Death on the Black Sea - Softcover

Frantz, Douglas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0732278244 ISBN 13: 9780732278243

Publisher: Harper Collins, 2003

Synopsis

Discusses the harrowing 1942 events and tragedy of the Struma, a disabled ship that was trying to rescue eight hundred Jewish passengers from Nazi-occupied eastern Europe before it was mysteriously sunk by a Russian submarine.

About this title

About the Author:

Douglas Frantz, the investigations editor at the New York Times, is the newspaper's former Istanbul bureau chief and a former investigative reporter the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.

From Publishers Weekly:

On February 25, 1942, a young Romanian Jew named David Stoliar was rescued after surviving more than 24 hours in the frigid Black Sea. His 768 shipmates were not so lucky-their desperate attempts to escape Nazi persecution in Romania ended when a Russian torpedo downed the Struma, a former cattle barge pressed into service as a decrepit, cramped refugee ship bound for Palestine. But as journalists Frantz and Collins (Celebration, U.S.A.) chronicle, the Struma, stymied by uncaring or anti-Semitic officials in England and Turkey, was doomed from the start. When the Struma's engine failed almost immediately after leaving the port of Constanta, a make-do repair got it to Istanbul. There, the engine failed again and the ship languished in port for two months; eventually, she was towed back into the Black Sea, where she was attacked. The authors are painstaking in their efforts to expose the horrors of what has been but a historical footnote, and their talent for fleshing out the admittedly meager historical record of the attack is compelling and clear-eyed (they were able to track down Stoliar). But their narrative sometimes shuttles awkwardly between historical events and the present-day, unsuccessful quest by a victim's descendant to locate the sunken wreck. With scant corroborating first-hand accounts, the authors lean too heavily on laundry lists of Holocaust horrors and reports of "diplomatic callousness"-the back-and-forth missives between various governments seeking to rid themselves of the Struma, for example. Still, this is a book of meticulous, driven reporting, and a valuable contribution to WWII history.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Collins
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0732278244
• ISBN 13: 9780732278243
• Binding: Paperback