Ira Hirschmann has been in Turkey for less than two weeks, and this was his first major success. All the issues in Turkey—the Turkish government not granting transit visas, the lack of ships to transport refugees, and the refusal of Bulgaria—meant that very few refugees were making it to Turkey and Hirschmann’s job was to open up this traffic.
In this cable to the WRB, Laurence Steinhardt (the very supportive US ambassador in Turkey) reports that they have “broken the bottleneck” for land transportation of Bulgarian children. Hirschmann anticipated the promise of 150 people (140 children and 10 adults) would start coming through Turkey soon. The deal was 150 every ten days. (It doesn’t work out as smoothly as Hirschmann wants.)
