Eighty-one years ago today on February 24, 1941, the overloaded and unseaworthy MV Struma was sunk with the loss of almost 800 Jewish refugees. Of the estimated 790 people who died, more than 100 were children. There was only one survivor.

The Romanian port of Constanta, on the Black Sea, was a major embarkation point for Jewish refugees attempting to leave Nazi-occupied Europe for Palestine. Thousands of Jews, desperate to escape the Germans, took the route by ship from Constanta via Turkey to Palestine, despite British immigration restrictions.

In December 1941, in Constanta, 781 Jewish refugees boarded the MV Struma. They planned to travel to Istanbul in Turkey, apply for visas to Palestine, and then sail to Palestine.

The Struma was an iron-hulled ship of 240 GRT that had been built in 1867 as a steam-powered schooner yacht and had been recently re-engined with an unreliable second-hand diesel engine. The ship was only 148.4 ft (45 m) long, had a beam of only 19.3 ft (6 m) and a draught of only 9.9 ft (3 m) but an estimated 781 refugees and 10 crew were crammed aboard her. Despite repeated engine breakdowns, Struma reached Istanbul on December 16, 1941. There, the passengers were informed they would not get visas to enter Palestine and, furthermore, would not be permitted entry into Turkey.

The refugees were trapped aboard the overcrowded ship with limited supplies of food and water. Turkish authorities denied the passengers permission to land without British agreement to their continued journey to Palestine, which the British refused to grant. The ship was held in quarantine in Istanbul harbor for two months. 

On February 23, 1942, Turkish police towed the ship, whose engine had recently failed again, out to sea and abandoned it. The next day, February 24, there was a huge explosion and the ship sank quickly. Many years, later it was determined that the ship had been torpedoed by the Shchuka-class Soviet submarine Shch-213.

Many passengers were trapped below deck and drowned; others survived the sinking and clung to pieces of wreckage. All but one of the passengers eventually died. 19-year-old David Stoliar was the sole survivor.

The sinking of the Struma led to widespread protest against Britain’s policy on immigration into Palestine and became a landmark moment for the Zionist longing for a Jewish homeland.