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By Robert
Satloff
npr
 The
central question of this book is "Did any Arabs save any
Jews during the Holocaust?" Trite as it sounds, the idea
behind that question came to me as I walked along the white
stripe painted in the middle of Fifth Avenue in the eerie
emptiness of the afternoon of September 11, 2001. Although
this book was originally motivated by the awful events of
that day, one of the conclusions I reached in the course of
my research was that it could and should have been
written much earlier.
I am, by
training, an historian of the modern Middle East, schooled
at Oxford, Harvard, and Duke, and, by profession, an analyst
of the politics of the countries and peoples of that region.
Almost everything I have ever written has been about Arabs.
To do this, I have learned their language, studied their
culture, and lived among them. Throughout, I have tried,
with great empathy, to understand who they are, where they
come from, and whatmakes them tick.
I am also
a Jew a fact that, I am sure, was responsible for my
career choice. I am loyal to my country, America, and proud
of my connection to the Jewish homeland, Israel. I came of
age, intellectually and politically, in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, the era of Anwar el-Sadat, the journey to
Jerusalem, and Israel's peace with Egypt, a hopeful moment
when, to many Americans and certainly to most American
Jews Arabs stopped being caricatures and started being
flesh-and-blood, three-dimensional figures. This was also
the time when Islamic extremists, including Sadat's killers,
began to set their sights on America as the Great Satan,
with Israel relegated to the lesser role of devil's helper.
In one of those unspoken decisions that determine one's
life, I decided that understanding Arabs was important to my
being Jewish. And because of the many ties that bind America
and Israel, and because of the rising sense of direct clash
between the United States and the Middle East, I decided
that understanding Arabs was also an important part of my
being American. I have lived my life at the point where
those four America and Israel, Jews and Arabs intersect.
In the
twenty-five years since I started studying Arabic and
traveling to the Middle East, two ideas stand out.
First is
the fact that "Arab culture" is really many cultures, that
"Arab people" are really many peoples, and that "Arab
countries" are filled with a combustible mix of ethnicity,
religion, nationalism, and race that produces the entire
range of human passions. That insight alone, I believe,
makes comprehensible much of the seemingly impenetrable
politics of the Middle East.
Second is
an observation about the role of history in the lives of
Arabs and Jews. For both groups, the past is a powerful
source of motivation, grievance, and legitimacy. From God's
covenant with Abraham to his promise to Muhammad, from the
Balfour Declaration to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, from
Israel's War of Independence to the Nakba, which is the
Arabic term for "catastrophe" commonly used for Israel's
birth, the role of history as narrative resonates deeply
among both Arabs and Jews.
Jews, both
in Israel and the Diaspora, are steeped in the details of
history. The United States alone boasts more than fifty
separate local Jewish historical associations and another
fifty local Jewish genealogical societies, plus all the
national Jewish organizations; Israel, a country of just 6
million, has more than 215 museums, with more opening every
year. The intra-Israeli clash between traditional historians
and "new historians" between mainstream Zionists and their
"post-Zionist" critics is the stuff of great national
debate.
Similarly,
in Arab countries, as throughout most Muslim societies,
history excites, inspires, and animates civic life. "The
Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are shaped
by their history, but, unlike some others, they are keenly
aware of it," writes the eminent historian Bernard Lewis.
"Middle Easterners' perception of history is nourished from
the pulpit, by the schools, and by the media. [It is] vivid
and powerfully resonant." Arab lands, historical allusions
more than a millennium old such as the names of Muslim
battlefield victories from the seventh century adorn
freshly built universities (such as Yarmouk and Mu'tah, in
Jordan) and even an inter-Arab consortium of satellites
(Badr).
But there
is a difference: Jews live predominantly in democracies,
where history, like politics, is alive with bustle, debate,
and disorder. Most Arabs, by contrast, live in closed
societies, where rulers fear uncertainty and spend their
nation's wealth controlling it. Although Arab peoples may
revere the study, writing, and teaching of history, their
leaders are more likely to view a clash of historians as a
source of threat, rather than a source of strength.
The result
is that historians in most Arab countries are more like the
court chroniclers of long-dead dynasties, and the hollow or
distorted history they write and teach reflects the
difference between intellectual and government employee.
This phenomenon has produced a generation of Arabs that
knows little about the details and texture of their own
history, especially the modern history of the republics,
monarchies, and principalities in which they live today. I
recall that many Jordanians who read a book I wrote on their
country's politics in the 1950s, an especially turbulent
time for the Hashemite royal family, told me it had filled
in an historical black hole for them, telling stories of
people and events that no Jordanian had ever done. Western
scholars may chafe at rules that control access to official
government documents, but they are nothing compared to the
restrictions on information that exist in the Middle East.
