"Among the Righteous" updated

"Among the Righteous" updated
I just finished watching "Among the Righteous" - it's a very

interesting film, not only telling the stories of some Arabs

who saved Jews in North Africa, but also asking the

question of why this has not been researched and

remembered. These are my notes on the film:

Among the Righteous

More than one hundred concentration camps were set up

in North Africa, by the Vichy French, the Nazis, and the

Italians. A camp in Libya named Giado was where the most

Jews died of all of the camps. An interesting point made by

Satloff is that even though knowledge of these camps had

been forgotten for a long time, the movie Casablanca

(made during the war) mentions concentration camps at a

couple of points, so their existence was certainly known at

the time.

One example of a righteous person whom Satloff found

was an Arab nobleman named Ali Sikkat, in Tunisia. During

fighting in 1943, sixty Jews were being kept in a labor

camp fled the camp in the middle of a battle between the

Allies and the Axis. Their lives were saved by Ali Sikkat,

whose story was published already fifty years ago.

Satloff said that his search for a righteous Arab was

politically loaded: why don’t we know these stories? Arabs

don’t want to be found – it became toxic in many Arab

countries to let it be known that you’d helped Jews. The

problem is that Arab sympathy for the Palestinian people

has prevented these stories from being unearthed and told,

in order not to give support to Israel.

Historically speaking, Jews in Muslim lands lived as second

class citizens (admittedly, usually better than the situation

of Jews living in Christian countries). Jews were under legal

prescriptions (as dhimmis who had to pay the jizya to gain

legal protection), and from time to time there was violence

against them. In the 1930s, the Jews of North Africa faced

a new threat – fascism and antisemitism.

The only Holocaust memorial monument in all of North

Africa commemorates a group of Tunisian Jews who were

deported and killed in Europe – Joseph, Gilbert, Jean

Scemla. Gilbert went to the Ecole Polytechnique (highest

French university), and fought with the French against the

Nazis in 1940.

France’s Vichy government was almost as antisemitic as

the German government. After the fall of France, Gilbert

rejoined his family in Tunis, since he was no longer at home

in France. But North Africa was becoming less hospitable to

Jews – the film shows images of Petain, and the fascist

salute.
The strict quotas of France’s antisemitic laws were

imposed in French North Africa. Jewish businesses were

confiscated, Jews were barred from the professions,

Jewish children were kicked out of schools, and Jews were

stripped of their citizenship.

The Vichy government established harsh internment camps

in Algeria and Morocco, in the Sahara. The
Jewish prisoners were mostly from central Europe, people

who had fled to North Africa from the Nazis in Europe.

Satloff relays testimonies from Polish Jewish survivors who

were liberated by the British. One of the tasks laid upon the

prisoners was to build the trans-Sahara railway. A couple

of the camps in Morocco were in Bergen and Tendrara,

where people died of starvation, insects, exposure, and

illness.

In beginning of 1942, Rommel (general of the Afrika Korps)

entered Egypt. Hitler ordered him to hold North Africa.

Operation Torch, the beginning of the Allied

counteroffensive against the Nazis, landed American and

British troops in North Africa. The video shows the war

cemetery in Tunis, with the graves of 6,000 American

troops (I never knew this).

German troops invaded Tunisia - it was the only Arab

country to be occupied by the Nazis. Once the Germans

entered Tunisia, they began the usual routine of

persecuting the Jews. The SS commander in Tunis was

Walter Rauf, the Nazi commander who had been involved

in organizing the mobile gas killing vans in eastern Europe.

In December, 1942, Rauf rounded up Jews in Tunis. Jewish

laborers were forced to wear the yellow star.

How did Arabs react to the persecution of their Jewish

neighbors? Most were bystanders, a few made their hatred

heard – “you Jews, you Yids, will all have your throats cut.”

Some Arabs enlisted in the German army, others

volunteered to guard the camps, and a few rescued Jews

from Nazi persecution.

Joseph Naccache said that his neighbors had shielded him.

