by Charles King
Geographically, Turkey was the obvious exit route for Jews seeking to escape. Its neutrality offered relative freedom of movement, provided that any rescue effort did not push activities too far into the open and create a public relations problem for the Turkish government. In two nights, a ship could sail from Romania to Istanbul; an overnight train ran from Sofia, Bulgaria. With new stories emerging from Europe about planned killing centers and mass expulsions of Jews to labor camps, the hope was that Allied governments would at last start paying attention. The Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe—a group formed in New York in the summer of 1943 to pressure the US government to deal with the Jewish refugee problem—had floated the idea of sending someone to Turkey to investigate the possibility of emigration via Istanbul. Hirschmann volunteered.
Some weeks later, Hirschmann and the president of the Emergency Committee, Peter Bergson, met with Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary of state in charge of overseeing US responses to the refugee crisis in Europe. Long insisted that the government was doing everything possible to provide relief for European civilians caught up in the war. Bergson mentioned that the Emergency Committee wanted to send a special representative to Europe and that Hirschmann had stepped forward to take on that task. Long was skeptical, but he agreed to send a telegram to Laurence A. Steinhardt, the US ambassador to Turkey, to seek his advice and his agreement to work with Hirschmann. Steinhardt cabled back that he had no objection, and in January 1944 Hirschmann prepared to make the rounds in Washington, arranging meetings with agency heads and getting up to speed on the business of refugee assistance.
In the middle of his preparations, he was awakened by an early morning telephone call. On the line was Oscar S. Cox, a confidant of President Franklin Roosevelt. “The president has just signed the order,” he said. Hirschmann knew instantly what he meant. Cox had recently shown Hirschmann the text of Roosevelt’s order creating a body called the War Refugee Board, composed of the secretaries of state, war, and the treasury. The board’s task would be to take immediate action to rescue from the Nazis as many members of persecuted minorities—ethnic, religious, or political—as possible. At last there would be a US government body whose sole mission was to relieve the plight of civilian victims of war—in other words, to try to ensure that there would be no more Struma affairs. Hirschmann’s role was to be the State Department’s special attaché for Turkey and the Middle East, Cox continued. His task would be to carry out the board’s work in that region.
Hirschmann was elated. He would now be an official representative of the US government, rather than just a private citizen on a humanitarian mission to aid displaced families. The next day, he boarded a plane for Miami. After a week cooling his heels waiting for a US Army transport plane for Turkey, he found a berth. At the end of January, the C-54 took off with a group of young officers bound for India and one middle-aged civilian hitching a ride. After five days en route, via air hops to Puerto Rico, Brazil, Ghana, and Egypt, several days in Jerusalem, and a twenty-eight-hour train ride across the Taurus Mountains and half of Anatolia, Hirschmann at last arrived in Ankara on Valentine’s Day, 1944.
“An old world seems slipping away from me,” he wrote in his diary, “and I seem to be racing into a new.” The Turkish capital had been willed into existence, and it still took an act of imagination to see it as a real city. The wide streets and purpose-built government buildings seemed soulless and merely functional. Hirschmann was happy to have a social invitation shortly after he arrived, to attend a diplomatic luncheon at the residence of Ambassador Steinhardt. Guests milled around the spacious residence, but as they made their way to their next appointments, Hirschmann lingered behind for a chance to speak with Steinhardt privately.
Besides their Jewish heritage, the two men had little in common. Steinhardt had had the kind of career that Hirschmann might once have dreamed of: a life of diplomatic adventure at missions in Sweden, Peru, the Soviet Union, and now Turkey. Hirschmann was flattered by the ambassador’s eagerness to talk.
Hirschmann was to remain indefinitely in Ankara, Steinhardt informed him, and to have the status of special attaché to the US Embassy. His orders from Washington included an almost-unprecedented power. Unlike other diplomats, who were prevented by law from conversing with agents of enemy countries, Hirschmann would be expected to engage with enemy powers for the purpose of spiriting refugees out of harm’s way. Support was to be provided by the embassy staff, but Hirschmann was to have main responsibility for the “transportation, rescue, relief, and maintenance of refugees” under his care. Americans were a people with a conscience, Hirschmann recalled thinking on hearing his orders for the first time, but now they “had a government with a conscience, as well as policy.”
