Citizens of Arab nations
also played a role in the events of World War II, whether as villains or
heroes, collaborators or 'righteous gentiles.'
By Robert Satloff
Haaretz
October 1, 2004
Denial of the Holocaust is
a consistent theme of Arab politics - a staple not only of radicals, both
secular and Islamist, but of the mainstream as well. Borrowing methods from
their Western counterparts, Arab deniers wrap their arguments in
pseudo-scientific scholarship, discounting (or denying) the numbers of dead,
equating the Holocaust with lesser crimes, denigrating its historical
uniqueness, or reversing history to ascribe to present-day Jews the role of
"Nazi" persecutors of Palestinians.
A heartening trend in recent
years is that a growing number of Arabs have begun to address this phenomenon,
deplore its effects and even correct the record for Arab readers. But despite
these signs of progress, Holocaust denial remains a powerful orthodoxy.
One issue that remains
completely out of bounds is any exploration of the intersection of the
Holocaust with Arab history itself. For the Holocaust, although overwhelmingly
a European story, was not solely a European story. It was an Arab story, too.
>From the outset, German
plans to persecute and eventually to exterminate the Jews extended throughout
all the lands Germany and its allies hoped to conquer. That included a great
Arab expanse in North Africa, extending from Casablanca to Tripoli and onward
to Cairo - a region that was home to a half-million Jews. Indeed, the
country-by-country plan of extermination laid out at the Wannsee Conference in
Berlin in January 1942 makes sense only if the wildly inaccurate figure for the
Jews of unoccupied France - 700,000 - is understood to include France's North
African possessions: the colony of Algeria and the protectorates of Morocco and
Tunisia.
In the brief period when
they had a chance, the Germans and their allies laid a significant basis toward
their murderous goal for North Africa's Jews. For three years - from the fall
of France in June 1940 to the expulsion of German troops from Tunisia in May
1943 - the Nazis, their Vichy French collaborators, and their Italian fascist
allies applied in these areas many of the same tools that would be used to
devastating effect against the much larger Jewish populations of Europe. These
included not only statutes depriving Jews of property, education, livelihood,
residence and free movement, but also forced labor, confiscations,
deportations, and executions. Virtually no Jew in North Africa was left
untouched. Thousands suffered in labor camps, work gangs, prisons, or under
house arrest. By a stroke of fortune, relatively few perished. But if U.S. and
British troops had not driven the Germans from the African continent in 1943,
the 2,000-year-old Jewish communities of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and
perhaps Egypt would almost certainly have met the fate of their brethren in
Europe.
Particularly hard hit was
Tunisia, the only Arab country to come under direct German occupation. In just
six months, from November 1942 to May 1943, the Germans and their local
collaborators implemented a forced-labor regime, confiscations of property,
hostage-taking, mass extortion, deportations and executions. They required
thousands of Jews in the countryside to wear the Star of David, and they
created special Judenrat-like committees of Jewish leaders to implement Nazi
policies under threat of imprisonment or death.
French malevolence
Despite the depravity
of the Germans, one can point to France as being, in some way, even more
malevolent in terms of the bringing of the Holocaust to Arab lands. In Morocco
and, especially, Algeria, France implemented strict laws against local Jews,
expelling them from schools, universities and government employment,
confiscating their property, and in some cases sending local Jewish political
activists to harsh labor camps. In some respects, Vichy applied its anti-Jewish
statutes with more vigor in Arab lands than in the unoccupied zone of
metropolitan France. All this was done without much prodding from Berlin.
Not content with this,
Vichy also dispatched more than 2,000 European Jews to labor camps in North
Africa, many of whom had been refugees from Central Europe who joined the
French army or Foreign Legion. Unlike the other "unwanteds" that
Vichy sent to suffer on the fringes of the Sahara - Spanish republicans,
communists, socialists, anti-Nazi Germans, and Gaullists - Jews were sent
because of their religion, not their politics.
Shipped southward by cattle
car from the ports of Algiers and Oran, these unfortunates were herded into
camps from which there was little opportunity for escape; some died in the
attempt. Given little food, water or rest, they worked from dawn to dusk
gathering, breaking, loading, and moving rocks to build the
never-to-be-completed Trans-Sahara Railway, or mining the ore along the route.
Torture was common and
frequent. According to later testimonies, the camp commandants and senior
officers, mostly foreign legionnaires themselves, were vicious anti-Semites,
sadistic and often drunk, many of German origin or with fascist sympathies. A
1943 British Foreign Office document, "Barbaric Treatment of Jews and
Aliens in Morocco," records the testimony of Polish Jewish prisoners who
made their way to London after being freed by the Allies. Here is one such
testimony, describing a common method of torture:
"The tombeau - tomb -
is a grave dug in the ground, two meters long, 40 centimeters deep and 60
centimeters wide. Men under punishment are confined to this tomb for various
periods ... The minimum sentence is eight days and nights. The maximum survived
was 17 days and nights ... Typical of the offenses which earned a man a stretch
of tombeau was that of the German Jew Selgo... Like all the others, he had to
lie face up night and day. He had no covering, only a tattered Legion uniform
with no underclothes. He was not allowed to move or change positions in the
tombeau. An Arab was posted over the graves to see that the victims stayed
rigidly still ...
