AT THE GATE OF FELICITY

 

A safe haven, August 1944: Jewish refugees, probably survivors of the doomed Mefkûre convoy, arrive at Sirkeci station from the Black Sea coast.

 

THERE WAS A MUNDANE everydayness to acts of heroism. The telegraph operator tapping away Barlas’s messages from the Pera Palace was just one piece of an intricate bureaucratic puzzle. Filling out forms, collating official papers, negotiating with a transport company, arranging for the repair of a ship’s engine, and doggedly pursuing Turkish officials more interested in having a problem go away than in resolving it were all critical elements of rescue and escape.

Survival required planning, and before planning came paper, lots of it. War, occupation, and atrocity blocked the Slowes family’s paper chase. For many Jews, however, the core problem was not just getting the permits to enter Turkey and then Palestine. Rather, outside the areas of German occupation, there was still a set of officious and maddening technicalities involved in convincing a government—even a reasonably cooperative one—to let people leave. “It would appear from the telegrams received by Hirschmann and myself that the War Refugee Board is under the impression that the principal difficulty with which we have been confronted has been a reluctance on the part of the Turk Government to cooperate,” Ambassador Steinhardt wrote to Washington in March 1944. “Thus far this has not been the case. Up to the present time our principal difficulty has been the refusal of the Axis authorities in the Balkans to permit Jewish refugees to depart.”

Romania was the intended point of exodus for growing numbers of Jews, just as it had been for the ill-fated Struma passengers. Some were native to Romania and had spent the war living openly in the capital, Bucharest, or in other cities. Others had been interned or deported to Transnistria, the stretch of occupied Soviet Ukrainian territory where the Romanian government herded hundreds of thousands of Jews into camps and ghettos. Still others had fled to Romania from farther north, from Poland or other areas under direct German rule.

Even though Romania was a Nazi ally, it was still possible to live relatively safely inside the country’s prewar borders, despite the growing pressure that Berlin was exerting on Bucharest to round up local Jews and send them to German-run camps. What united the many Jewish communities thrown together by war inside Romania was the government’s requirement that a Romanian official formally approve any request to emigrate by issuing an exit visa and, when necessary, a passport. This was a common practice in many countries at the time; it was simply a way of keeping tabs on citizens’ comings and goings across international frontiers. But in the context of persecution and flight, it created enormous obstacles for Jews in particular.

Even after the Turks had ceased requiring transit visas for Jews holding valid immigration certificates, the Romanian government insisted that migrants present special exit documents before departure. Since many Jews had been stripped of their citizenship by the Romanian government in 1938, as part of a string of antisemitic laws, getting out of the country required that Romanian Jews apply to have their citizenship reinstated or verified. Bureaucrats dutifully kept all these records, much like an immigration officer today would be able to provide a full accounting of which airport one departed at precisely what hour.

At a minimum, getting out of Romania required that a Jewish applicant present the following documents:

a current photograph

a statement of the applicant’s birth date, place of birth, height, hair color, eye color, nose shape, forehead shape, mouth shape, chin shape, and facial hair

a certificate confirming that the applicant had no pending legal cases against him

a notarized affidavit from two witnesses confirming the identity of the applicant, his parents, birth date, residence, and identity as a Jew

a notarized affidavit confirming the identity of the two witnesses above

a certificate from the Ministry of Finance stating that the applicant was not in arrears on taxes in the past five years

a special form, signed by the applicant, expressly requesting permission to leave the country

It was the last requirement on this list that was the most insulting. The form required that the applicant sign a simple statement swearing to the following:

By these presents, I, the undersigned, __________, living at __________, declare that, in obtaining a passport and leaving the country, I understand that I will be permanently settling abroad with my entire family.

The bureaucratic language masked the perverse reality: The Jewish applicant was in effect restored to a version of Romanian citizenship only on the condition that he and his immediate relatives never set foot in the country again.