As he made his inquiries around Ankara, Hirschmann found the buck being passed from one office to the next, from an embassy to a Turkish government agency, and from government officials back to embassies. He began to feel like a wandering refugee himself. The British had agreed to allow a precise quota of immigrants to come to Palestine, but the number had been persistently under-filled for a simple bureaucratic reason: Being legally admitted to Mandate Palestine required papers—an exit permit from a Nazi-allied country, for example, plus a transit visa via a neutral state, plus an immigration certificate from British Mandate authorities. Even if transport could be arranged—in secret or at great risk, as in the Struma case—papers were still the one thing that only governments could supply.
In the middle of February, as the icy winter winds roared down Ankara’s avenues, it gradually dawned on Hirschmann that the person who would be key to his efforts was not in a governmental role at all. He was technically a private citizen living in Istanbul who had a penchant for making lists. Unlike Hirschmann, he could only afford rooms in the Pera Palace, which at this point had become somewhat desperate for customers. That fact gave him a telegraph code—the equivalent of an e-mail address today—that would become one of the most widely known of the entire war: “barlas perapalas beyoglu.”
Chaim Barlas was an old Istanbul hand, at least compared to the novice Hirschmann. He was easy to miss in a crowd: slight of stature, swallowed up in an ill-fitting overcoat, with hooded eyes that marked him as an inveterate insomniac. But he knew everyone who was anyone in the city and most people of rank in the country as a whole. His correspondence files included regular letters and notes from the American, French, and British ambassadors; the Swedish military attaché; the consuls of Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, France, Afghanistan, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy; and folders brimming with memoranda, telegrams, contracts, and reports from Turkish shipping magnates, business leaders, and political luminaries. He was probably the best-connected man in Istanbul, polite to a fault as a letter writer, solicitous in conversation, and obsessive about getting names, birth dates, and places of birth exactly right. It was a rare combination of gifts, and the lives of many people depended on how well he wielded them.
Barlas’s official title was Representative of the Immigration Department of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Both his title and his organization’s name gave little hint of the enormous role that both would soon play. By agreement of the League of Nations, the former Ottoman territory of Palestine had been placed under British administrative authority as part of the settlements governing the breakup of the sultan’s empire at the end of the First World War. Part of that mandate provided for the establishment of a Jewish Agency for Palestine to act as the official voice of the local Jewish community, or yishuv, and to liaise with the British authorities on any matters connected with the community’s affairs. Headed by David Ben-Gurion, the agency created its own self-defense unit, the Haganah, and oversaw the social and economic development of the Jewish community. As time went on, it became the body that facilitated migration by arranging entry permits for Jews seeking to move to Mandate Palestine. It was the organization that would eventually morph into the government of independent Isra
el.
Immigration lay at the root of the Zionist cause. It was a way of changing the demographic realities in Arab-majority Palestine and creating, literally one person at a time, a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. But with the advent of the Final Solution in Europe, migration also became a pathway to survival. The United States, Britain, and other European countries had begun to impose strict quotas on Jewish immigration after 1938, precisely at the time that anti-Jewish laws and attacks ramped up in central Europe. Like Turkey, these governments feared that Jewish refugees, pushed out of Germany and the Nazi-occupied regions of Europe, would seek to immigrate permanently, a fear stoked by widespread antisemitism in the receiving states. The Palestine option was thus a route to safety that more and more Jews were eager to take.
Sometime after arriving in August 1940, Barlas took up residence at the Pera Palace. The location was ideal. Not only were the Americans and British close by, but the hotel was also safely away from the Park and the Tokatlian, whose Axis leanings were well known. And since the Pera Palace had its own telegraph station, Barlas could almost treat the lobby as his personal office. Even after he managed to locate a larger, permanent office on the Grande Rue, runners were constantly going back and forth to send wires at the hotel.
