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bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
Saviours in a strange world
Heroism of Arabs saved Jews during Holocaust: UK Times
The Sunday Times December 03, 2006
Many Jews had a lucky escape during the Holocaust - when Arabs risked
their own lives to rescue them. Deirdre Fernand reports
Anny Boukris was just a child when the soldiers came knocking at the
door. The year was 1942, and German troops were occupying her town and
her homeland of Tunisia. Boukris lived with her parents, Jacob and
Odette, in the seaside town of Mahdia, along its eastern shore. She and
her brothers and sisters wanted for nothing. Jacob, a Jewish
businessman, was doing well; they could even afford a maid.
All that changed with the fist at the door. Since the arrival of German
troops that year, the family had suspected something would happen. They
had stocked up on food, packed their family heirlooms into a boxroom and
placed a bookcase in front of the door.
All to no avail. The soldiers inspected the house, found the hiding
place and took all their precious belongings. Anny minded her stamp
collection being confiscated.
Their house was being requisitioned as a barracks, the soldiers said,
and they had only an hour to leave. Anny’s father kept his wits about
him. He quickly arranged for his family to find refuge in an old factory
nearby. Aunts and uncles joined them, and although the living conditions
were far from satisfactory for everyone, they all felt safe enough.
A few weeks later came another knock at the door. This time the caller
was no German but a local man, the son of a wealthy landowner. “You are
all at great risk,” he told them. “You must leave straight away.” In the
middle of the night he drove them to his farm, about 20 miles away.
There they stayed hidden for four months, until the Germans had been
driven out of the country and they could return home. It was only then
that Anny came to understand the significance of the rescuer in the
night.
The man was 32-year-old Khaled Abdelwahhab, a prominent and well-
connected Arab from Mahdia, who made it his business to fraternise with
German officers so he knew what was going on. Handsome, sophisticated
and educated in the West, he made an agreeable companion and would sit
drinking with them into the early hours. He knew, for instance, which
brothels they frequented, which females they lusted after. He had also
heard tales of local girls, many of them Jewish, being abducted for sex
and never being seen again.
One night, one of the soldiers confided to him that he had his eye on a
beautiful Jewish woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, whom he was going
to take away “for his own pleasure”. When Abdelwahhab realised that the
blonde he intended to rape was Anny’s mother, Odette, he sprang into
action. He plied the soldier with drink, and when he eventually fell
into a stupor, Abdelwahhab drove directly to the farm and whisked
everyone to safety. “We left like that,” Anny recalled. Abdelwahhab, who
later married and had a daughter, became a lifelong friend of the
Boukris family. Forever an honoured guest, he was always invited to
celebrate the sabbath with them, sitting down to share chicken couscous
and memories. There, around that table, they would talk of the war. Arab
and Jew shared a special bond.
Abdelwahhab’s heroism in saving Odette from abduction and rape – and
rescuing her entire family from persecution and possible death – would
have been forgotten were it not for the efforts of one remarkable
historian of the Middle East, Robert Satloff. A 44-year-old American of
Jewish descent, he has devoted the past four years to searching out lost
heroes of the Holocaust. Not just any heroes, but Arabs such as
Abdelwahhab. “He could so easily have been killed if the German officer
had found out that he had tricked him to save a Jewish woman,” he says.
Executed swiftly, perhaps, or tortured to death in any of the 104
“punishment” camps then being built across the Sahara.
Satloff’s quest for good men took him not to Europe, where 6m perished
under the Nazis and where virtuous men like Oskar Schindler and Raoul
Wallenberg risked everything to save lives, but to the shores of North
Africa, where France’s possessions of Morocco, Tunisia and Algiers – and
its Jewish population – had fallen to the Germans.
“We all know the horrific stories of the Jews who died in Europe under
the Nazis,” he says.
“I wanted to look at the long reaches of the Holocaust. Persecution was
not just a European story. I wanted to investigate what happened to Jews
living among Arabs when the Nazis arrived. Their stories have been
overlooked for far too long.” He reminds us that had allied troops not
driven the Germans from the African continent in 1943, then the 2,000-
year-old Jewish communities of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and
maybe Egypt and Palestine too, might have met the fate of their brothers
in Europe.