When I was doing doctoral research in the late 1980s, the
University of Jordan housed a massive collection of books in
what was then called the "forbidden room" of the school's
library. Through political connections, I gained access to
the room, which contained some hard-to-find volumes written
by and about people out of royal favor but certainly nothing
that was worthy of labeling secret. Indeed, the very act of
writing history in many Arab countries can be risky
business. In this part of the world, it is not uncommon for
new leaders to airbrush their predecessors out of history
such is the fate, for example, of Egypt's Sadat and
Tunisia's Habib Bourghuiba. Woe unto the historian who has
already immortalized the ancien rιgime in print!
But none
of this was actually in my mind as I walked down the middle
of Fifth Avenue that sunny Tuesday afternoon. I had
practical matters to think about like contacting my wife,
who I later learned had been evacuated from her office two
blocks from the White House, deciding where I was going to
sleep that night, and figuring how I was going to get back
home, to Washington. But I also thought a lot about the
audacity of the people who took down the towers that day.
Killing,
as Cain learned, is an audacious act, and killing on a grand
scale is even more so. As genocides have become frequent
occurrences, we know that the potential for such killing is
always there, from the knives drawn in Rwanda to the death
pits of Bosnia. The worst genocide of all, the Holocaust,
stands out because it was the most audacious Germans
employed the most scientifically advanced means of the day
in the most culturally advanced society in the world to kill
the greatest number of people as quickly and efficiently as
possible. On a much smaller scale, the killers of 9/11 did
just that. Using the most modern of technologies, they
exceeded if just for a couple of hours the deadly output
of Auschwitz, and were the terrorists able to do so, they
would have multiplied the killing many times over. To my
mind, the plume of smoke rising over the wounded towers
conjured to me the chimneys of the death camps, two examples
of killers audaciously perfecting murder on an industrial
scale.
None of
that would have occurred to the perpetrators of the attacks,
of course. But that is as much because of the culture that
shaped them as the ideology that motivated them. Virtually
alone among peoples of the world, Arabs have effectively
claimed and won exemption from the global campaign to
remember the most audacious crime in history. Soon after
9/11, I surveyed Holocaust and tolerance-related
institutions and found that not a single module, text, or
program for Holocaust education existed in an Arab country,
even within the context of studying twentieth-century
history, modern genocides, or tolerance education.
At one
level, this phenomenon is easy to explain. Arabs even many
modern, moderate, and enlightened Arabs opt out of
discussions about the Holocaust because of its special
relevance to Jews and its role in the creation of Israel. A
review of documents at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
for example, shows that only one Arab at or near the highest
level of government a young prince from a Gulf state
ever left a record of an official visit to the museum in its
history. In the eyes of many Arabs, the catastrophe of
Israel's founding would not have occurred if the catastrophe
of the Holocaust had not occurred first; accepting the
uniqueness and enormity of the latter therefore runs the
risk of accepting the validity and legitimacy of the former.
As an historian, it is important to recognize the critical
role that the Holocaust did play in the founding of Israel
as source of tragic clarity to Jews about the need for
independent Jewish sovereignty, as source of cruel stimulus
for Jewish immigration to Palestine, and as source of
international sympathy for the Jewish people's claim to
self-determination. At the same time, it is necessary to
point out that the Holocaust provides neither the first, nor
the primary, nor the only rationale for the establishment of
a Jewish state. By the time German panzers rolled into
Poland, modern Zionism was already more than forty years old
and the Zionists had attracted so many Jews to Palestine
that the British, who governed the territory under a
postWorld War I mandate, had already proposed to partition
the land to accommodate two states for two peoples, one
Jewish and one Arab. For most Arabs I have met, that history
muddies the image of European colonialists paying with Arab
land to atone for their guilt over the fate of the Jews
during World War II. To them, the creation of Israel was the
world's indulgence to Jews as compensation for the
destruction of the Holocaust; validating the latter can only
validate the former.
However
easy to explain, this phenomenon is not so easy to excuse.
In the weeks that followed the 9/11 attacks, as my focus
moved from Manhattan to the Middle East, it dawned on me
that we do no favors to Arabs to exempt them from this
history, whatever connection the Holocaust may have to their
political dispute with Israel. To borrow a phrase from
another context, sparing Arabs the responsibility of
Holocaust remembrance actually exposes the soft bigotry of
our own low expectations. And, as the events of 9/11 made
clear, it certainly does us no favor either.
