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Introduction

Introduction

History of prejudice

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The Struma

Trapped between questionable Turkish neutrality, a Britain unwilling to lose Arab support and, in Russia, Stalin's retaliation against a Turkish-German deal on chromium, nearly 800 adults and children fleeing Nazi massacres were already doomed as they left the Romanian port of Constanta in December 1941 crammed into the refugee ship the Struma bound for Palestine.

After the engines failed, the refugees endured a 71-day stalemate of bureaucratic inhumanity in Istanbul harbour, allowed neither to pass nor disembark, before the ship was towed out to sea to be torpedoed by the Russians. Only one person survived. His name is David Stolier.

Stolier recounts the moving story of his ordeal as the programme follows the emotionally charged attempts of British diver Greg Buxton, whose grandparents died on the ship, to locate the wreck.

As Buxton searches for information in modern-day Istanbul, he has to buy details that may turn out to be false. He speaks to fishermen and the local Jewish community in an attempt to lay the ghost of the past.

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