The result of his detective work, which drew upon scores of interviews
with witnesses and survivors of pogrom, is contained in his newly
published book, Among the Righteous. “I set myself a simple goal,” he
says. “To tell the story of one Arab who saved the life of one Jew.” He
had in his mind a saying from the Koran: “Whoever saves one life, saves
the entire world.” This passage echoes the Jewish exhortation: “If you
save one life, it is as if you have saved the world.”
Satloff, who runs the influential think-tank the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy, began to dig in wartime archives and libraries but
could find little about the half-million Jews of North Africa. There
were bare statistics – nearly 5,000 were killed in air raids or as a
result of forced labour – but few details. Questions hung in the air.
What became of the Jewish families in Casablanca and Algiers when the
tanks rolled in and the jackboots marched? What happened when Vichy, the
collaborationist government of Marshal Pétain, brought in anti-semitic
laws?
As Sir Martin Gilbert, the respected historian of the Shoah, points out,
the fate of Jews outside Europe has only recently emerged as a topic of
interest. It was not until 1997 that Yad Vashem, Israel’s national
memorial and library of remembrance, published its first volume on the
wartime persecution of Jews in Libya and Tunisia. And it was only last
year that three documentaries on the plight of North African Jews aired
on Israeli television.
Then another, larger question began to bother Satloff. Could there ever
have been an Arab Schindler? An Arab Wallenberg? As the world remembers,
Oskar Schindler, whose story was told by Thomas Keneally in the award-
winning Schindler’s Ark, was the German factory owner who defied the SS
to rescue as many as 1,300 Jews. Wallenberg,
a Swedish diplomat working in wartime Budapest, is credited with saving
as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews.
In pursuit of his Arab Schindler, Satloff, who is fluent in Arabic,
French and Hebrew, moved with his wife, an economist at the World Bank,
and two young sons to Morocco in 2002 and began his research in earnest.
He turned himself into a Simon Wiesenthal in reverse: where the
legendary Nazi hunter, who died last year, sought criminals to bring
them to justice, Satloff sought champions. Over steaming cups of sweet
mint tea in houses and cafes, he listened to tales from the past. Some
people were eager to speak of their wartime tribulations, as if they had
been waiting all their lives to unburden themselves; others were more
guarded. Acceptance and suspicion of him went hand in hand.
In the event, he found not one saviour but many. Wherever he went he
collected stories about Arabs welcoming Jews into their homes, sharing
their meagre rations, guarding their valuables so Germans could not
confiscate them, and warning leaders about SS raids. Abdelwahhab, who
died in 1997 aged 86, features prominently in his gallery of heroes,
along with Si Ali Sakkat, a former mayor of Tunis who hid 60 Jewish
workers who had fled a labour camp, and Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the
rector of a Paris mosque, who helped 100 Jews evade persecution in 1940.
Similarly, the Bey of Tunis, Tunisia’s wartime ruler under the Germans,
is reported as having told members of his government: “The Jews… are
under our patronage and we are responsible for their lives. If I find
out that an Arab informer caused even one hair of a Jew to fall, this
Arab will pay with his life.” As one old gentleman from a small town in
Tunisia remarked, “The Arabs watched over the Jews.”
Satloff is prepared for such tales of Arab derring-do to stir
controversy. Denial of the Holocaust in Arab lands is not uncommon. The
leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has declared to his supporters
that Jews invented the “legend” of the Holocaust. Hamas’s official
website has labelled the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews “an alleged and
invented story with no basis”. And recently, President Bashar al-Assad
of Syria told an interviewer he doesn’t “have any clue how [Jews] were
killed or how many were killed”. So if the Shoah never happened, or has
been exaggerated, how can Arabs such as Si Kaddour Benghabrit or the Bey
of Tunis have played any part in it – noble or otherwise?
