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In December 1941 the Struma, an unseaworthy cattle boat carrying about 780 Jewish refugees from Romania, broke down and was held off Istanbul for roughly ten weeks. Britain refused entry certificates for Palestine and Turkey refused to let the passengers land. On 23 February 1942 Turkish authorities towed the engineless ship into the Black Sea, where a Soviet submarine torpedoed it the next day, leaving one known survivor, David Stoliar.
No single actor sank the Struma by intention. Britain guarded its immigration quotas, Turkey guarded its neutrality and borders, and a Soviet submarine fired on an unidentified ship. When each state follows its own procedure and passes the problem on, the deaths lose an author. That is why such events drop out of national memory instead of being atoned for.
Maya, a university clerk assigned to escort the elderly German professor Maximilian Wagner around Istanbul, learns through his private grief for his wife Nadia a chapter of her own country's past she was never taught. His story then leads her to silences in her own family history. A personal testimony from an outsider can get past official forgetting that textbooks and archives never challenge.