Time flies and memories are temporarily submerged under the weight of life’s travails. But they return to haunt us.
Last December marked the anniversary of a now-forgotten event, the first of two inexplicable acts of mass murder. Both would be eclipsed by the convulsions of a world at war, then trivialized by the passage of time. In retrospect, they would remind us of man’s notable indifference to human life.
On Dec. 12, 1941, fleeing the pogroms in Nazi-occupied Romania, 778 Romanian and Russian Jews embarked in the Black Sea port of Constanza on a small vessel of dubious seaworthiness, the SS Struma, bound for then British-controlled Palestine.
All too eager to rid his country of the Jews, the crossing had been approved by Romania’s fascist dictator and convicted war criminal, Ion Antonescu. Passengers had each paid $1,000 (about $20,000 in today’s currency) to make the voyage.
When they boarded, they discovered a greasy, dilapidated, foul-smelling rust bucket. Sleeping quarters were filthy, and cramped. There were only two lifeboats. Worse, the engine did not work. It had been salvaged from a wreck dredged from the bottom of the Danube River and hastily refitted in the Struma’s bowels.
Adrift for three days, the ship was towed to Istanbul, where it remained at anchor while “secret negotiations” between Hitler and his Turkish puppet were being held over the fate of its human cargo. With diminishing food and water reserves, lacking basic sanitation, conditions on the Struma worsened.
On the evening of Feb. 23, 1942, after 70 days at sea, the disabled ship was seized by the Turkish police and towed through the Bosporus into open waters where it continued to drift.
At dawn a torpedo launched from a Russian submarine tore into the Struma, splitting it in half. That day 103 children, 269 women, and 406 men died, among them two members of my family.
Before dawn on Aug. 5, 1944, sailing under the Turkish and Red Cross flags, the MV Mefküre, a motor schooner chartered to carry Romanian refugees to Istanbul, was suddenly illuminated by flares from an unidentified vessel.
The Mefküre failed to respond and sailed on. It was fired on and sunk. Only five of the 350 passengers survived. Like the Struma, the Mefküre, it was later learned, had been torpedoed by a Russian submarine.
In-your-face prime-time images of man’s inhumanity to man don’t lie. Our world, history and the evening news remind us, is a sewer in which we wade knee-deep in the blood of martyrs. Gathered around the dinner table, we watch them die or fade away like ghosts. We owe it to our fragile, overtaxed psyches to forget an endless stream of atrocities—the Crusades, the “Holy” Inquisition, the wholesale massacre of native Americans, slavery, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Biafra, the intertribal Hutu-Tutsi carnage, the U.S.-sponsored bloodbaths in Chiapas and the Guatemalan highlands, Bosnia, the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian bloodletting, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the assassination of Central American street children by agents of the state.
These calamities shock us to our core and remind us of our own mortality. The images we replay in our minds are reinforced by a steady diet of gruesome horrors, compliments of our TV networks.
Then fatigue sets in—emotional exhaustion. We tire of the spectacles that had kept us briefly spellbound and anguished. Distance, racial differences, and cultural incongruities all help intellectualize other peoples’ agony. We endure it by purging our souls after each infamy.
“You can’t change human nature,” we pontificate, as we partake of dessert. In a pinch, a mind-numbing sitcom will help set our minds at ease. We survive the truth by looking the other way.
W. E. Gutman is a retired journalist and published author. He served as a press attaché at Israel’s Consulate General in New York and reported from Central America from 1994 to 2006.
