Emphasizing that there can be no justification for the fact that the 769 Rumanian refugees on board the Struma were sent back to the Black Sea to drown when the freighter sank, the New York Times in an editorial today writes:
“The Struma was a problem. There is some evidence that in earlier incidents, at least, the Nazis have taken a diabolical pleasure in presenting the British with such problems. It may be difficult to say precisely what the answer should have been. It is not difficult to say what it should not have been. No matter what policies fell by the wayside, not one of those lives should have been endangered. These refugees were soldiers, as we all are now, in the war against evil. They were comrades of the men on Bataan, of the men holding the line in Burma, of the men facing the Japanese in China. They were of the flesh and blood of the free peoples.
“Nothing that can have been gained by the failure to save them is of any value compared with the moral loss that their disaster brought about. Let us leave it to our enemies to be careless of human life–that is their philosophy. Our cause cannot survive without the simple, old-fashioned virtues of mutual helpfulness and compassion.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
