David Stoliar

David Stoliar (31 October 1922 – 1 May 2014) was the sole survivor of the Struma disaster, in which the torpedoed and sank the Holocaust refugee ship in the Black Sea in the early morning of 24 February 1942. All of the other estimated 781 Jewish refugees and 10 crew were killed.

Early life Stoliar was born in Chișinău, Bessarabia, which at the time was part of Romania, to a Jewish family, the son of Yaakov and Bella Stoliar. The Stoliars lived in Chișinău until 1927, when David and his parents moved to France to join one of Yaakov's brothers, a hotelier in Vence in Provence. At the UK's behest, Turkey held Struma at anchor in Istanbul without allowing her passengers to disembark. Negotiations between Turkey and Britain over the fate of the refugees seemed to reach an impasse, and on 23 February 1942 Turkish authorities boarded Struma, towed her back into the Black Sea with her engine still inoperable and cast her adrift.

The next morning, Soviet submarine Shch-213 commanded by D.M. Denezhko sank Struma with a single torpedo. Stoliar survived the blast and clung to a floating piece of deck, and later was joined by the ship's First Officer, who was Bulgarian. He and Marda settled in Bend, Oregon.