In addition to restrictions on the Romanian side, the Turkish government continually threw up roadblocks as well. Officials in Ankara were wary about using Turkish-flagged vessels in any rescue efforts, even if the full costs were borne by private organizations or foreign governments, for fear that this would tip Turkey too far to the Allied cause and bring down Hitler’s wrath. The Struma affair had made the government even more cautious. In the event of another catastrophe at sea, Ankara believed, the blame would land squarely on Turkish heads, repaying any assistance in the rescue effort with international condemnation. Even as seemingly simple a matter as allowing relief organizations to trade Turkish lira at the same preferential exchange rate allowed for diplomatic missions was treated carefully. Delaying tactics and a retreat into the arcana of diplomatic consultations and official inquiries were the normal responses to Ambassador Steinhardt’s requests for assistance.

By the middle of 1944, however, things were working better than ever before. So many foreign organizations were seeking to aid Jews via Istanbul—some Jewish, some American, some international, such as the Red Cross—that the entire process threatened to collapse under its own weight. Given the fact that it was in a refugee’s interest to be in contact with as many aid groups as possible—hedging bets in the hope that at least one of them would be able to help—multiple agencies sometimes devoted incredible energy to a particular case only to find that a matter had already been resolved by another.

As Ambassador Steinhardt wrote to Barlas in June, many of these groups sent their representatives to Turkey for only a few days and had little understanding of the complexities of the local environment. There were even instances when multiple rescue groups were bidding on the same ship, driving up the price that an owner could ask. And since some of them were expressly involved in illegal migration—flouting Turkish immigration law in the hope of getting more people out of central Europe—their activities threatened to bring a halt to the hard work of the Jewish Agency and others in securing legal permission to transit to Palestine. Earlier that spring, Foreign Minister Numan Menemenciolu had told Steinhardt explicitly that the Turkish authorities were well aware of the illegal activity being carried out in Istanbul and that the government could easily activate plans for stopping it. For that reason, Barlas had always been wary of mixing aliyah bet with his own above-board campaign to get official transit visas and Palestine certificates for as many Jews as possible.

In all of these efforts, both legal and illegal, information was the crucial component of survival. If you knew where family members or friends were located and how to get to them, and if you had the wherewithal to assemble official papers that could easily have been mislaid or destroyed, the chances of making it to safety were immeasurably greater. That is why Barlas and Hirschmann frequently made the short trip from the Pera Palace and the Park Hotel, across Taksim Square, and toward the neighborhood of Harbiye. Their destination was the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit.

Harbiye’s name was derived from the root word for “war,” but there was probably no more peaceful or secure place in the city. It had been the site of the old Ottoman military training academy—hence the name—and had graduated the elite of the sultan’s imperial land forces, including Mustafa Kemal. It had also been selected by the British occupation troops for their headquarters after the First World War. Like most of the suburban highlands north of the Golden Horn, where many non-Muslims had resided during the Ottoman era, the district was a hodgepodge of Christian churches, cemeteries, shops, and lodgings for foreigners, all lying uneasily alongside barracks and parade grounds. When he set up his offices during the Allied occupation, General Charles Harington found an overgrown Armenian cemetery nearby. He ordered it transformed into a sports field. The old tombstones were rearranged into makeshift bleachers from which members of the British colony could enjoy refreshments and watch amateur cricket matches.

The neighborhood was far away from the old city, both geographically and culturally. A major Turkish novelist of the era, Peyami Safa, entitled one of his most famous works Fatih–Harbiye (1931), contrasting the traditionally Muslim district of Fatih south of the Golden Horn with its upwardly mobile opposite to the north. Secular Muslims were increasingly moving into multistory houses and new apartment buildings in Harbiye, but the district had long been known for its Christian businesses, schools, and places of worship. In 1846, the Ottoman authorities had allotted land in the neighborhood for what would become Istanbul’s most important Catholic church. It was the seat of the spiritual leader of the group still referred to today as the city’s Latins or, more commonly, Levantines.

Istanbul’s Levantines were comfortable in many cultures but perhaps never truly at home in any. The church’s parishioners included Arab merchants, Maltese bankers, and Italian financiers—usually French- or Italian-speaking but also inherently multilingual—who were products of the long period of interaction between the Ottomans and Catholics in the eastern Mediterranean. Among them were some of the city’s wealthiest families, who lived clustered in villas and apartment buildings in Pera. They were “a strange community,” said the writer Harold Nicolson, “isolated, important, polyglot and yet united by a common function” as economic go-betweens linking Ottoman producers with European markets. The memoirist Ziya Bey was more pointed and probably reflected a view common among Muslims. The Levantines were, he said, “a nondescript people . . . whose one purpose is to make and spend money and who are ready to sell anything for the purpose.” Ziya Bey’s disdain was directed at a tiny portion of the city’s population, however. There were fewer than 23,000 Levantines in the city at the time of the first republican census in 1927, two-thirds of them foreign citizens, and that number declined steadily thereafter.

