This document is about the Tari, which I think I’ve talked about before. It was a big ship which Hirschmann chartered to go to Romania and bring refugees gathered in Constanța to Istanbul. There, the refugees would take a train to Palestine. With the help of Ambassador Steinhardt, Hirschmann had spent most of his time in Turkey working on this project–getting the Romanians to allow them to depart, the Turkish government to agree to allow the refugees to land, and the British to allow them to go to Palestine. It was a pretty big bureaucratic undertaking, and the Tari, the largest proposed refugee ship, would be a bit of a culmination of successes for him.
The one sticking point on the sailing of the Tari is that it had to have safe conducts. The belligerent nations, including Germany, had to agree that the ship could sail. Even though Hirschmann was technically allowed to negotiate with the enemy–and did with the Bulgarians and Romanians–he didn’t with the German ambassador, von Papen. He let Gilbert Simond of the Red Cross meet with von Papen about the Tari, and von Papen promised to request safe conduct from Germany–the outcome, as Simond said, was uncertain.