It was witnessing the 9/11 attacks that prompted Satloff to embark upon
his book. Watching the twin towers collapse, an event he saw from the
relative safety of a Midtown office building in Manhattan, he wondered
what he, as a Jew, an American and an Islamic scholar, could do to bring
together warring ideologies. In his mind, the plume of smoke rising from
the towers conjured up the chimneys of the death camps. “I decided that
the best thing I could do would be to combat Arab ignorance about the
Holocaust,” he says. “And the most effective way of doing that was to
tell a positive story. Any history that I wrote had to involve the
Islamic world and its Arab heroes.” As he points out, in a fractured,
fragmenting world, dialogue is both desirable and essential.
Today, Schindler and Wallenberg are perhaps the most famous men to have
been officially recognised by Yad Vashem as “righteous among the
nations”. They are just two of the 21,310 Gentiles honoured for risking
their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Individuals come from
Chile and Croatia, Lithuania and Latvia, but there is no representative
on that list from Tunisia, Morocco or Algiers. “There are Turkish and
Bosnian Muslims cited,” says Satloff, “but nearly 60 years after the
war, no Arab has ever been officially recognised.”
Perhaps the testimonies of women like 71-year-old Anny Boukris, whose
mother was rescued by Abdelwahhab, hold the clue. She spent years trying
to tell people about her family and the debt they all owed to the
dashing young Arab. But none of her neighbours wanted to know. Satloff,
who checked her story with several sources, has his own explanation: “I
came to the sad conclusion that there are two main reasons that no Arabs
have been included among that righteous list. First, many Arabs (or
their heirs) didn’t want to be found, and second, I think many Jews
didn’t look too hard.”
Officials from Yad Vashem have expressed interest in Satloff’s work.
Throughout his research he has been in contact with its Department of
the Righteous, which scrutinises the credentials of candidates, and he
will be making all his files available to them. The final decision to
afford the honour is made by an independent public committee comprising
Holocaust survivors, lawyers, historians and individuals, and is chaired
by Supreme Court judges. “But Yad Vashem doesn’t act like a detective
agency,” says Satloff. In practice, the process of recognition, a
painstaking and laborious operation, is usually initiated by Holocaust
survivors or their families – and that has not yet happened. “So far,
the commission has yet to receive a request to recognise a person as
‘righteous among the nations’ from an Arab country,” says a spokesman.
Whatever the outcome, Satloff already has one victory under his belt. By
providing documentary proof of their incarceration, he has helped dozens
of survivors of 100 labour camps in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia gain
thousands of pounds’ compensation from the German government. And if he
has his way, maybe Khaled Abdelwahhab, the elegant and good-looking man
he calls “the Paul Newman of Tunisia”, will become the first righteous
Arab. No wonder that after 25 years of writing about conflict in the
Middle East, he calls this “the most hopeful story I’ve written”.
In order to understand the bravery of these Arab heroes, it is necessary
to put their behaviour in context. As a remark by the philosopher Edmund
Burke warns us, “It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for
evil to triumph.” There were plenty of men who did nothing.
>From the beginning of the second world war, Nazi plans to persecute and
eventually exterminate Jews extended throughout a great swathe of Arab
lands. Though Germany and its allies controlled this region only
briefly, they made substantial progress towards that goal. From June
1940 to May 1943, the Nazis, their Vichy French collaborators and their
Italian fascist allies applied in Arab lands many of the precursors to
the Final Solution. These included not only laws depriving Jews of
property, education, livelihood, rights of residence and free movement,
but also torture, slave labour, deportation and execution. Though there
were no death camps, many thousands of Jews were consigned to more than
100 brutal labour camps. The very first concentration camps to be
liberated by allied troops in late 1942 were in Algeria and Morocco.
About 1% of North African Jews (4,000 to 5,000) died under Axis control,
compared with more than 50% of European Jewry. As Satloff says, “These
Jews were lucky to be in Africa, where the fighting ended relatively
early and where boats – not just cattle trucks – would have been needed
to take them to the ovens in Europe.”
In this world, Arabs were both willing participants and collaborators.
They worked as interpreters, going house to house with SS officers
pointing out where Jews lived, oversaw work gangs and guarded prisoners
in labour camps. Without a compliant populace, the persecution of Jews
would have been impossible.
