The refugee steamer Struma which sank in the Black Sea on February 24, carrying 768 Jewish men and women fleeing from Rumania and Bulgaria to their death, was torpedoed by an unidentified submarine, according to an eye-witness account brought here today by Mrs. Nadia Solomowitz, who was taken off the ship shortly before it left Istanbul because she was expecting a child.
Mrs. Solomowitz, whose husband perished on the Struma and whose new-born child died in an Isvanbul hospital, related that in the concentration camp to which she was sent after leaving the hospital she met twenty-one year old David Stolira, the only survivor of the catastrophe. Stolira, who is an expert swimmer, told Mrs. Solomowitz that the Struma was torpedoed by an unidentified underseas craft and that he and three other refugees clung to a piece of floating wreckage. After several hours, however, his companions wore frozen to death but he succeeded in keeping alive by swimming around.
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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.