 156 percent for Greeks, while Muslims were assessed at just under 5 percent. Many of the most successful businesses in the city—including the Gesarian brothers’ gramophone company, which had recorded Seyyan, Udi Hrant, and other leading artists of the day—became targets. Faik Ökte, the Turkish official responsible for administering the tax in Istanbul, later wrote a tell-all memoir denouncing the affair and blaming the prime minister, Saracolu, for coming up with the idea. It was all a shameful episode, Ökte concluded, the “misbegotten offspring of German racialism and Ottoman fanaticism.”
Betty Carp, the American consular administrator and OSS agent, recalled the effects of the tax on friends and acquaintances, few of whom were rich or propertied. One Greek friend, Irini, witnessed the police arrive at her house and cart away everything except a bed and mattress, a few items of china and dishware, and, in exchange for a bribe, her clothes. The men of the household were herded into an open garbage truck and, in a raging snowstorm, taken away. In the end, more than a thousand Istanbullus—including prominent industrialists and commercial leaders—were assembled at Sirkeci station and deported from the city to pay off their debts through forced labor, many of them at a special camp in Akale, in eastern Anatolia. Their personal belongings were sold in public auctions at the Grand Bazaar.
The wealth tax was repealed in March 1944 and prisoners were allowed to return home, but their properties were never restored. In fact, the effort to pay the exorbitant tax rates had produced another massive wealth transfer among Istanbul’s ethnic communities on the model of the 1920s. Greeks, Armenians, and Jews owned nearly eighty percent of the property sold off during the era when the wealth tax was in force. Ninety-eight percent of the buyers were Turkish Muslims or the Turkish government. “According to the best-informed sober judgments,” a diplomat reported at the time, “this represents the first step of a bloodless massacre.”
The bureaucratic obstacles that faced Jews were thus part of the Turkish state’s deeper nervousness about minorities and movement in general. Chaim Barlas was juggling a host of diplomatic conundrums. As soon as one door opened, another closed. The Turkish government agreed to facilitate the dispatch of food packages of raisins, nuts, figs, and margarine to Jewish communities via the Red Cross, a kind of stopgap while Jews were awaiting permission to emigrate. But because of rationing, the Turkish authorities mandated that packages containing meat could only include pork—a product in low demand among Muslims but, of course, prohibited for observant Jews as well. Similar problems affected transportation. Turkey had eased its restrictions on group transit of refugees in February 1943, but two months later Bulgaria closed its frontiers to people traveling in large groups—effectively stopping any substantial flow across the crucial land border between the two countries. Barlas next approached the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ankara, requesting that Turkey reverse its policy and instead allow individuals to transit the country rather than requiring that they be part of a preestablished group.
It was a bold request. This was precisely the problem that Turkish authorities had feared: an influx of individual families—difficult to monitor and impossible to control once they had entered the country—making their way to Turkey and getting effectively stuck there, with the government having no way of knowing whether they had in fact exited and continued toward Palestine. The response was to accede to Barlas’s request but to place a nearly impossible restriction on movement: Only nine Jewish families were permitted to transit the country per week. Moreover, the Turkish government required that everyone admitted as part of this quota exit the country before another quota could be admitted. At that rate, Ira Hirschmann later reckoned, it would have taken two hundred years to ease the bottleneck of displaced people seeking to flee Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.
The plan went into effect that September, but in the following two months only 215 people—some from Romania, others from Poland who had escaped to Hungary—made their way to Istanbul. By December 1943, Barlas had already compiled a list of more than a thousand other names. Small numbers of refugees had also arrived on the Turkish coast from Greece, and arrangements were being made for acquiring immigration papers for Palestine.
In December, Barlas wrote to Ambassador Steinhardt that only 1,126 people had made their way out of Nazi-dominated Europe via Turkey. In fact, nearly twice as many Turkish Jews—2,138 people—had left for Palestine as the number of rescued Jews escaping the Nazis. If that balance continued, the Jewish Agency would be emptying Istanbul of its Jews far faster than it was able to aid Jews trapped inside Axis Europe.