Catholic communities in the Middle East always retained the flavor of an earlier time in the church’s history. In Christendom’s great schism of 1054, the churches now labeled Orthodox—Greek, Russian, Romanian, and others—decided to hew to the concept of church hierarchies being tied to distinct national or cultural communities. They parted ways with the idea that one leader among them—the bishop in Rome—could lay claim to universal authority. But Rome realized that touting its universality too loudly in the East would harden the position of its Orthodox rivals; worse, it might alienate loyal congregations that had developed their own traditions. That is why Istanbul, like Damascus or Beirut, developed an enormous variety of churches that, in the West, would all simply be called Catholic, from Armenian Catholics to Syrian Catholics to Latin (that is, Roman) Catholics. The result was the broad mosaic of Catholicism in its many Eastern forms, each with its own liturgy, vestments, hierarchy, and even, for some, married priests. In that sense, the Levantines—although purely Roman Catholic—might be seen as the easternmost Westerners or the westernmost Easterners, depending on one’s point of view, within the Catholic communion.

Among these Catholics, the pope always tended to tread rather lightly. That may have been why the apostolic delegate—the pope’s personal representative in Turkey—ended up in a rather out-of-the-way location, in Harbiye, rather than establishing himself in the middle of the old Christian district of Pera. The Cathedral of the Holy Spirit is by no means the most appealing Catholic church in Istanbul. Its plaster façade frames a mildly interesting mosaic of a dove descending and tongues of fire sprouting from the heads of the faithful. Wisteria and English ivy spill into the courtyard. What the cathedral lacked in architectural appeal, however, it made up for in temporal power, which is why Chaim Barlas had been trying so hard to get there through the early winter of 1943.

Even though Barlas’s telegraph station in the Pera Palace was less than a half-hour walk from the cathedral, protocol demanded that he go through the proper channels. He corresponded with the apostolic delegate’s chief secretary, Vittore Righi, in hopes of arranging a meeting. He may have already gained access in January, but it is more likely that the process dragged on for several weeks, as pleasantries were exchanged and requests forwarded.

On February 12, 1943, Barlas found a telegram waiting for him in the lobby of the Pera Palace. It was from Isaac Herzog, the chief rabbi in Jerusalem, and warned of the “extreme danger” that Jews in Italy were facing. He urged Barlas to make contact as quickly as possible with the pope’s representative to see whether something could be done. There was no plan to bring Italian Jews to Istanbul; Barlas already had his hands full trying to arrange passage for the much larger communities besieged in eastern Europe. But the hope was that a respected senior church leader might be able to intercede with papal officials in Rome. In any case, Barlas now had yet another talking point on which to engage the Vatican’s representative.

Pope Pius XII had chosen to observe a calculated neutrality in the war, even when it became clear that Jewish communities were being destroyed en masse throughout Europe. His staunch opposition to communism pushed him away from an open endorsement of the Allied cause, which would have placed him effectively in the same camp as the Soviets. His concern for protecting Rome and Vatican City from Hitler’s armies also pushed him to speak cautiously when addressing the issue of German atrocities, even though Vatican diplomats were fully aware of the horrors being perpetrated in occupied Poland and the Axis-occupied parts of the Soviet Union. However, equal treatment of both sides became the polestar guiding Pius XII’s diplomacy. “He explained that when talking of atrocities he could not name the Nazis without at the same time mentioning the Bolsheviks . . . ,” said Harold H. Tittmann Jr., the American chargé d’affaires at the Holy See. “He stated that he ‘feared’ there was foundation for the atrocity reports of the Allies but led me to believe that he felt there had been some exaggeration for purpose of propaganda.”