At that
early date, I decided that the most useful response I could
offer to 9/11 was to combat Arab ignorance of the Holocaust.
The question was how to do it. An adversarial approach, I
soon realized, was the wrong way to engage Arabs if I truly
wanted to change attitudes on a taboo topic. To do that, I
needed to make the Holocaust accessible to Arabs; I needed
to make the Holocaust an Arab story.
The answer
came to me one autumn evening in 2001. "Whoever saves one
life, saves the entire world," says the Qur'an, an echo of
the Talmud's injunction "If you save one life, it is as if
you have saved the world." If I could tell the story of a
single Arab who saved a single Jew during the Holocaust,
then perhaps I could make Arabs see the Holocaust as a
source of pride, worthy of remembering, not just something
to avoid or deny. It was, I thought, the most positive
solution I could imagine.
When that
idea first came to me, I figured my work was half done. I am
not an expert on the history of the Holocaust, and my
assumption was that stories of Arabs who saved Jews already
circulated among the cognoscenti but were not widely known.
In the context I know bestmodern Middle East history such
was the case, for example, in 1929, when a few brave Arabs
saved the lives of dozens of Jews from an Arab massacre in
the biblical city of Hebron. Surely, I thought, the
Holocaust had its share of these stories, too. I would only
have to find them, mine them, and popularize them.
I was
wrong. After a flurry of e-mails to Sir Martin Gilbert,
the renowned historian; to Walter Reich, the former director
of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and, ultimately, to
Mordechai Paldiel, the widely respected head of the
Department of the Righteous at Israel's national memorial to
the Holocaust, Yad Vashem reality set in: Nearly sixty
years after the war, no Arab had ever been officially
recognized as a rescuer of Jews. "What an interesting
topic," a distinguished scholar wrote in reply to a query
from me. "Good luck in your work."
Two months
after 9/11, my wife and I decided to move to Rabat, the
capital of the North African kingdom of Morocco. My first
encounter with North Africa was as a child, when my father
told fascinating, if unnerving, tales from his wartime stops
in Casablanca, Algiers, and Oran in 1943, courtesy of the
U.S. Air Force, but I had never been there myself. For
Jennie and me, the decision to move there broke a pattern.
Throughout our eleven years of marriage, we had kept our
professional lives apart; she, an economist at the World
Bank, worked previously on Vietnam, Russia, and sub-Saharan
Africa, but never an Arab country. When Jennie received an
offer to relocate to the field office in Rabat, we decided
not to pass up the one opportunity to live in a country
where our interests might overlap. In April 2002, we left
Washington with our two young boys and settled into our new
home in Morocco.
Over the
next two and a half years, my tiny office on the second
floor of our white stucco house at 1 Oulad Fares Street
became the world headquarters of a far-flung effort to find
Arabs who had saved Jews during the Holocaust. My research
extended to a dozen countries on four continents; I drew on
the skills of a small army of archivists, translators,
interviewers, and researchers as well as the advice and
counsel of many experts far more knowledgeable than I in the
history of the Holocaust. Early on, I realized that it made
no sense to focus solely on a narrow search for Arabs who
saved Jews. Context matters. Without understanding the Nazi,
Fascist, and Vichy efforts to extend their Holocaust-era
persecution of Jews to Arab lands, without understanding how
the half-million Jews of Europe's Arab possessions fared
under this threat, and without understanding the many
different roles that Arab populations of these lands played
during this experience, there could be no real meaning to
specific stories of Arabs who saved Jews if they existed,
at all. What started as a small, boutique effort to find one
Arab who saved one Jew mushroomed into the most complex
mega-project of my life.
This book
contains what I found. It is, I admit at the outset, not the
comprehensive account of any of the concentric circles I
just described. That mammoth task awaits a team of graduate
students who will make their careers combing over each of
the more than 100 sites of German, French, and Italian
forced labor set up in Arab countries, sketching the
personal tales of the thousands of Jews both Ashkenazim
and Sephardim interned at "punishment camps" in the
Sahara, or assessing the way scores of Arab leaders and
officials dealt with the competing tugs of their public
responsibilities, on the one hand, and their private
friendships with Jews, on the other hand. This book is a
more modest undertaking. It is part history, part
travelogue, part memoir. It is the story of my search
for an Arab who saved a Jew during the Holocaust the
"Righteous" of the title and what I found along the way:
the discoveries I made, the personalities I encountered, the
lessons I learned.
