Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  The plan went into effect that September, but in the following two months only 215 people—some from Romania, others from Poland who had escaped to Hungary—made their way to Istanbul. By December 1943, Barlas had already compiled a list of more than a thousand other names. Small numbers of refugees had also arrived on the Turkish coast from Greece, and arrangements were being made for acquiring immigration papers for Palestine.

  In December, Barlas wrote to Ambassador Steinhardt that only 1,126 people had made their way out of Nazi-dominated Europe via Turkey. In fact, nearly twice as many Turkish Jews—2,138 people—had left for Palestine as the number of rescued Jews escaping the Nazis. If that balance continued, the Jewish Agency would be emptying Istanbul of its Jews far faster than it was able to aid Jews trapped inside Axis Europe.

  Hirschmann’s arrival in February 1944 gave a new impetus to the effort. Hirschmann set about pulling together the many organizations that were working, sometimes at cross purposes, to facilitate rescue. He now had the full authority of the American government, and the personal endorsement of President Roosevelt and key members of the cabinet. What he also brought to the table was money.

  Workmen clear the tracks of ice and snow for a trolley car.

  From his years in New York and New Jersey, Hirschmann had a long association with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; in his new role at the War Refugee Board, he helped transform the board into a conduit for Joint funds. The Joint had been active since the First World War in channeling assistance from the American Jewish community to needy people abroad. It now became the principal financier for the Turkish relief effort, as well as for many other programs around the world. The War Refugee Board persuaded the US Treasury Department to waive restrictions on trading with enemy countries to allow the Joint to carry on financial transactions in Axis-dominated zones: to exchange currency, distribute resources, and where necessary buy tickets and arrange for travel for individual Jewish families. Other funds—nearly $700,000—indirectly financed operations in Turkey and transport to Palestine, in addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on transit from Hungary and other countries and distribution of food via Turkey. Further Joint-funded programs delivered food to concentration-camp internees and Jewish refugees hiding in the Russian Far East; sent burlap-wrapped food packages to Jews languishing in Romanian ghettos (with the burlap to be used for clothing and blankets); supplied physicians and public health workers to Balkan refugee centers; and provided direct financing for the ongoing work of Jewish schools, hospitals, and other community organizations in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and other Turkish cities.

  In relatively short order, Hirschmann, Barlas, Steinhardt, and other major players managed to work out an informal arrangement involving the US government, the Jewish Agency, and private American philanthropists, all focused on getting as many Jews as possible into and out of Turkey. Hirschmann was also in regular contact with Lanning Macfarland and the OSS station in Istanbul, using the resources of the US intelligence mission while passing along any information he had been able to glean from his own sources about conditions in Axis Europe.

  Since the day the war began, Barlas told Hirschmann, he had devoted himself to the task of rescue. Now, at last, he felt “confident that nothing can further disturb our cooperation which has only one aim in view: the rescue and bringing into safety of our brethren.” But as the winter of 1943–1944 faded into a bright Istanbul spring, a singular problem remained: If the Nazis were increasingly killing Jews in groups—and now on a scale that even skeptical Allied observers could no longer deny—the only way to save them was in groups as well.

  As long as a private citizen had the requisite papers, there was no problem in theory with being able to enter a neutral state such as Turkey. But theory and reality were often far apart. In the summer of 1938, the Turkish government had officially barred the door to Jews coming from countries with antisemitic laws. Ankara may have believed that these people, even though the neediest, were also the most likely to stay in Turkey. Once Germans began transporting large groups of Jews to established killing sites in Poland, a possible route of rescue was to transport Jewish refugees to Turkey en masse in specially outfitted ships or trains. But the devil lay in the bureaucratic details.

  The process began with Barlas. As representative of the Jewish Agency, he was empowered by the British Mandate authorities in Palestine to draw up lists of candidates for immigration, based on information provided by his own agents or directly from people with family members still in Axis-dominated lands. The information required was substantial, and war made it hard to obtain. It could take two to three weeks to gather a complete list of names, dates of birth, places of birth, and current addresses for a group of people large enough to fill a ship or train.

  Once the list was assembled, Barlas would forward the information to Palestine. The authorities there would go down the list name by name, either endorsing or denying a person’s candidacy. The finalized list would then be forwarded to London for approval. That entire process took another two to three weeks. After that, the British passport control officer in Istanbul would be instructed to draw up his own prioritized list—again over a period of two to three weeks. From there, the officer would communicate directly with the British Embassy in Ankara with details of which families were approved for immigration.

  The final list would then go from the embassy to the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where it would eventually—over three or four days—find its way to the Turkish consular affairs department. That department would in turn transmit the list of approved candidates to Turkish consuls in Bucharest, Budapest, Sofia, or other cities where officers were empowered to release transit visas. In the end, a Jewish family could expect to wait at least two and a half months, if everything went smoothly, to receive permission both to transit Turkey and to enter Palestine. The wait was often considerably longer. After that, it was Hirschmann’s job to sort out the even more complex issue of arranging ships and trains to get people with the appropriate paperwork out of harm’s way.