Satloff found his house and the hammam (bathhouse)

where he had been protected. Why did they protect the

Jews? Because Jews and Muslims were like brothers

(speaking to the son of the man who protected

Naccacche).

Satloff showed the marble mausoleum of King Mohammed

V of Morocco, who was king during WWII. He defied the

Vichy authorities and said that in his kingdom there were

no Jews or Muslims – only Moroccan citizens. The Vichy

authorities wanted Moroccan Jews to wear the yellow star,

but the king refused, saying that he too would wear the

yellow star. In Algeria there were Muslim religious

objections to Vichy laws against the Jews. An

announcement was made in the mosques forbidding any

Muslim believer from serving as a custodian of confiscated

Jewish property. The newly crowned king of Tunisia under

Nazi rule told the Jews he thought of them as part of his

family.

To return to the Scemla family. They moved to the seaside

town of Hammamat. Gilbert and Jean decided to fight with

the French resistance. They then tried to escape, with the

help of Hassan Vergany, who was a friend of the family.

Vergany turned them into the Germans, and they were

arrested outside of the German headquarters of Rommel

himself. Joseph Scemla and his two sons were sent to the

old Turkish prison in Tunis. In April 1943 they were sent to

Dachau in Germany with 50 other prisoners.
It was a year before the Germans decided on their fate.

Satloff then recounted the story of Khaled Abdul Wahad,

who owned a farm in Tunisia. Annie Bouqris told of this

Arab landowner who saved her life and the life of her

family. His daughter is still alive, and she said that at that

time she knew that there were some Jewish families on

the farm.

Edmee Masliah was told that her family’s home was being

taken by the Nazis. Her family took refuge in an

abandoned olive oil factory along with other Jewish

families. Khaled wined and dined the German soldiers and

learned that one of them had his eye on a Jewish girl.

Khaled went to the oil press factory and told the Jews they

had to leave immediately, and he led them to his farm,

where they stayed in the stables. This should have been a

perfect hiding place for the Jews, but soon after they

arrived, a German regiment pitched its tents right on the

edge of his property. Khaled told them not to wear their

Jewish stars, so no one would know they were Jewish.

One night when the men were away doing forced labor,

the women and children almost came to grief. Khaled was

still entertaining Germans to keep informed; a drunken

German wandered off into the Bouqris family’s bedroom

and threatened to rape one of the girls. He told them he

was going to kill them that night. At that moment Khaled

showed up and led away the German from the Jews.

That spring the German army was caught in a pincer

between the British and American armies. Hundreds of

thousands of German soldiers were captured. The ordeal

of North African Jews was almost over. Satloff showed a

film clip of Jews in Tunisia taking off the yellow stars.

To return to Joseph Scemla and his sons: they were

transferred to the prison at Halle, Germany, and all were

condemned to death. (Vergany was also condemned to 14

years in jail when the Free French took over Tunisia after

the defeat of the Germans in 1943).

When Satloff lectures in Arab countries about the

Holocaust, some Arabs yell at him, and say why are we

talking about the Holocaust of 60 years ago instead of the

Holocaust of the Palestinian Arabs today (he shows a clip

of man who left his lecture yelling at him). A Palestinian

Arab woman says we can now make a choice for peace,

but many Arabs don’t want to recognize the Holocaust out

of the fear that it means the acceptance of Israel.

In Israel – Satloff asks why haven’t we looked for Arab

rescuers? He presents more stories from Tunisian

survivors – about how they were saved from Germans by

Arab neighbors. Satloff is trying to get Khaled Abdul Wahad

recognized as one of the Righteous – but Yad Vashem has

refused, out of doubt that he risked his life for Jews (which

is required to declare someone a Righteous Gentile).

Volcano in Iceland -Natural Accidents

The Fimmvoruhald volcano erupting at Iceland's

Eyjafjallajökull glacier, earlier this week. (Don't ask me to

pronounce either name - when I listen to Eyjafjallajökull

being pronounced via Slate or Wikipedia, it sounds very

little like what it looks like).