"The only occasion
when a man was allowed to raise his head a little was after a rainstorm when
the graves filled with water. Then he was allowed a stone for a headrest to
save him from drowning. As the subsoil was clay, the water would take three
days to drain away ... A man was allowed to relieve himself only during these
three visits of the guard. If he could not do it then he had to do it in his
clothes and lie in it ... As the majority of prisoners were suffering from
severe and sanguinary dysentery, a man lying in his own filth was the rule
rather than the exception."
Villains and heroes
Many Arabs today would
respond that all this has nothing to do with Arab history. But they would be
wrong. Arabs in Arab countries were not too different than Europeans were in
Europe. Just as in Europe, most members of the local populace were indifferent
to the suffering of Jews around them, but a few helped - the Arab world, too,
had its "righteous gentiles"; yet some made matters demonstrably
worse. From May 2002 to July 2004, while living in Rabat, the capital of
Morocco, I tracked down stories of Arabs who played a role in these events, be
they villains or heroes. With the help of researchers and investigators in 10
different countries, I was able to unearth the stories of dozens of such
individuals.
Their number includes
outright collaborators - i.e., Arabs who personally participated in the
persecution of Jews. Among these were an Arab sadist who commanded a Jewish
work brigade in the Tunisian countryside; another Tunisian, Hassen Ferjani,
convicted by a French military tribunal of having informed to the Germans on
three Jews fleeing across Allied lines, an act leading to their deportation and
eventual beheading; Arab patrolmen who tracked down Jewish escapees from
forced-labor camps; Arabs who walked alongside German soldiers, pointing out
Jewish homes and property for confiscation; the Arab accomplice to a German
soldier who raped a Jewish woman in La Marsa, outside Tunis; and Arab camp
guards who urinated on the heads of Jewish forced laborers as they lay buried
to their necks in the sands of Algeria.
In addition to these
individuals were the hundreds of Arabs who volunteered to join Axis and
pro-Axis forces like the Phalange Africaine, the Brigade Nord Africaine, and
the German-Arab Training Battalion. And then there were the nameless thousands
throughout North Africa who extorted money and property from Jews at their
moment of abject weakness.
As for the heroes who
helped save Jews from pain, injury, indignity and perhaps death, they included:
l The bey of Tunis and,
more famously though less conclusively, the sultan of Morocco, both of whom
provided vital moral support to their Jewish subjects, as well as practical
help to a number of Jewish personalities and their families;
l The Arab country squire
who opened his farm to 60 Jews escaping from an Axis forced-labor camp in
Tunisia's Zaghouan valley;
l An Arab notable in the
Tunisian seaside town of Mahdia who, upon learning that a German officer was
bent on raping a local Jewish woman, whisked away her entire family in the
middle of the night and kept them hidden on his farm for several weeks until
the Germans quit the town.
l The Arab politician who
secretly warned and offered shelter to his long-time Jewish friends when Nazi
SS troops were planning raids against the Jewish leadership in Tunis;
l Religious leaders in
Algiers who forbade any Muslim from serving as a Vichy-appointed conservator of
Jewish property;
l Arab inmates of a prison
camp in the Algerian desert who forged an anti-fascist bond with their Jewish
prison mates;
l And, in faraway Paris,
the rector of the municipal mosque, Si Kaddour Bengabrit, who is said to have
given Jewish children counterfeit certificates of good standing as Muslims,
thereby enabling them to escape deportation.
Taken together, this
history is rarely told, and the heroes, in particular, have never been
recognized. Of the more than 20,000 "righteous" honored by Israel's
Yad Vashem for rescuing Jews from death during the Holocaust, not a single one
is an Arab (though there are a number of Muslims). My view is that there are
two reasons for this: Few ever looked for "Arab righteous," and fewer
still had an incentive to be found.
Fleeting memories
For Arabs, the legacy of
World War II was soon overshadowed by two other developments: the conflict with
Zionism over the fate of Palestine and the struggle for independence against
European colonialism. By the late 1940s - and certainly by the time of the Suez
crisis in 1956 - the blurring of the State of Israel with "the Jews"
was already a deeply embedded theme of Middle Eastern politics. For an Arab,
there was little to be gained (and much to be lost) by being identified with
the defense of Jews or of Jewish interests. Sultan Mohammed V of Morocco and,
to a lesser extent, Habib Bourghiba, were significant exceptions, noteworthy
not least for their rarity.
