Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  PAPER TRAILS

  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 Constana, 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 b
oard 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 coun
try’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.