  For the applicants, the entire process was excruciating. You wrote a letter or filled out a form, waited, then perhaps wrote it all again. Abraham Slowes had immigrated to Palestine from Poland in 1930 and made a successful career in Haifa as a power-station engineer. His parents, Moshe and Malka, were respected dental surgeons who were still living in the family home in Vilna. The city—eventually renamed Vilnius—had undergone immense changes: It was part of the Russian Empire when the Slowes family first moved there; it had been made part of Poland after the First World War; it was captured by the Red Army in September 1939 and incorporated into Soviet Lithuania. As Hitler and Stalin jointly moved through eastern Europe, Vilnius was at the center of the vise. In early March 1941, Abraham received a simple telegram from his father. “Send certificates,” Moshe Slowes wrote, requesting that his son get travel documents for himself, his wife, and another family, the Fiksmans.

  Abraham wrote back quickly to say that he was doing everything possible to arrange the certificates of immigration to Palestine via Turkey. In fact, he had already made an application on his parents’ behalf, but that request had been denied in February 1940. In the months that followed, his family’s predicament worsened. Germany and the Soviet Union were allies when Moshe sent the first telegram to his son. Three and a half months later, the two countries were enemies. The German invasion of the Soviet Union placed the family squarely on the front line of a new war. Abraham now ramped up his efforts, sending a steady stream of letters and telegrams to virtually anyone he thought might be able to help. Finally, in March 1942, more than two years after his first request, the Department of Migration in Jerusalem wrote with superb news. The British passport control officer in Istanbul had been instructed to release immigration certificates for Moshe and Malka. They would simply need to apply in person in Istanbul.

  The first problem for Abraham was getting this news to his parents; the second wa
s getting his parents to Istanbul. He must have known at the time that things were desperate in Vilnius. The Wehrmacht had captured the city from the Soviets in the first days of the invasion in the summer of 1941, and Jews in the city had been rounded up and confined to a ghetto. But the uncertainty of war and the bureaucracy of the process created new obstacles. When Abraham asked the Red Cross to contact whoever was living at his parents’ last known address, the receiving officer wrote back instructing him to fill out the required form. Abraham quickly returned the form—listing eight family members who were believed to reside in the occupied zone—and included a postage stamp to pay for the cost of forwarding. He wrote to the Swedish consul in Jerusalem and even to the Vatican. “I venture to hope that assistance will not be denied to aged people who have during all their lives helped the sick as physicians, in these hard times,” he told the Swedish official, enclosing his parents’ photographs as identification. The consul in Jerusalem wrote back, asking him to address his request to the Swedish consul in Haifa. Similar replies came from his other correspondents. Regrettably, they all said, contact with the German-occupied territories had ceased.

  Finally, Abraham reckoned that going closer to the source might yield better results, and in early August 1944 he wrote to the British Embassy in Moscow requesting that news of the immigration certificates be forwarded to his parents’ address. Only weeks earlier, the Red Army had retaken Vilnius, so Abraham hoped that the lines of communication would once again be open. In November, an attaché at the embassy wrote back with the first clear news. “With reference to your letter of 8th August enquiring about the whereabouts of your father,” the letter said, “I regret to inform you that a letter sent to the address you gave has been returned marked ‘Addressee has died.’”

  A follow-up note from the embassy the next spring contained more information: The family apparently had been killed at the beginning of the German occupation four years earlier. The people to whom the Palestine authorities had issued immigration certificates, to whom the passport control officer in Istanbul was prepared to issue a validation, and to whom Turkish officials were asked to issue a transit visa were already dead by the time the first stamp had been placed on any of their documents. For individual families, as well as for Barlas and Hirschmann—all of them busy creating long lists of people waiting to be saved—filling up a passenger manifest was sometimes like assembling a ship of ghosts.

  AT THE GATE OF FELICITY

  A safe haven, August 1944: Jewish refugees, probably survivors of the doomed Mefkûre convoy, arrive at Sirkeci station from the Black Sea coast.

  THERE WAS A MUNDANE everydayness to acts of heroism. The telegraph operator tapping away Barlas’s messages from the Pera Palace was just one piece of an intricate bureaucratic puzzle. Filling out forms, collating official papers, negotiating with a transport company, arranging for the repair of a ship’s engine, and doggedly pursuing Turkish officials more interested in having a problem go away than in resolving it were all critical elements of rescue and escape.

  Survival required planning, and before planning came paper, lots of it. War, occupation, and atrocity blocked the Slowes family’s paper chase. For many Jews, however, the core problem was not just getting the permits to enter Turkey and then Palestine. Rather, outside the areas of German occupation, there was still a set of officious and maddening technicalities involved in convincing a government—even a reasonably cooperative one—to let people leave. “It would appear from the telegrams received by Hirschmann and myself that the War Refugee Board is under the impression that the principal difficulty with which we have been confronted has been a reluctance on the part of the Turk Government to cooperate,” Ambassador Steinhardt wrote to Washington in March 1944. “Thus far this has not been the case. Up to the present time our principal difficulty has been the refusal of the Axis authorities in the Balkans to permit Jewish refugees to depart.”