Hirschmann’s arrival in February 1944 gave a new impetus to the effort. Hirschmann set about pulling together the many organizations that were working, sometimes at cross purposes, to facilitate rescue. He now had the full authority of the American government, and the personal endorsement of President Roosevelt and key members of the cabinet. What he also brought to the table was money.
Workmen clear the tracks of ice and snow for a trolley car.
From his years in New York and New Jersey, Hirschmann had a long association with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; in his new role at the War Refugee Board, he helped transform the board into a conduit for Joint funds. The Joint had been active since the First World War in channeling assistance from the American Jewish community to needy people abroad. It now became the principal financier for the Turkish relief effort, as well as for many other programs around the world. The War Refugee Board persuaded the US Treasury Department to waive restrictions on trading with enemy countries to allow the Joint to carry on financial transactions in Axis-dominated zones: to exchange currency, distribute resources, and where necessary buy tickets and arrange for travel for individual Jewish families. Other funds—nearly $700,000—indirectly financed operations in Turkey and transport to Palestine, in addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on transit from Hungary and other countries and distribution of food via Turkey. Further Joint-funded programs delivered food to concentration-camp internees and Jewish refugees hiding in the Russian Far East; sent burlap-wrapped food packages to Jews languishing in Romanian ghettos (with the burlap to be used for clothing and blankets); supplied physicians and public health workers to Balkan refugee centers; and provided direct financing for the ongoing work of Jewish schools, hospitals, and other community organizations in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and other Turkish cities.
In relatively short order, Hirschmann, Barlas, Steinhardt, and other major players managed to work out an informal arrangement involving the US government, the Jewish Agency, and private American philanthropists, all focused on getting as many Jews as possible into and out of Turkey. Hirschmann was also in regular contact with Lanning Macfarland and the OSS station in Istanbul, using the resources of the US intelligence mission while passing along any information he had been able to glean from his own sources about conditions in Axis Europe.
Since the day the war began, Barlas told Hirschmann, he had devoted himself to the task of rescue. Now, at last, he felt “confident that nothing can further disturb our cooperation which has only one aim in view: the rescue and bringing into safety of our brethren.” But as the winter of 1943–1944 faded into a bright Istanbul spring, a singular problem remained: If the Nazis were increasingly killing Jews in groups—and now on a scale that even skeptical Allied observers could no longer deny—the only way to save them was in groups as well.
As long as a private citizen had the requisite papers, there was no problem in theory with being able to enter a neutral state such as Turkey. But theory and reality were often far apart. In the summer of 1938, the Turkish government had officially barred the door to Jews coming from countries with antisemitic laws. Ankara may have believed that these people, even though the neediest, were also the most likely to stay in Turkey. Once Germans began transporting large groups of Jews to established killing sites in Poland, a possible route of rescue was to transport Jewish refugees to Turkey en masse in specially outfitted ships or trains. But the devil lay in the bureaucratic details.
The process began with Barlas. As representative of the Jewish Agency, he was empowered by the British Mandate authorities in Palestine to draw up lists of candidates for immigration, based on information provided by his own agents or directly from people with family members still in Axis-dominated lands. The information required was substantial, and war made it hard to obtain. It could take two to three weeks to gather a complete list of names, dates of birth, places of birth, and current addresses for a group of people large enough to fill a ship or train.
Once the list was assembled, Barlas would forward the information to Palestine. The authorities there would go down the list name by name, either endorsing or denying a person’s candidacy. The finalized list would then be forwarded to London for approval. That entire process took another two to three weeks. After that, the British passport control officer in Istanbul would be instructed to draw up his own prioritized list—again over a period of two to three weeks. From there, the officer would communicate directly with the British Embassy in Ankara with details of which families were approved for immigration.
The final list would then go from the embassy to the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where it would eventually—over three or four days—find its way to the Turkish consular affairs department. That department would in turn transmit the list of approved candidates to Turkish consuls in Bucharest, Budapest, Sofia, or other cities where officers were empowered to release transit visas. In the end, a Jewish family could expect to wait at least two and a half months, if everything went smoothly, to receive permission both to transit Turkey and to enter Palestine. The wait was often considerably longer. After that, it was Hirschmann’s job to sort out the even more complex issue of arranging ships and trains to get people with the appropriate paperwork out of harm’s way.