Were Arabs merely following orders? An interviewer from the US Holocaust
Memorial Museum once put that question to Harry Alexander, a Jew from
Leipzig, Germany. After his father was taken to Sachsenhausen and his
brother to Buchenwald, he managed to escape to France. There French
authorities sent him to the notoriously harsh Vichy labour camp at
Djelfa in the Algerian desert. “Nobody told them to beat us all the
time,” he said. “Nobody told them to chain us together. Nobody told them
to tie us naked to a post and beat us and to hang us by our arms and
hose us down, to bury us in the sand… No, they took this into their own
hands and they enjoyed what they did.”
Satloff tracked down another survivor of the camps, Morice Tondowski, a
92-year-old Polish-born Jew, to his retirement home in Ilford, Essex. He
had joined the Foreign Legion in France but was stripped of his rifle
under Vichy’s anti-semitic laws and sent to Berguent labour camp in
Morocco. Tondowski told him about one of the worst kinds of punishment,
the tombeau – French for tomb. Prisoners who were judged not to be
working hard enough were forced to dig holes and lie in these faux
graves for weeks on end, day and night. Surviving only on 175 grams of
bread and one litre of water a day, they lay in their own waste. If they
made the slightest movement they would be beaten. One of Tondowski’s
best friends, a fellow Pole, died after weeks in the tombeau. “I think
of him all the time,” the old man told him.
It is little wonder that Satloff prefers to dwell on the humanity of men
like Si Ali Sakkat, another of his local heroes, who died in 1954. He
was the Tunisian landowner who came from a noble Muslim family that
could trace its lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad. After a career in
public service, including a stint as mayor of Tunis, he retired to his
splendid 740-acre farm outside the city with fields of grazing sheep and
shady olive groves. Not far away from his land was an Axis labour camp.
At a critical point of the battle for Tunisia, fighting broke out in a
nearby valley. Amid the bombs and gunfire, a group of about 60 Jewish
workers seized the opportunity to escape and found their way to Si Ali’s
property.
“They were lucky to come to his door,” says Satloff, who struck up a
friendship with Si Ali’s grandson. “He didn’t hesitate to offer each of
them food and lodging. This was a man of ready and simple kindnesses.”
Opening up his outbuildings and barns for them, the country squire
sheltered them for weeks until allied troops, on their way to Tunis,
could liberate them.
Just as remarkable are the actions of Si Kaddour Benghabrit. Perhaps the
most influential Arab in Europe, he was the rector of the Great Mosque
of Paris. Under the noses of German occupiers, he saved as many as 100
Jews by allowing his staff at the mosque to issue them with certificates
of Muslim identity, with which they could evade arrest and deportation.
Two months after the Germans took control of France, they caught up with
the scam and ordered Benghabrit to stop. When Satloff visited the mosque
to investigate this claim, he was shown a letter telling Benghabrit to
desist. It read: “The occupation authorities suspect the personnel of
the Mosque of Paris of fraudulently delivering to individuals of the
Jewish race certificates attesting that the interested persons are of
the Muslim confession.” For reasons that are unclear, or perhaps because
the Germans lacked firm evidence, no action was taken against
Benghabrit. He died in the 1960s and is buried in the same holy plac!
e that gave so many Jews a lifeline.
In recording these stories, Satloff’s work is far from finished. Now
back living and working in Washington, a regular on the university-
lecture circuit, he is still discovering more heroes. What next? A
sequel? A film of the book? “I’ve only scratched the surface,” he says.
“We know not all Arabs joined with the European-inspired campaign
against the Jews. The few who risked their lives to save them provide
inspiration beyond their numbers.”
In the final days of his last research trip, he came across the story of
a group of Arab shepherds from western Tunisia, who hid fleeing Jews.
“When the Germans came looking for Jews, the Arabs would say they are
their cousins,” he was told. But the race against time is on. Those who
lived through the war are dying out.
Just eight weeks after telling her story for the first time in 60 years
in all its stirring detail – from the hammering on the door to the
midnight flight – Anny Boukris breathed her last.
source:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2469952_1,00.html
===
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