  Romania was the intended point of exodus for growing numbers of Jews, just as it had been for the ill-fated Struma passengers. Some were native to Romania and had spent the war living openly in the capital, Bucharest, or in other cities. Others had been interned or deported to Transnistria, the stretch of occupied Soviet Ukrainian territory where the Romanian government herded hundreds of thousands of Jews into camps and ghettos. Still others had fled to Romania from farther north, from Poland or other areas under direct German rule.

  Even though Romania was a Nazi ally, it was still possible to live relatively safely inside the country’s prewar borders, despite the growing pressure that Berlin was exerting on Bucharest to round up local Jews and send them to German-run camps. What united the many Jewish communities thrown together by war inside Romania was the government’s requirement that a Romanian official formally approve any request to emigrate by issuing an exit visa and, when necessary, a passport. This was a common practice in many countries at the time; it was simply a way of keeping tabs on citizens’ comings and goings across international frontiers. But in the context of persecution and flight, it created enormous obstacles for Jews in particular.

  Even after the Turks had ceased requiring transit visas for Jews holding valid immigration certificates, the Romanian government insisted that migrants present special exit documents before departure. Since many Jews had been stripped of their citizenship by the Romanian government in 1938, as part of a string of antisemitic laws, getting out of the country required that Romanian Jews apply to have their citizenship reinstated or verified. Bureaucrats dutifully kept all these records, much like an immigration officer today would be able to provide a full accounting of which airport one departed at precisely what hour.

  At a minimum, getting out of Romania required that a Jewish applicant present the following documents:

  a current photograph

  a statement of the applicant’s birth date, place of birth, height, hair color, eye color, nose shape, forehead shape, mouth shape, chin shape, and facial hair

  a certificate confirming that the applicant had no pending legal cases against him

  a notarized affidavit from two witnesses confirming the identity of the applicant, his parents, birth date, residence, and identity as a Jew

  a notarized affidavit confirming the identity of the two witnesses above

  a certificate from the Ministry of Finance stating that the applicant was not in arrears on taxes in the past five years

  a special form, signed by the applicant, expressly requesting permission to leave the country

  It was the last requirement on this list that was the most insulting. The form required that the applicant sign a simple statement swearing to the following:

  By these presents, I, the undersigned, __________, living at __________, declare that, in obtaining a passport and leaving the country, I understand that I will be permanently settling abroad with my entire family.

  The bureaucratic language masked the perverse reality: The Jewish applicant was in effect restored to a version of Romanian citizenship only on the condition that he and his immediate relatives never set foot in the country again.

  In addition to restrictions on the Romanian side, the Turkish government continually threw up roadblocks as well. Officials in Ankara were wary about using Turkish-flagged vessels in any rescue efforts, even if the full costs were borne by private organizations or foreign governments, for fear that this would tip Turkey too far to the Allied cause and bring down Hitler’s wrath. The Struma affair had made the government even more cautious. In the event of another catastrophe at sea, Ankara believed, the blame would land squarely on Turkish heads, repaying any assistance in the rescue effort with international condemnation. Even as seemingly simple a matter as allowing relief organizations to trade Turkish lira at the same preferential exchange rate allowed for diplomatic missions was treated carefully. Delaying tactics and a retreat into the arcana of diplomatic consultations and official inquiries were the normal responses to Ambassador Steinhardt’s requests for assistance.
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  By the middle of 1944, however, things were working better than ever before. So many foreign organizations were seeking to aid Jews via Istanbul—some Jewish, some American, some international, such as the Red Cross—that the entire process threatened to collapse under its own weight. Given the fact that it was in a refugee’s interest to be in contact with as many aid groups as possible—hedging bets in the hope that at least one of them would be able to help—multiple agencies sometimes devoted incredible energy to a particular case only to find that a matter had already been resolved by another.

  As Ambassador Steinhardt wrote to Barlas in June, many of these groups sent their representatives to Turkey for only a few days and had little understanding of the complexities of the local environment. There were even instances when multiple rescue groups were bidding on the same ship, driving up the price that an owner could ask. And since some of them were expressly involved in illegal migration—flouting Turkish immigration law in the hope of getting more people out of central Europe—their activities threatened to bring a halt to the hard work of the Jewish Agency and others in securing legal permission to transit to Palestine. Earlier that spring, Foreign Minister Numan Menemenciolu had told Steinhardt explicitly that the Turkish authorities were well aware of the illegal activity being carried out in Istanbul and that the government could easily activate plans for stopping it. For that reason, Barlas had always been wary of mixing aliyah bet with his own above-board campaign to get official transit visas and Palestine certificates for as many Jews as possible.