One of
those lessons is that the Holocaust experience of Jews and
others persecuted in Arab lands are not "untold stories" but
rather "lost stories." Recall, for example, this scene from
the movie Casablanca, in which a Gestapo officer
urges the devoted wife of the Czech underground leader to
convince her husband to return to Paris under German
protection.
Major
Strasser: There are only two other alternatives for him.
Ilse:
What are they?
Major
Strasser: It is possible the French authorities will find a
reason to put him in the concentration camp here.
Ilse:
And the other alternative?
Major
Strasser: My dear Mademoiselle, perhaps you have observed
that in Casablanca, human life is cheap. Good night,
Mademoiselle.
When
Warner Bros. released the movie, in December 1942, filmgoers
did not scratch their heads at this passing reference to
French "concentration camps" in Morocco. The existence of
these camps much like the terrible fate of Jews more
generally was known, certainly among those who were
interested in knowing. Somehow, over the last sixty years,
those stories have been lost. There were even brief accounts
of Arab rescuers mentioned in well-known books and memoirs
of the period; historians never picked up on these, either,
and they were also lost. One of the goals of this book is to
recapture those stories and revive them; another is to
explain how they were lost and why.
Along the
way, I include relevant statistics how many were killed,
how many were interned, and so on but I try not to fixate
on them. Based solely on a numerical comparison with the
enormity of the horror in Europe, the experience of Jews in
Arab lands during the war barely deserves mention and the
frequent recitation of statistics inevitably invites such
judgment. Such an emphasis on numbers, however, has the
effect of ripping these stories from their historical,
cultural, and geographic roots and distorting the narrative
of the people both Jews and Arabs whose lives were
touched by the long reach of the Holocaust. This book
represents the distillation of years of research, but it is
ultimately about stories and the people who lived them; the
comprehensive, authoritative account of what transpired in
Arab lands during World War II awaits a future volume.
I expect
this book to provoke controversy. Over two generations, most
Arabs and most Jews have settled into a comfortable pattern
of how to view each other's role in history and each
other's understanding of history. The stories I tell
both of what happened between Jews and Arabs sixty years
ago and how each of them relate to that history today
challenge convention within each community. The lessons I
derive from my research are not likely to go down easily
with either.
No one who
knows me or reads what I have written over the past two
decades can accuse me of romanticizing the politics or
peoples of the Middle East. The gruesome accounts of
torture, betrayal, and death I recount in this book will
only confirm that reputation. But, in fact, this is the most
hopeful story I have ever told. Recapturing these lost
stories from the Holocaust's long reach into Arab lands
offers people of goodwill among each community Arab and
Jewish a way to look through the lens of one of the most
powerful narratives in history and see each other
differently. It is the most positive response I could offer
to the events of that Tuesday morning in September.
Early in
this introduction, I wrote that understanding the complex
ethnic, religious, national, and racial makeup of Arab
societies makes comprehensible much of the Middle East's
seemingly impenetrable politics. In order to make this book
accessible to nonspecialists, I have taken the risk of
disregarding that prime directive. Throughout, I use the
shorthand term "Arab" to refer to the Muslim population of
the countries in question. Many of these people were not, in
fact, ethnic Arabs; a large proportion, for example, were
Berbers, native peoples of northwest Africa whose culture
and languages predate the Arab Muslim conquests. Similarly,
the distinction between Jews and Arabs fails to take account
of the variety of Jewish communities in Arab lands at this
time. Most Jews in these countries spoke Arabic as their
first language; in a sense they were "Arab Jews." There were
also large groups of Jews of recent (and not so recent)
European origin Italian, Maltese, Greek, and so forth
who maintained linguistic, cultural, and sometimes even
political ties to their countries of origin. Dissecting the
different wartime experiences of these various ethnic and
national subgroups will, someday, make an excellent
dissertation (or two). Because the stories I tell in this
book are complicated enough as they are, I decided that the
limitation of using the shorthand terms was worth the risk.
In the
same vein, I have also tried to make the many names of Arabs
mentioned in the book as accessible to the nonspecialist as
I could. Therefore, I opted not to apply academic standards
of transliteration, which have a way of making Arabic names
even more distant and unattainable to a Western reader.
Instead, wherever possible (and with a few exceptions), I
used the spelling actually preferred by the person in
question. So, for example, "Muhammad" often becomes
"Mohamed," the way Tunisians in the 1940s tended to spell
the name.
Excerpted from Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the
Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands by Robert Satloff
(Public Affairs, 2006). Reprinted with permission. |