Barlas and his associate Joseph Goldin were the only two individuals working openly as representatives of the Jewish Agency, but behind them lay a larger network of Jewish activists living in Istanbul as journalists and businessmen while secretly providing assistance to the rescue effort. Turkish authorities generally assumed that any foreigner was up to some kind of spy game, and they kept close tabs on the Barlas group. Surveillance could lead in bizarrely amusing directions. One of Barlas’s associates, Teddy Kollek, recalled being approached on the street by a passerby who overheard him speaking Hebrew. The man was a Jewish importer of dried fruits who had come to Istanbul to arrange a shipment of produce to Palestine. When his visa expired, he applied to the Turkish police to have it extended, but the police saw his real job as an unbelievable cover story. They insisted that he reveal which foreign agency he was working for, and when he protested that he wasn’t working for any of them, his visa was denied. Kollek managed to convince one of his contacts in British intelligence to claim the distraught businessman—falsely—as one of their own. That satisfied the police, and the fruit merchant was sent away with visa in hand.
While Jewish Agency representatives were in some ways dependent on the help of British officials, the same government also provided their greatest roadblock. At the beginning of their work, Barlas and his associates realized they were caught in a double bind. To begin with, the Jewish Agency had to work to convince the British authorities to allow Jews into Palestine. While the British had delegated to the agency the right to vet Jews for entry, full approval still depended on British consular authorities’ making the final call. Since 1939, however, the British had placed strict limits on Jewish entry. An earlier migration campaign organized by the yishuv had led to a massive influx of Jews in the 1930s while also sparking resistance from local Arabs. The British response was a famous white paper issued by the government of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. The policy paper committed Britain to supporting the transition toward a Palestinian state jointly governed by Jews and Arabs, but in order to maintain demographic balance, it capped new Jewish immigration at 75,000 people over the five years from 1940 to 1944.
The other problem for Barlas was gaining Turkish assent for Jews to transit via Istanbul, either by rail or by ship. Jews quickly found themselves trapped, as Hirschmann once quipped, between a white paper and the Black Sea. Since the beginning of the war, the Turks had been playing a delicate balancing game—not only with all the major powers that were courting them to join the war but also with their own past. Turkish immigration law had been crafted less as a way of forestalling a flood of refugees during war—although that was how Turkish officials explained their behavior—and more as a way of preventing the return of minorities who had fled the country in the 1920s and 1930s. The regulations were so strictly enforced that American sailors with Greek names were sometimes refused permission to step ashore in Istanbul, for fear that they were secretly ex-Istanbullus returning to reclaim the family estates.
Old habits were reinforced by wartime fear and the persistent belief that local minorities were a potential fifth column that could be put to use by enemies. Everyday antisemitism and racialized nationalism were becoming commonplace. Antisemitic cartoons, a mainstay of the Turkish press, portrayed local Jews as parasites eager to profit from the war-ravaged economy and immigrant Jews as unscrupulous wealth-mongers who would strip Turkey bare in their race to get out of Europe. In France and elsewhere, individual Turkish diplomats made attempts to prevent Jews with Turkish citizenship from being deported to Nazi camps and death facilities. But while these examples were later highlighted as evidence of Turkey’s collective heroism, only one unambiguous case of genuine rescue seems plausible: the effort by Selahattin Ülkümen, the Turkish consul on the island of Rhodes, to prevent the Nazis from deporting forty-six Jews, most of whom were Turkish citizens. Many more might have been saved had the Turkish government intervened more energetically on behalf of people trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe who also happened to be Turkish citizens.
