NP-The one name missing from the torpedo

[grladams at mail.teleport.com]

THE ONE NAME MISSING FROM THE TORPEDO
[SUNRISE Edition]
The Oregonian
Portland, Or.
Aug 20, 2000

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Authors:                  Steve Duin - of The Oregonian staff

Pagination:               B01

Personal Names:           Stoliar, David


Abstract:

   Struma. When David Stoliar mouths the word, Struma is much heavier than
a 150-foot wooden yacht. It is a black hole, a 58-year-old coffin, a rowboat
on the river Styx.

Full Text:

   He was sleeping when the torpedo hit.

   "Imagine," he began, "that you have a rowboat on a lake. And you shoot
at it with a cannon. You know what would happen to that rowboat. That's
what happened to Struma."

   Struma. When David Stoliar mouths the word, Struma is much heavier than
a 150-foot wooden yacht. It is a black hole, a 58-year-old coffin, a rowboat
on the river Styx.

   Imagine. He was sleeping. That early in the morning, most of the 779
Jewish refugees were. Adrift in the Black Sea, the Holocaust behind them
and Palestine just out of reach, they were jammed in their bunks below
the waterline, hungry and cold, wrapped in a three- month stench, dreaming
of an end to their misery.

   Then the torpedo hit.

   A million jagged pieces of flesh and wood ripped into the clouds and
rained down upon the freezing water. When Stoliar woke, he was falling.

   "When I surfaced," he said, "there was no ship."

   You know, of course, that he survives. You know this because he is sitting
in a chair on the back deck of his home on the slope of Awbrey Butte in
Bend. His wife, Marda, is cooking panettone, an Italian dessert bread,
just inside the kitchen window. The two beagles are rooting through the
terraced Japanese jungle. The heat of the day camps a safe distance away.

   Yes, David Stoliar survived the rowboat's last voyage.

   He alone.

   "In a war, every bullet has a name," he said. "If your name is on that
bullet, you're going to get it. If it isn't, the bullet won't touch you.

   "My name was not on that torpedo."

   There was only room, apparently, for 778.

   Struma. Like the wreckage, Stoliar's story has been long buried at sea.
Only because a team of divers, led by the British grandson of one of the
refugees, wants to explore the remains this summer is Stoliar, 77, fielding
questions about that bleak morning.

<snip> there was more, but I don't think it would fit. what an interesting
article.