Barlas knew the church’s position, which is why he was so careful in his approach to the papal representative living near him in Istanbul. Finally, in the spring of 1943, Barlas walked through a small doorway off Cumhuriyet Avenue and into the presence of someone with the weighty title of Titular Archbishop of Mesembria and Apostolic Delegate to Turkey and Greece.

Monsignor Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli had been in Istanbul much longer than Barlas. He had served as apostolic delegate since 1934 and, before that, had enjoyed a promising ecclesiastical career. But he was also imbued with the core quality that was of most interest to Barlas: a commitment to social activism and the church’s role in the world.

Roncalli was born in 1881—making him an exact contemporary of Mustafa Kemal—near Bergamo, the son of sharecropping farmers who produced a hearty Italian household of thirteen children. It was not unusual for a large family to have at least one son destined for the priesthood, but Roncalli seemed to take to theology with unusual fervor. He completed studies as a local seminarian, then as a scholarship student in Rome, and finally as a doctoral candidate. In 1904, he was ordained as a priest. He eventually returned to Bergamo to serve as secretary to the local bishop, a position that gave him his first real access to the church hierarchy. Bergamo was one of the centers of progressive social thought, the view that the great wealth and power of the church should be used both to improve the lot of individual parishioners and to nudge political institutions into directions that were more equitable and just.

The job of chief confidant and adviser in the bishopric placed Roncalli squarely within the major currents of progressive teaching. His organizational experience also recommended him to higher authorities. By 1920, he had been elevated by Pope Benedict XV to become director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, a position that gave him added experience as administrator of the church’s missions in Italy and abroad. That international experience placed him in line for an appointment outside Italy, and in 1925 he was named archbishop and papal representative in Bulgaria, a position that, in 1931, Roncalli convinced both the church and the Bulgarian government to raise to the level of apostolic delegate. Three years later, he was transferred to the same position in Istanbul.

Roncalli quickly grew fond of Turkey and the Turks. His decade of service in Bulgaria had already made him an expert in negotiating the societies and cultures of southeastern Europe, and he threw himself into his new job with enthusiasm. He began learning Turkish, although the intricacies of the language made him think of the project mainly as a form of mortification and penance. His real challenges were less cultural than political. “My work in Turkey is not easy,” Roncalli wrote candidly in his journal. “The political situation does not allow me to do much.”

In the world of ecclesiastical diplomacy, an apostolic delegate’s role was delicate. He had no legal diplomatic standing and, unlike the higher office of papal nuncio, could not speak on behalf of the Vatican. His bishopric was based in Istanbul, where most of Turkey’s Roman Catholic community resided, but that location also kept him at some remove from the foreign policy intrigues—and political power—in Ankara. The Turkish government had extended its commitment to secularism into the international realm; any communication between Roncalli and Foreign Minister Menemenciolu was treated as strictly personal, not as a form of diplomatic correspondence. In 1939, when Roncalli contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the official announcement of the death of Pope Pius XI and the accession of Pius XII, the foreign ministry’s response was that the event was a purely religious matter and had no bearing on interstate relations. Like other priests, Roncalli often had to leave his ecclesiastical collar in his closet, since the Turkish government generally prohibited the wearing of religious garb in public. Nor did Roncalli have a claim to any particular administrative power over the bishops in the territory where he happened to be located. His only real tools were moral suasion and a direct line of communication with Rome. In Roncalli’s case, any hindrances were lessened by a wealth of local experience, contacts, and “a great deal of tact and ability,” in the words of the French ambassador.

There is no transcript of Barlas’s first encounter with Roncalli, but he presumably made the points to the delegate that he had earlier made in correspondence with Righi: that the Jewish Agency was ramping up its efforts to get Jews out of occupied Europe; that the church could do more to condemn the atrocities being committed across the continent; and that the church could play a very particular role in mobilizing its contacts to make sure that Jews were able to access the immigration papers they would need to exit their home countries, transit Turkey, and finally arrive in Palestine. In any case, the channels of communication were now open. Throughout the spring and summer of 1943, Barlas either met personally with Roncalli or passed documents to him through Righi. In June, Barlas wired a quick update to Jerusalem: “Have seen today his eminence the pappal [sic] nuncio [sic] who is doing utmost render help.”

