Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  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 H
aydarpaa 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.

  EPILOGUE

  Two women share a bicycle on an Istanbul street.

  EVER SINCE HE TOOK OVER ownership of the Pera Palace in 1927, Misbah Muhayye had come to know more about departures than arrivals. The tensions of the war years and the wealth tax had driven away business. The 1941 bomb explosion had scared away entire seasons of paying customers. By the time Allied operatives and Jewish rescuers checked out at the end of the Second World War, the Pera Palace’s reputation had come to rest on the signatures in its old registry books. The most famous guest in recent memory—Joseph Goebbels—was quietly left out of the marketing materials.

  Muhayye was in his late fifties at the close of the war. His adult life had paralleled the rise of the Turkish Republic and the rapid expansion of Istanbul’s culturally Muslim but deeply Kemalist bourgeoisie. He was extraordinarily wealthy by any standard. A long string of investments, running from Beirut to Istanbul, had paid dividends. He could afford the annual write-off that the Pera Palace had become. Although he had no children of his own, his summers were spent among nieces and nephews at his Yeniköy yalı.

  Through the 1940s and early 1950s, he visited the hotel regularly to supervise its operation. The life had gone out of the party, however. Worldly and adventurous Turks were looking for clean lines and modern furnishings, not velvet curtains and imperial excess. The hotel was now surrounded by tumbledown tenements. The front door opened onto dark, narrow streets. The back side, still with one of the best sunset views in the city, towered over gritty neighborhoods where Turkish migrants from the Black Sea coast and central Anatolia hung laundry from the windows of their apartments.

  One day in October 1954, at the age of sixty-eight, Muhayye went up to a room on the second floor and ordered a bottle of whiskey. Early the next morning, the night porter heard a loud noise from inside the room and opened the door to find his boss bleeding on the bathroom floor. Theories swirled about a fatal mishap—a drunken fall on wet marble, maybe—or a possible murder, but the hint of an explanation came from a comment he had made to friends a few days earlier. “Now that my cat is dead,” he reportedly said, “I can’t go on living.” When his will was later unsealed, no one expected the news. He had turned over the hotel to three charities for children, for the elderly, and for the fight against tuberculosis.

  The hotel remained open, since the philanthropies wisely leased it out to a private company for management, but the country was changing quickly and, with it, the tastes and expectations of Istanbullus and travelers alike. In 1950, a few years before Muhayye’s death, Turkish citizens had been given their first chance to choose a parliament in free and direct elections. They voted to sweep out the party that Atatürk had founded. Celebrations erupted in the streets, an outpouring of popular enthusiasm for change not seen since the revolution of 1908. President smet nönü stepped aside, opting to head up the new parliamentary opposition rather than remain head of stat
e. Members of the rival Democratic Party filled senior government posts.

  The old Republican People’s Party had claimed to have the wind of history at its back. Atatürk had dragged Turks out of their imperial stupor and had shaken them into modernity, the party maintained, and even after death, Kemalist ideals would best be realized through the party that Mustafa Kemal himself had founded. The new Democratic Party leadership, by contrast, saw popular will, not national destiny, as its mandate. The Democrats’ landslide victory at the polls seemed to confirm it. These dual claims to authority would become one of the mainstays of Turkish politics, regardless of the specific parties in power and in opposition. One group wore the mantle of breakneck modernizer; the other promised to speak on behalf of the previously silent masses.

  The Democrats’ prime minister, Adnan Menderes, moved to dismantle the old one-party system, even though he accepted the basic tenets of Kemalism as a political ideology. Property belonging to the Republican People’s Party was taken away and given to the national treasury. Landholdings that party leaders had acquired under Atatürk were placed under state control. Privatization enriched a new class of landowners and industrialists. In foreign policy, the new government moved away from the balancing act that had defined the Atatürk and nönü eras. Turkey had been one of the founding members of the United Nations—a position facilitated by its decision to join the Allies in the closing months of the Second World War—and in 1952 the Menderes government secured Turkey’s role in NATO, locking it in as a member of what was already called the free world. Turkish troops shipped out to Korea, the first major time they had stood alongside Western soldiers, rather than across from them, since the Crimean War. All these policies were repaid at the next election two years later, when the Democratic Party came away with even more seats in the Grand National Assembly.