For the applicants, the entire process was excruciating. You wrote a letter or filled out a form, waited, then perhaps wrote it all again. Abraham Slowes had immigrated to Palestine from Poland in 1930 and made a successful career in Haifa as a power-station engineer. His parents, Moshe and Malka, were respected dental surgeons who were still living in the family home in Vilna. The city—eventually renamed Vilnius—had undergone immense changes: It was part of the Russian Empire when the Slowes family first moved there; it had been made part of Poland after the First World War; it was captured by the Red Army in September 1939 and incorporated into Soviet Lithuania. As Hitler and Stalin jointly moved through eastern Europe, Vilnius was at the center of the vise. In early March 1941, Abraham received a simple telegram from his father. “Send certificates,” Moshe Slowes wrote, requesting that his son get travel documents for himself, his wife, and another family, the Fiksmans.
Abraham wrote back quickly to say that he was doing everything possible to arrange the certificates of immigration to Palestine via Turkey. In fact, he had already made an application on his parents’ behalf, but that request had been denied in February 1940. In the months that followed, his family’s predicament worsened. Germany and the Soviet Union were allies when Moshe sent the first telegram to his son. Three and a half months later, the two countries were enemies. The German invasion of the Soviet Union placed the family squarely on the front line of a new war. Abraham now ramped up his efforts, sending a steady stream of letters and telegrams to virtually anyone he thought might be able to help. Finally, in March 1942, more than two years after his first request, the Department of Migration in Jerusalem wrote with superb news. The British passport control officer in Istanbul had been instructed to release immigration certificates for Moshe and Malka. They would simply need to apply in person in Istanbul.
The first problem for Abraham was getting this news to his parents; the second was getting his parents to Istanbul. He must have known at the time that things were desperate in Vilnius. The Wehrmacht had captured the city from the Soviets in the first days of the invasion in the summer of 1941, and Jews in the city had been rounded up and confined to a ghetto. But the uncertainty of war and the bureaucracy of the process created new obstacles. When Abraham asked the Red Cross to contact whoever was living at his parents’ last known address, the receiving officer wrote back instructing him to fill out the required form. Abraham quickly returned the form—listing eight family members who were believed to reside in the occupied zone—and included a postage stamp to pay for the cost of forwarding. He wrote to the Swedish consul in Jerusalem and even to the Vatican. “I venture to hope that assistance will not be denied to aged people who have during all their lives helped the sick as physicians, in these hard times,” he told the Swedish official, enclosing his parents’ photographs as identification. The consul in Jerusalem wrote back, asking him to address his request to the Swedish consul in Haifa. Similar replies came from his other correspondents. Regrettably, they all said, contact with the German-occupied territories had ceased.
Finally, Abraham reckoned that going closer to the source might yield better results, and in early August 1944 he wrote to the British Embassy in Moscow requesting that news of the immigration certificates be forwarded to his parents’ address. Only weeks earlier, the Red Army had retaken Vilnius, so Abraham hoped that the lines of communication would once again be open. In November, an attaché at the embassy wrote back with the first clear news. “With reference to your letter of 8th August enquiring about the whereabouts of your father,” the letter said, “I regret to inform you that a letter sent to the address you gave has been returned marked ‘Addressee has died.’”
A follow-up note from the embassy the next spring contained more information: The family apparently had been killed at the beginning of the German occupation four years earlier. The people to whom the Palestine authorities had issued immigration certificates, to whom the passport control officer in Istanbul was prepared to issue a validation, and to whom Turkish officials were asked to issue a transit visa were already dead by the time the first stamp had been placed on any of their documents. For individual families, as well as for Barlas and Hirschmann—all of them busy creating long lists of people waiting to be saved—filling up a passenger manifest was sometimes like assembling a ship of ghosts.