Barlas’s requests were becoming ever more pointed and concrete. Barlas was asking Roncalli not only to use his resources to press Rome on taking a stronger stance against the persecution of Jews but also to use the Vatican network for the express purpose of assisting individual families in escaping. The relationship was mutual, in fact. Given his past experience in Bulgaria, Roncalli knew of families who were seeking to flee. On multiple occasions, he asked Barlas to follow up on whether a specific person in Sofia or elsewhere had received immigration papers. In November the chief rabbi in Jerusalem wrote to thank Roncalli for the “precious assistance that you have continually rendered in [Barlas’s] efforts to come to the aid of our poor brothers and sisters.”

Another crisis was yet to come, however. Axis-aligned countries such as Hungary and Romania had already enacted harshly discriminatory anti-Jewish laws and shuttered Jewish businesses. They had no qualms about murdering Jews in territories that they had occupied during the war. In Hitler’s carve-up of eastern Europe, Hungary was awarded slices of Czechoslovakia and Soviet Ukraine; Romania took an even larger portion of Soviet Ukraine, including the strategic city of Odessa; and Bulgaria received part of Macedonia and western Thrace. All three countries rounded up and deported foreign Jews from these occupied territories; some participated in the large-scale murder of Jewish civilians who were blamed for opposing the occupation or aiding the Allied enemy.

But these governments were also surprisingly patriotic about their own Jews. They resisted German pressure to load local Jews onto trains for deportation to Nazi-run killing centers abroad. Jews living inside Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria proper were by and large spared the worst ravages of the early stages of the Holocaust.

In Hungary, that situation began to change in the spring of 1944. As the likelihood of an Allied victory became more and more apparent, Hungary’s government began putting out secret feelers in Istanbul and other neutral capitals. If the Allies would agree to certain conditions—such as avoiding a Soviet occupation of Hungary and forgoing any punitive border changes in a peace settlement—Hungary might switch its allegiance from the Axis to the Allied cause. German intelligence was intimately aware of these conversations, and as German troops retreated from the Soviet Union after the defeat at Stalingrad, plans were drawn up for the full-scale invasion of Hungary—a way of scotching Hungary’s exit from the Axis and creating a buffer against an Allied advance through southeastern Europe. In the process, the Nazis would be able to realize a goal that the uncooperative Hungarian government had blocked since the beginning of the war: the large-scale deportation and murder of Hungary’s substantial Jewish community, which numbered some 725,000 people before the war. In March 1944, Wehrmacht troops crossed the border, accompanied by SS and Gestapo units. The attack on Jews began later that summer, a phased campaign personally overseen by Adolf Eichmann, the senior SS commander in Budapest. Jewish property was confiscated, Jewish families were forced into a string of ghettos, and then, beginning in May, trainloads of Jewish citizens were assembled for transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Many were gassed soon after their arrival.

By this stage, Barlas had an ally in Hirschmann, who was committed to using his funding and contacts to secure ships for rescue operations on the Black Sea. The Hungarian situation presented a particular kind of challenge. Much of the Jewish community had remained persecuted but reasonably safe. Now the Nazi eradication effort was kicked into overdrive. Nazi authorities were also aware of the particular concern that Allied governments had developed for the fate of Jews, and officials in Budapest sought to exploit this concern for reasons of propaganda and economics.

With Eichmann’s consent, in mid-May 1944 two emissaries, Joel Brand and Andrea György, were sent to Istanbul to open secret negotiations with the Allies. Brand, well known to Barlas and other Jewish agents there, was a young Jewish industrialist in Hungary who had been active in attempts to get Jews out of his native country. His traveling companion, György, was a Hungarian Jew who had converted to Catholicism and a man equally well known by a range of different names. He was sometimes called Grosz, sometimes Gross or Grenier, sometimes Trillium, the code name that he had been given by his American handlers: He was part of the OSS’s Dogwood network and as such an invaluable informant for Allied intelligence.

Brand and György carried a grotesque offer: The German authorities would agree to release Jews in exchange for needed goods. “We are in the fifth year of the war,” Eichmann had told Brand in Budapest. “We lack supplies. Well, you want to save Jews, especially the young and the women of childbearing age. I’m a German idealist, and I respect you as a Jewish idealist. You’ve got 1,200,000 Jews in Hungary, Poland, and so forth. I am selling you the goods.” Eichmann’s terms were startlingly specific. A limited number of Jews would be allowed to exit Hungary if the Allies would provide the Germans with two million bars of soap, two hundred tons of cocoa, eight hundred tons of coffee, two hundred tons of tea, and ten thousand trucks.

