The Milka, a small, ramshackle ship docked in the port of Istanbul. Aboard are 240 refugees. Without permission to disembark, they wait as officials weigh their options and debate whether they should be granted passage through Turkey. Thanks to the combined efforts of the British and American governments, the refugees are allowed to leave the ship a day later, and escorted by police to the Haydarpasa station where they start their train journey to the safety of - Syria.
In today’s global context, Syria as a transit station to safety sounds surreal at best. But in March 1942, when this incident took place, Syria was indeed a safe haven for the Jewish refugees from Romania who had risked their lives to reach Palestine. We tend to forget that the direction of refugees across the Mediterranean some seven decades ago went in the opposite direction of the fragile rafts and dinghies carrying thousands of desperate people from Syria today. Recalling this history is valuable, and not just for its own sake: it indicates strongly that the current lack of leadership in the countries best placed to solve the latest humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean reflects a failure to draw proper lessons from the earlier one.
The refugees on the Milka were lucky to complete their harrowing journey alive. The same is true of other vessels such as the Maritza and the incongruously named Bella Citta, chartered in 1944 at the height of the Holocaust by the Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee in Istanbul. Not so lucky had been the 769 aboard the Struma that arrived in Istanbul in December 1941. The Struma waited in vain for weeks in the Bosphorus, with a banner that read “Save Us” attached to its mast, while Turkish officials upheld their policy banning transit to any “foreign Jews” without “Palestine Certificates” issued by Britain. Despite pledges from local Jewish organisations to cover the refugees’ expenses while ashore, the refugees (many of them children) were forced to stay aboard a ship that did not even have a working engine.
