By Rachel Avraham
The United Nations determined that International Holocaust Remembrance Day is marked annually on January 27, the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. In the eyes of Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, former Chief Rabbi of Israel and Chairman of Yad Vashem, “the date set by the UN as International Holocaust Remembrance Day should be used to commemorate the righteous of other nations, who worked to save Jews in spite of the terrible danger involved.”
Rabbi Lau compares the actions of these people to those of Pharoah’s daughter in ancient times, when she (Exodus 2:6) opened a basket in the Nile River and “saw the child, and behold the baby cried. She had compassion on him and said, ‘This is one of the Hebrew’s children.’” Even though Pharaoh had ordered all the male Hebrew infants to be killed, she defied the murderous decree by finding a Hebrew wet nurse and raising the child as her own.
Rabbi Lau also compares the plight of the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to that of Job, as “they took our children, forcefully and cruelly, stole everything we owned, trampled our human honor and almost wiped out the image of God in man.” But, in the eyes of Rabbi Lau, these righteous Gentiles are akin to the three friends of Job–Bildad, Zophar and Eliphaz–who stood by him in his hour of need (Job 2:12-13): “They lifted up their eyes afar off and did not recognize him and they lifted up their voice and wept. Each tore his robe and they sprinkled dust upon their heads towards Heaven. They sat down with him upon the ground for seven days and seven nights and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.”
During our lifetime, in an age where there is an ongoing conflict with the Palestinians and the ascent of radical Islam in our region following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, it is pivotal to recall that some of the non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews were Muslims, among them Turks, Albanians, Arabs and even Iranians.
In fact, the US Holocaust Museum noted: “In 1942, as the Nazis carried out the systematic slaughter of Jewish people in Europe, Iran accepted hundreds of Jewish children from Poland, who came to be known as the Children of Tehran. Also, Abdol Hossein Sardari, an Iranian diplomat in Paris, helped many Iranian and non-Iranian Jews by issuing them Iranian passports, which did not state the passport holder’s religion.”
While Sardari had the authority to do this for Iranian Jews living in Paris, he overstepped his authority by also agreeing to do this for the friends, colleagues and relatives of Iranian Jews living in Paris: “In fact, he not only supplied them with passports but also affidavits to protect them from persecution. Sardari argued with the Nazis that Iranian Jews were not really Jewish and did not belong to an enemy race.” He told the Nazis that Iranian Jews were actually Djougoutes, a minority group that were not of Jewish descent: “He said that in Iran, Djougoutes have the same civil, political, and religious rights as Muslims. In one case, Sardari witnessed how an affidavit saved the life of a Jewish Russian doctor.”
“Throughout the war, Sardari did his best to save Jewish lives and even properties by any means possible, without any personal gain,” the US Holocaust Museum stressed. “For example, when the Germans attacked France, Sardari told a man named Haim Sassoon to hide his antiquities in the embassy or in the basement of his own home during the war. After the war, when the Germans left, Sardari called Mr. Sassoon and said that he could come to the embassy and collect his belongings.”
Turkey also saved many Jewish lives during the Holocaust. According to Dr. Izzet Behar of the University of Pittsburgh, “In 1933, the young Turkish Republic was in search of civil servants capable of modernizing its old-fashioned and seemingly anti-reformist educational system.” Around the same time, Germany dismissed all of its professors, who were either Jewish or had Jewish ancestry. This led to Turkey’s President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk inviting 200 German Jewish professors and their families to settle in Turkey. They went on to lay the foundations for Turkey’s modern university system. These German Jewish refugees who arrived in Turkey established the country’s first astrological observatory, created the country’s first labor union, and launched the Ankara State Conservatory, among other contributions.
However, they were not the only Jews to be saved by Turkey. Necdent Kent, the Turkish Consul General in Marseilles, recalled: “When the Nazis occupied northern France, Jews living there fled to the southern part of the country, to Vichy France, which had not been occupied at that time. But when it was occupied too, everything went further bad. The first thing the Nazis did was to fill trains with Jews – as many as they could find – and send them to Germany.”
According to him, ”Some Jews who were also Turkish citizens asked us to help them. We provided them with certificates of proof of Turkish citizenship and protected their businesses. We put signboards on facades of their workplaces that Turkey protected those places. As time went by, the Gestapo officers changed, and Nazi attacks increased. We used to go to the Gestapo headquarters three or four times a day to save Turkish Jews that were detained or arrested.”
Kent recalled that one night, his translator came to him in panic mode: “He told me the Germans were rounding up 80 Jews, also Turkish citizens, and putting them in train cars for animals and sending them to Germany. He was almost crying. We immediately went to the train station. The scene at the station was unbelievable. There were humans crying and groaning in the animal cars. Each car read that it could haul 20 large cattle and half a ton of hay. And in each of them were crammed 80 people.”
I pushed a German officer trying to block me and got on the train,” he added. “The train stopped when we arrived in Arles or Nimes. German officers got on the train. They came over to me and told me that there was a mistake and those who caused it would be punished. I told them that 80 Turkish citizens were arrested and stuffed into animal cars simply because of their religion and I would not leave my citizens alone. All women, men and children in the train were shocked and watched the game being played over their lives. The Germans then let them all free as a result of my resolve.”
Kent continues, ”Every day, Germans used to find new ways to arrest Jews. They even used to stop a Jewish man on the street, surround him, and force him to lower his pants to see if he was circumcised or not. But Nazis mistakenly arrested many Muslim men too, for they were circumcised as well. I used to go to the Gestapo headquarters and tell the Nazis that Muslims get circumcised too. When they did not understand what I meant, I told them that a medical doctor could examine me. In this way, I saved many innocent people.”