The emissaries were detained by Allied operatives for further questioning in Istanbul and Cairo, and the offer was roundly rejected. No Allied government could bear the thought of paying blood money to the Nazis, and the Soviets in particular feared that additional war matériel or supplies might embolden the Germans to launch a new offensive on the eastern front. Similar ransom plans had been proffered before; the yishuv leadership was eager to explore any option for getting Jews out of Europe, even if it meant making pacts with the devil. The Brand mission, however, illustrated the desperation of the Germans—now clearly in retreat in the east and focusing their attention on eliminating as many Jews as possible before the war ended.

The Brand mission also showed that the window for action had not fully closed. Escape routes might still be available, even as the deportations accelerated. Through his channels of communication with church officials in Budapest, Roncalli learned that Jews who had not yet been deported might be allowed to exit the country. What they required was immigration certificates for Palestine, certificates that could be obtained only in Istanbul. But if the threatened Jews could not come to Turkey to receive the certificates, the only possible solution was to take the certificates to them—inside a Nazi-occupied country that had, by midsummer of 1944, already deported more than 400,000 Jews to labor and death camps.

That was where Barlas and Hirschmann came to rely on the apostolic delegate. In a series of exchanges that summer, the Jewish Agency and the War Refugee Board made arrangements to transfer packets of immigration certificates to Roncalli, for onward transmission via church networks to Jewish communities in Hungary. Barlas authorized his team to identify as many Hungarian Jews as possible. His associates scoured Istanbul for people who might supply the names and addresses of friends or family members. Others took to copying down any recognizably Jewish name from the Budapest phone directory.

On June 5, Roncalli wrote to Barlas: “I am pleased to inform you that the certificates for the Jews of Hungary which you passed to me are being sent to Budapest by a reliable courier.” “Thanks to these documents,” Barlas replied the next day, Hungarian refugees “could be saved.” In doing this, Roncalli was circumventing his superiors in Rome. Before the Hungarian deportations began, the War Refugee Board had informed him of the plans for the mass murder of Hungarian Jews. Roncalli forwarded the report to the Vatican—an eyewitness account by two Slovak Jews who had managed to escape from Auschwitz—but with little public result. Later, the papal nuncio in Budapest personally informed Rome of the round-up of Hungarian Jews. Yet Pope Pius XII continued to refuse to name Jews as Hitler’s principal victims or to condemn Nazi policies directed against them.

At the very least, Roncalli was overstepping his role as a religious leader with no diplomatic standing in a neutral country. He must also have realized that he was actively participating in a plan that the church had previously refused to endorse: the large-scale immigration of Jews to Palestine. In the context of the Final Solution, the lines between rescue and resettlement—effectively between immigration and Zionism—quickly faded. In late July, Hirschmann called on Roncalli at his summer residence on Büyükada. “He has helped the Jews in Hungary and I beseech his further help,” Hirschmann wrote in his diary. Thousands of immigration certificates had already been dispatched to Hungary, but further ships were now being prepared to bring Jewish refugees across the Black Sea.

On Pentecost Sunday, Roncalli stepped into the pulpit of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit to give one of his most poignant and pointed sermons of the war. “We are called to live in a painful epoch of destruction and hate,” he said, “in which individuals are sacrificed to national egoism with a brutality that is a disgrace to the human race.” Even as he spoke, Jews were on their way to Palestine, many of them carrying papers that had been delivered by Roncalli’s network.

Few of the escapees saw much of Istanbul en route, however. For those arriving by train, the Turkish authorities carefully guarded the groups during their transfer from Sirkeci station and across the Bosphorus to Haydarpaa station. New arrivals had little time to take in their surroundings. They were quickly moved along to the next stage of what must have seemed a never-ending succession of trains, checkpoints, and formalities. Similar strictures governed the transfer from sea to land.

