The Holocaust's Arab Heroes
By Robert Satloff
Washington Post (Outlook Section)
Sunday, October 8, 2006
Virtually alone among peoples of the world, Arabs appear to have won
a free pass when it comes to denying or minimizing the Holocaust.
Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has declared to his supporters that "Jews
invented the legend of the Holocaust." Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad recently told an interviewer that he doesn't have "any
clue how [Jews] were killed or how many were killed." And
Hamas's official Web site labels the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews "an
alleged and invented story with no basis."
Such Arab viewpoints are not exceptional. A respected Holocaust research
institution recently reported that Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia
all promote Holocaust denial and protect Holocaust deniers. The records
of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum show that only one Arab leader
at or near the highest level of government -- a young prince from
a Persian Gulf state -- has ever made an official visit to the museum
in its 13-year history. Not a single official textbook or educational
program on the Holocaust exists in an Arab country. In Arab media,
literature and popular culture, Holocaust denial is pervasive and
legitimized.
Yet when Arab leaders and their people deny the Holocaust, they deny
their own history as well -- the lost history of the Holocaust in
Arab lands. It took me four years of research -- scouring dozens
of archives and conducting scores of interviews in 11 countries --
to unearth this history, one that reveals complicity and indifference
on the part of some Arabs during the Holocaust, but also heroism
on the part of others who took great risks to save Jewish lives.
Neither Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to Holocaust victims,
nor any other Holocaust memorial has ever recognized an Arab rescuer.
It is time for that to change. It is also time for Arabs to recall
and embrace these episodes in their history. That may not change
the minds of the most radical Arab leaders or populations, but for
some it could make the Holocaust a source of pride, worthy of remembrance
-- rather than avoidance or denial.
The Holocaust was an Arab story, too. From the beginning of World War
II, Nazi plans to persecute and eventually exterminate Jews extended
throughout the area that Germany and its allies hoped to conquer.
That included a great Arab expanse, from Casablanca to Tripoli and
on to Cairo, home to more than half a million Jews.
Though Germany and its allies controlled this region only briefly, they
made substantial headway toward their 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, residence and free movement, but also torture,
slave labor, deportation and execution.
There were no death camps, but many thousands of Jews were consigned
to more than 100 brutal labor camps, many solely for Jews. Recall
Maj. Strasser's warning to Ilsa, the wife of the Czech underground
leader, in the 1942 film "Casablanca": "It is possible
the French authorities will find a reason to put him in the concentration
camp here." Indeed, the Arab lands of Algeria and Morocco were
the site of the first concentration camps ever liberated by Allied
troops.
About 1 percent of Jews in North Africa (4,000 to 5,000) perished under
Axis control in Arab lands, compared with more than half of European
Jews. These Jews were lucky to be on the southern shores of the Mediterranean,
where the fighting ended relatively early and where boats -- not
just cattle cars -- would have been needed to take them to the ovens
in Europe. But if U.S. and British troops had not pushed Axis forces
from the African continent by May 1943, the Jews of Algeria, Libya,
Morocco, Tunisia and perhaps even Egypt and Palestine almost certainly
would have met the same fate as those in Europe.
The Arabs in these lands were not too different from Europeans: With
war waging around them, most stood by and did nothing; many participated
fully and willingly in the persecution of Jews; and a brave few even
helped save Jews.
Arab collaborators were everywhere. These included Arab officials conniving
against Jews at royal courts, Arab overseers of Jewish work gangs,
sadistic Arab guards at Jewish labor camps and Arab interpreters
who went house to house with SS officers pointing out where Jews
lived. Without the help of local Arabs, the persecution of Jews would
have been virtually impossible.
Were Arabs, then under the domination of European colonialists, merely
following orders? An interviewer once posed that question to Harry
Alexander, a Jew from Leipzig, Germany, who survived a notoriously
harsh French labor camp at Djelfa, in the Algerian desert. "No,
no, no!" he exploded in reply. "Nobody told them to beat
us all the time. 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 so our heads should
look up and bash our brains in and urinate on our heads. . . . No,
they took this into their own hands and they enjoyed what they did."
But not all Arabs joined with the European-spawned campaign against the
Jews. The few who risked their lives to save Jews provide inspiration
beyond their numbers.
Arabs welcomed Jews into their homes, guarded Jews' valuables so Germans
could not confiscate them, shared with Jews their meager rations
and warned Jewish leaders of coming SS raids. The sultan of Morocco
and the bey of Tunis provided moral support and, at times, practical
help to Jewish subjects. In Vichy-controlled Algiers, mosque preachers
gave Friday sermons forbidding believers from serving as conservators
of confiscated Jewish property. In the words of Yaacov Zrivy, from
a small town near Sfax, Tunisia, "The Arabs watched over the
Jews."
I found remarkable stories of rescue, too. In the rolling hills west
of Tunis, 60 Jewish internees escaped from an Axis labor camp and
banged on the farm door of a man named Si Ali Sakkat, who courageously
hid them until liberation by the Allies. In the Tunisian coastal
town of Mahdia, a dashing local notable named Khaled Abdelwahhab
scooped up several families in the middle of the night and whisked
them to his countryside estate to protect one of the women from the
predations of a German officer bent on rape.
And there is strong evidence that the most influential Arab in Europe
-- Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris
-- saved as many as 100 Jews by having the mosque's administrative
personnel give them certificates of Muslim identity, with which they
could evade arrest and deportation. These men, and others, were true
heroes.
According to the Koran: "Whoever saves one life, saves the entire
world." This passage echoes the Talmud's injunction, "If you
save one life, it is as if you have saved the world."
Arabs need to hear these stories -- both of heroes and of villains. They
especially need to hear them from their own teachers, preachers and
leaders. If they do, they may respond as did that one Arab prince
who visited the Holocaust museum. "What we saw today," he
commented after his tour, "must help us change evil into good
and hate into love and war into peace."
Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, is author of Among the Righteous: Lost Stories
from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands (PublicAffairs).