For Jews, the situation was
more complex. To many of those remaining in North Africa, memories of their
horrible wartime experience were swiftly overtaken by the less systematic but
often more violent anti-Zionism that compelled hundreds of thousands to quit
their homes for Israel in the late 1940s and 1950s. Once in Israel, wartime
memories were further obscured by the tension between Ashkenazi and Sephardi
Jews. To the degree that the former jealously guarded their Holocaust legacy -
theirs, after all, had been by far the greater calamity - the latter tended not
to focus on theirs. Similarly neglectful were Holocaust historians and
institutions; even today, one hears debate in Israel over whether it is even
appropriate to use the term "survivors" for Jews from Arab countries
who suffered Nazi-era racial laws and punitive actions.
An additional wrinkle
concerns the odd position held by the small, dwindling remnants of once-grand
Jewish communities in Arab countries. Navigating between the Scylla of Islamic
radicalism and the Charybdis of regime indifference to their fate, Jews in
these countries have by and large opted for quiescence. This attitude even
extends backward to their history. Although I did come across Sephardi
activists agitating for wider acknowledgment of the history of the Holocaust in
Arab lands, none actually resides in an Arab land today.
But if these considerations
help to explain the obscuring of the Arab encounter with the Holocaust, they
hardly excuse it. Consider the rebuff I received when I met the children of a
candidate for recognition as a "righteous Arab": Tunisia's wartime
prime minister, Mohammed Chenik.
Walking a dangerous line
between the Germans and his long-time personal friendships with Jews, Chenik
had - according to various interviewees - used his connections to warn Jewish
leaders of impending arrests and secured dispensations from forced labor for
the sons of Jews he knew from his business days. He very likely saved Jewish
lives, perhaps at risk to his own.
Whatever the motive behind
these deeds - personal friendship, old business obligations, simple kindness -
they were truly noble. Since I was intending to resurrect the story of this
long-forgotten statesman and bring honor to his name, I had expected his family
to embrace these revelations, or at least to thank me for my efforts. And
indeed, the family members who gathered in their comfortable seaside villa
outside Tunis to hear my tale were polite, generous and welcoming. But through
the smiles and handshakes, it rapidly became clear that they wanted nothing to
do with my story of their father's exploits. We have never heard about any of
this, they insisted, and even if what you say is true, it does not amount to
anything significant. Although they urged me to return with irrefutable proof,
they offered no help and it was obvious they hoped never to hear from me again.
Perhaps the hardest blow
has been the silence that has greeted so many requests I have made to moderate,
forward-thinking Arabs to assist me in researching their history. For every
helpful response I received to a posting on an Internet message board or to an
unsolicited telephone call, there were a dozen cold shoulders, unanswered
faxes, or unfilled promises.
In October 2003, for
example, I contacted the prominent Egyptian thinker Ahmed Kamal Abulmagd -
widely considered one of the most moderate and open-minded of Muslim
theologians, and certainly no Holocaust denier - after his appearance at the
American University of Cairo, where he participated in a public exchange with
the American ambassador. At one point in their discussion, Abulmagd turned to
the ambassador and said: "We all condemn the policies of Hitler and the
Holocaust, but enough is enough. There is a moment of saturation and, let me be
very blunt on this, world Jewry is in danger because of the very irresponsible
policies of the government of Israel, supported by some unaware leaders of the
Jewish community in the United States. I hate to see a day where there is an
unleashing of dormant general anti-Semitism, in Europe, particularly, and maybe
in the United States. But we Arabs are not part of it. We are not part of the
Holocaust. We never persecuted Jews."
In contacting Abulmagd, my
purpose was not to persuade him to repudiate his remarks. On the contrary, I
wanted to ask him to use his good offices in helping me gain access to Egyptian
consular records from the late 1930s. Those files, I believe, may contain
evidence of an "Arab Wallenberg," an Egyptian diplomat who I suspect
provided marriage or birth certificates to German and Austrian Jews, enabling
them to flee to Cairo and from there to freedom in London. Though one might
think Egyptian officialdom would be eager to exploit proof of a great
humanitarian act by an Egyptian diplomat, one that would burnish Egypt's
bruised image in the United States, none of my requests to Cairo policymakers -
some of whom, at the highest levels of government, I have known for more than
15 years - has ever been acknowledged.
That is why I wrote to
Abulmagd - twice. Noting the absence of a single Arab among Yad Vashem's list
of "righteous" non-Jews, I begged for his intercession: "Didn't
some Arabs help or rescue some Jews?" I asked. "And if indeed some
Arabs did rescue some Jews, then isn't this the positive, constructive answer
to Arab Holocaust denial?"
But the taboo against
recognizing any Arab connection to the Holocaust, even one that might celebrate
the deeds of a heroic Arab rescuer, is evidently too strong. I am still waiting
for an answer.
Robert Satloff is
executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. This
article is adapted from his "In Search of Righteous Arabs,"
Commentary, July/August 2004.