The treatment of Jews in Turkey was part of a broader pattern of squeezing minorities, nationalizing the economy, and encouraging non-Muslims to leave. In November 1942, the government enacted a one-off levy on “wealth and extraordinary profits,” an intentionally vague wording. This new “wealth tax” was intended in part to raise funds in case Turkey were forced to enter the war and in part to crush war profiteers who had supposedly benefited from inflation and scarcity. Some 114,368 individuals and businesses were assessed by specially appointed commissions, with no right of appeal except directly to the parliament. The bulk of the tax burden fell on Istanbul, but none of the major Turkish-owned hotels, including the Pera Palace, seems to have been much affected. The reason is that the largest tax assessments were handed out to Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. “This law is also a law of revolution,” said Prime Minister Saracolu at the time. “We will in this way eliminate the foreigners who control our market and give the Turkish market to the Turks.”
Families and minority businesses found it impossible to meet the requirements. According to a secret report by the OSS, the tax assessments for Armenian property owners amounted to 232 percent of their property’s real value, 179 percent for Jews, and 156 percent for Greeks, while Muslims were assessed at just under 5 percent. Many of the most successful businesses in the city—including the Gesarian brothers’ gramophone company, which had recorded Seyyan, Udi Hrant, and other leading artists of the day—became targets. Faik Ökte, the Turkish official responsible for administering the tax in Istanbul, later wrote a tell-all memoir denouncing the affair and blaming the prime minister, Saracolu, for coming up with the idea. It was all a shameful episode, Ökte concluded, the “misbegotten offspring of German racialism and Ottoman fanaticism.”
Betty Carp, the American consular administrator and OSS agent, recalled the effects of the tax on friends and acquaintances, few of whom were rich or propertied. One Greek friend, Irini, witnessed the police arrive at her house and cart away everything except a bed and mattress, a few items of china and dishware, and, in exchange for a bribe, her clothes. The men of the household were herded into an open garbage truck and, in a raging snowstorm, taken away. In the end, more than a thousand Istanbullus—including prominent industrialists and commercial leaders—were assembled at Sirkeci station and deported from the city to pay off their debts through forced labor, many of them at a special camp in Akale, in eastern Anatolia. Their personal belongings were sold in public auctions at the Grand Bazaar.
The wealth tax was repealed in March 1944 and prisoners were allowed to return home, but their properties were never restored. In fact, the effort to pay the exorbitant tax rates had produced another massive wea
lth transfer among Istanbul’s ethnic communities on the model of the 1920s. Greeks, Armenians, and Jews owned nearly eighty percent of the property sold off during the era when the wealth tax was in force. Ninety-eight percent of the buyers were Turkish Muslims or the Turkish government. “According to the best-informed sober judgments,” a diplomat reported at the time, “this represents the first step of a bloodless massacre.”
The bureaucratic obstacles that faced Jews were thus part of the Turkish state’s deeper nervousness about minorities and movement in general. Chaim Barlas was juggling a host of diplomatic conundrums. As soon as one door opened, another closed. The Turkish government agreed to facilitate the dispatch of food packages of raisins, nuts, figs, and margarine to Jewish communities via the Red Cross, a kind of stopgap while Jews were awaiting permission to emigrate. But because of rationing, the Turkish authorities mandated that packages containing meat could only include pork—a product in low demand among Muslims but, of course, prohibited for observant Jews as well. Similar problems affected transportation. Turkey had eased its restrictions on group transit of refugees in February 1943, but two months later Bulgaria closed its frontiers to people traveling in large groups—effectively stopping any substantial flow across the crucial land border between the two countries. Barlas next approached the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ankara, requesting that Turkey reverse its policy and instead allow individuals to transit the country rather than requiring that they be part of a preestablished group.
It was a bold request. This was precisely the problem that Turkish authorities had feared: an influx of individual families—difficult to monitor and impossible to control once they had entered the country—making their way to Turkey and getting effectively stuck there, with the government having no way of knowing whether they had in fact exited and continued toward Palestine. The response was to accede to Barlas’s request but to place a nearly impossible restriction on movement: Only nine Jewish families were permitted to transit the country per week. Moreover, the Turkish government required that everyone admitted as part of this quota exit the country before another quota could be admitted. At that rate, Ira Hirschmann later reckoned, it would have taken two hundred years to ease the bottleneck of displaced people seeking to flee Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.