Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  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 Gy�
�rgy, 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.