Marseilles was not the only place where Turkey worked to save Jewish lives. In Rhodes, Selahattin Ulkumen, the Turkish Consul General on the Greek island, managed to prevent the deportation of 50 Greek Jews to Auschwitz, claiming that they were Turkish citizens. In Paris, Turkey’s Deputy Counsel General Nemal Kamal Yoga helped many local Jews to acquire Turkish citizenship to save them from deportation. In his memoirs, he wrote: “Throughout its history, Turkey has never set the scene for antisemitism, which was seen at different levels in many countries. The Turkish state has never discriminated against its Jewish citizens. One of the tasks of our consulate general is to protect Turks, Turkish citizens of Jewish descent and citizens of other faiths.” Behiç Erkin, Turkey’s Ambassador in Paris, used to give local Jews documents saying that their persons and property belonged to the Republic of Turkey. Erkin then reportedly saved about 20,000 Jews by sending them on trains headed for Turkey.
Yad Vashem also recalled the brave stance of Albania, another Muslim nation, during the Holocaust: “Following the German occupation in 1943, the Albanian population in an extraordinary act refused to comply with the occupier’s orders to turn over lists of Jews residing within the country’s borders. Moreover, the various governmental agencies provided many Jewish families with fake documentation that allowed them to intermingle amongst the rest of the population. The Albanians not only protected their Jewish citizens, but also provided sanctuary to Jewish refugees who had arrived in Albania when it was still under Italian rule and now found themselves faced with the danger of deportation to concentration camps.”
According to Yad Vashem, “Albania, the only European country with a Muslim majority, succeeded where other European nations failed. Almost all Jews living within Albanian borders during the German occupation, those of Albanian origin and refugees alike, were saved, except members of a single family. Impressively, there were more Jews in Albania at the end of the war than beforehand.”
Robert Satloff, a prominent Middle East scholar, published a book titled Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach Into Arab Lands, which documents how Arabs also saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. According to him, there are a number of lost stories of Arabs who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, both in Europe and North Africa.
“Salim Halili, a world-renowned singer, escaped certain deportation and death thanks to the generosity and ingenuity of Si Kaddour Benghabrit,” he noted. “When Vichy started its pursuit of Jews, Halili turned to the Great Mosque of Paris for help. Benghabrit, the mosque’s imam at the time, did not fail him. To protect Halili from the grip of Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws, Benghabrit evidently provided him with a certificate of Muslim identity. But because Halili was such a public figure, Benghabrit had to go one step further. To lend credibility to Halili’s claims of Muslim roots, Benghabrit arranged to have the name of Halili’s grandfather engraved on an abandoned tomb in the Muslim cemetery in Bobigny. This unconventional ploy provided incontrovertible proof of Halili’s Muslim origins and enabled him to survive the war in safety.”
According to Satloff, in Tunisia, the Nazis used to seize Jewish homes so that their troops would have a place to stay, and while there they sexually exploited local Jewish women. In the town of Mahdia, an Arab named Khaled Abdelwahhab, the son of a wealthy landlord, warned the mother of a girl named Anny that she was at great risk of being abducted and raped by the local Nazi soldiers: “Khaled told them to hurry, and he would take them to safety. Everyone would come, the extended Bourkis family as well as the neighbors who shared the lodgings with them. Khaled eventually managed to get everyone settled on his family’s farm in the small village of Tlelsa. By dawn, the factory was empty.” They stayed on his farm until the British took over the town.
There were a number of Arabs in North Africa who spoke out against how the Nazis mistreated the Jews. Algerian nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas proclaimed: “Your racism runs in all directions. Today against the Jews and always against the Arabs.” Messali Hadj, the jailed leader of the Parti Populaire Algerien, said when the Vichy Regime revoked the French citizenship of Algerian Jews: “This cannot be considered as progress for the Algerian people—lowering the rights of Jews did not increase the rights of Muslims.”
During the Vichy era, Shaykh Taieb el-Okri, a reformist Algerian religious leader, issued a formal prohibition on Muslims attacking Jews. As a result, not a single Arab stepped forward in Algeria to answer Vichy’s offer to be a conservator of Jewish property. Jose Aboulker, a local Jewish resistance fighter, praised the local Algerians: “The Arabs do not participate in the fight against Vichy. It is not their war. But as regards the Jews, they are perfect. The Vichy functionaries and the German agents try to push them into demonstrations and pogroms. In vain. When Jewish goods were put up for public auction, an instruction went around the mosques: ‘Our brothers are suffering misfortune. Do not take their goods.’ Not one Arab became an administrator of Jewish property either. Do you know other examples of such an admirable, collective dignity?”
Of course, the most famous Arab antagonist of the Nazis was Morocco’s King Muhammed the V. At the annual Throne Day Ceremony at the royal palace, he welcomed Jews despite Vichy’s presence and said: “I must inform you that just as in the past the Israelites will remain under my protection. I refuse to make any distinction between my subjects.” This proclamation made the King a beloved hero to Moroccan Jews, and he stood as a thorn in Vichy’s side, always trying to place obstacles to their implementation of anti-Jewish policies in Morocco.
Likewise, Tunisia’s wartime ruler Ahmed Pasha Bey and especially his cousin Moncef Bey “regularly warned Jewish leaders of German plans, helped Jews avoid arrest orders, intervened to prevent deportations and even hid individual Jews so they could evade a German dragnet. Acting in the name of the bey, cabinet ministers gave special dispensations to some Jewish men so they could avoid forced labor and tried to intervene with German authorities on behalf of Jewish hostages. Even members of the royal court hid Jews who had escaped from German labor camps.”