At every step, the small group of activists from the Jewish Agency, the War Refugee Board, and the Joint were responsible for organization and provisioning. While Barlas and his associates took care of the paperwork and Hirschmann handled the politics, the everyday details fell to Simon Brod, a local philanthropist who had weathered the Turkish wealth tax and was well regarded by both Allied and Jewish agents throughout the city. His perpetual trail of cigarette smoke and tuft of white hair were often the first thing that Jewish refugees saw in Istanbul.

The entire effort could seem abstract—a matter of lists, timetables, and telegrams—until a ship or train that Hirschmann and Barlas had organized actually arrived in Istanbul. In early July 1944, the Kazbek sailed into the Bosphorus from the Black Sea with 758 people on board. The ship was rated for only three hundred passengers, and Hirschmann recalled seeing people sprawled over the deck as the ship pulled into port. The manifest included 256 children rescued from Transnistria, the Romanian-occupied area of Soviet Ukraine.

The city authorities allowed Hirschmann and a few other activists to observe the arrival and departure from a bobbing launch that drew up alongside. The refugees were disembarked, carrying bundles and small packages of belongings, and escorted by Turkish police to second- and third-class carriages waiting at Haydarpaa. As with all transports, the Joint had provided food and water—typically hundreds of loaves of bread, thousands of cucumbers and tomatoes, and plenty of packages of cigarettes, even when many of these items were strictly rationed in Istanbul. Passengers settled into their carriages quietly and stoically.

Suddenly, one of the refugees, a woman, ran down the quay, breaking windows and shouting, before being restrained. She had been this way the entire journey, someone told Hirschmann, ever since her mother and three children were shot before her eyes. Other Jews resident in Istanbul crowded into the station, seeking to make contact with someone who might know the whereabouts of relatives. In some instances, Jewish Agency officials were allowed to enter the carriages and bring back news about a specific family. “As expected, it was very bad,” one of the inquirers later wrote in a thank-you note to the agency.

The train finally pulled out after sundown, and on the cool ferry ride back to the European side, Hirschmann watched as the early evening lights came up across the city. He could look across to Sarayburnu and the spires and domes of Topkapı Palace, its interior courtyards hidden behind stone walls and cypress groves. The palace’s innermost areas—the sultan’s old private quarters and the Harem—were accessed through an ornate portico that the Ottomans called the Gate of Felicity. In the Ottomans’ diplomatic correspondence, Istanbul itself was frequently known by a variant of the same name, Dersaadet. Hirschmann realized that his work in Istanbul was only one segment of a much longer chain, a line of the stateless and homeless, passing through to somewhere else. The world, he said, seemed very tired.

Ships and trains were now arriving with greater ease and regularity than ever before. But the route was still treacherous. Later that summer, on August 3, 1944, a convoy of three ships—the Morina, the Bülbül, and the Mefkûre—left the Romanian port of Constana, each crammed beyond capacity with refugees bound for Istanbul. By the second day at sea, the Bülbül and the Mefkûre had fallen out of sight of the faster Morina, with the Mefkûre then falling even farther behind because of engine trouble.

Around 12:30 a.m. on August 5, the Mefkûre came under strafing fire, probably from a Soviet submarine repeating the scenario that had doomed the Struma more than two years earlier. Large-caliber bullets ripped into the ship’s wooden hull. Fire quickly spread on deck. The Turkish captain and four crew members escaped in the only available lifeboat.

A few dozen passengers jumped into the sea. The rest, asleep in the hold when the attack started, went down with the burning ship, which sank about a half hour after the gunfire began. Five passengers managed to survive by clinging to a piece of debris and, four hours later, drifted on the sea’s currents to within sight of the Bülbül. The rest of the 320 refugees were shot or drowned.

The two remaining ships anchored off neada, a Turkish town near the Bulgarian border, and their passengers were taken to Istanbul by train. Exhausted but smiling with relief, they pushed expectantly against the barriers at Sirkeci station and were offered lotus glasses of tea from a silver tray. They soon made the transfer to Haydarpaa station and the route to Palestine.

By the time the Mefkûre sank, Allied powers had landed in Normandy and, on the eastern front, the Soviet Union was continuing its largest offensive of the war. The Red Army had already liberated the first in a string of Nazi death camps. Romania had evacuated Transnistria and, hoping to stave off a full-scale Soviet invasion, announced later in the summer that it would switch sides and join the Allied cause. Bulgaria, after a leftist coup, would follow suit.

Rumors were rife that Turkey was planning to declare war on Germany. The Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara were empty, with only a few boats bobbing in the current. Turkish authorities had ordered naval and civilian vessels removed offshore, for fear that the Germans would launch a preemptive attack. Air-raid drills were stepped up, and blackout curtains replaced drapes in businesses and apartments.

At the Park Hotel, the Germans ate in silence, and newspapermen hovered in the lobby to cover Germany’s shifting fortunes. Rooms were going for half price as Germans crowded the checkout desk with their children and suitcases in tow, seeking to leave as soon as possible before Turkey’s neutrality ran out. Franz von Papen, the German ambassador, arrived from Ankara and quickly departed for Berlin from Sirkeci station, waving his hat to a cheering crowd of local Germans, Japanese, and Turks. In mid-August, the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that the country was severing relations with Germany. Turkey formally joined the Allied cause in February 1945.

After the war, people continued to filter through Istanbul toward Palestine, but the flotillas, special trains, and desperate paper chase began to slow as the immediate danger to the surviving refugees lessened. The vessels that had carried them became part of the epic of forced exodus from wartime Europe. Family histories now contained not only the names of a long string of ancestors, running back to lost villages and emptied neighborhoods in Poland, Hungary, or Romania. They also wove together the exotic names of overcrowded ships that had ferried the survivors to safety: the Milka and the Maritza; the Bellacita, Kazbek, and Morina; the Bülbül, Salahattin, and Toros; along with the doomed Mefkûre and Struma. These ships carried 4,127 refugees, and many more arrived in Istanbul by train or in smaller groups aboard coasting vessels and small launches. In all, from 1942 to 1945, a total of 13,101 Jews went via Turkey to Palestine and other destinations. In the end, more than a quarter of all the Jews who made it to Palestine during the Second World War passed through Istanbul to get there. “The results of the immigration in numbers are in no comparison with the tragic situation of Jewry in the enemy-occupied countries,” Barlas reported, “but . . . I may say that it is a miracle that even this small number has escaped from . . . hell.”

Chaim Barlas checked out of the Pera Palace and returned to Palestine, where he became head of the immigration department for the entire Jewish Agency, soon to form the new government of Israel. Ira Hirschmann left the Park Hotel, returned to New York, and took up a vice president’s title at Bloomingdale’s. He had only been in Turkey for about six months—coming and going to keep up his networks and report on his efforts—but the experience shaped the rest of his life in public service. When the United Nations was created, he became one of its key administrators dealing with the plight of refugees.

Angelo Roncalli left Istanbul as well. He was transferred to France in 1944 as papal nuncio. It was a post that called for a combination of tact and decisiveness, since one of his most difficult tasks was to deal with the fate of French priests who had collaborated with the German occupation during the war. Pius XII eventually elevated him to the rank of cardinal, but this was more a recognition of his piety and long experience in the field than a statement of his power within the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He had been abroad for a very long time, with little inside knowledge of the workings of Rome and the networks that would allow him to become a major voice among the princes of the church. It was therefore a stunning surprise when, upon the death of the pope in 1958, his fellow cardinals raised him even higher. He soon took the name John XXIII.

Of the people who departed from Istanbul as part of the rescue effort, at least 3,994 of them—close to a third of Barlas’s total—had not experienced the Holocaust at all. They were Istanbullus, either Sephardic Jews whose families had lived in the city for generations or eastern European immigrants who had already put down roots there. The wealth tax, the antisemitic propaganda, and a secure lifeline to Palestine now prompted many to leave, much as Armenians had done after the First World War and Greeks after the end of the Allied occupation.

One evening in the late summer of 1944, as Istanbullus watched this new wave of émigrés pass out of the city, most of the musicians of the Park Hotel’s orchestra took the night off. The first violinist, Fritz Guth, stepped onto the stage to give a solo concert. He put aside his jazz charts and instead played Schubert and Mozart for the small number of paying guests in the dining room. It was his last performance in Istanbul. The son of a Viennese Jew, he had managed to get his name on one of Barlas’s lists, and he soon left with his wife and baby for Palestine.