I was living in Seattle in 1980 when Mount St. Helens blew

(see the website for the Mount St. Helens National Volcano

Monument for more information).

The winds never blew the ash cloud into Seattle, but

Portland was hit several times by the ash when the wind

blew in the right direction. It was still very dramatic - you

could see the huge column of ash for a long time from

Seattle. I never did visit the volcano, but one of the tourist

souvenirs one could buy soon afterwards were little glass

vials of volcano ash. I bought one but have no idea what

happened to it.

Human Rights Watch - Obsession with Israel

The Sunday Times (London) has just published an article

on Human Rights Watch's most controversial

ex-employee, Marc Garlasco (whose hobby was collecting

Nazi memorabilia). The article also nails HRW on their

obsession with Israel/Palestine above other conflict zones

in the world.
Every year, Human Rights Watch puts out up to 100

glossy reports — essentially mini books — and 600-700

press releases, according to Daly, a former journalist for

The Independent.

Some conflict zones get much more coverage than others.

For instance, HRW has published five heavily publicised

reports on Israel and the Palestinian territories since the

January 2009 war.

In 20 years they have published only four reports on the

conflict in Indian-controlled Kashmir, for example, even

though the conflict has taken at least 80,000 lives in these

two decades, and torture and extrajudicial murder have

taken place on a vast scale. Perhaps even more tellingly,

HRW has not published any report on the postelection

violence and repression in Iran more than six months after

the event.

When I asked the Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson

if HRW was ever going to release one, she said: “We have

a draft, but I’m not sure I want to put one out.” Asked the

same question, executive director Kenneth Roth told me

that the problem with doing a report on Iran was the

difficulty of getting into the country.

I interviewed a human-rights expert at a competing

organisation in Washington who did not wish to be named

because “we operate in a very small world and t’s not

done to criticise other human-rights organisations”. He told

me he was “not surprised” that HRW has still not produced

a report on the violence in Iran: “They are thinking about

how it’s going to be used politically in Washington. And it’s

not a priority for them because Iran is just not a bad guy

that they are interested in highlighting. Their hearts are not

in it. Let’s face it, the thing that really excites them is

Israel.”

Noah Pollak, a New York writer who has led some of the

criticisms against HRW, points out that it cares about

Palestinians when maltreated by Israelis, but is less

concerned if perpetrators are fellow Arabs. For instance, in

2007 the Lebanese army shelled the Nahr al Bared refugee

camp near Tripoli (then under the control of Fatah al Islam

radicals), killing more than 100 civilians and displacing

30,000. HRW put out a press release — but it never

produced a report.

Such imbalance was at the heart of a public dressing-down

that shook HRW in October. It came from the

organisation’s own founder and chairman emeritus, the

renowned publisher Robert Bernstein, who took it to task

in The New York Times for devoting its resources to open

and democratic societies rather than closed ones.

(Originally set up as Helsinki Watch, the group’s original

brief was to expose abuses of human rights behind the iron

curtain.)

“Nowhere is this more evident than its work in the Middle

East,” he wrote. “The region is populated by authoritarian

regimes with appalling human-rights records. Yet in recent

years Human Rights Watch has written far more

condemnations of Israel… than of any other country in the

region.”

Bernstein pointed out that Israel has “a population of

7.4m, is home to at least 80 human-rights organisations, a

vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a

judiciary that frequently rules against the government…and

probably more journalists per capita than any other

country in the world… Meanwhile the Arab and Iranian

regimes rule over some 350m people and most remain

brutal, closed and autocratic”.

Bernstein concluded that if HRW did not “return to its

founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it…

its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important

role in the world significantly diminished”. HRW’s response

was ferocious — and disingenuous. In their letters to the

paper, Roth and others made it sound as if Bernstein had

said that open societies and democracies should not be

monitored at all.
It turns out that even Garlasco was not as enthused about

the anti-Israel line of HRW as his bosses in New York

wanted him to be:
Associates of Garlasco have told me that there had long

been tensions between Garlasco and HRW’s Middle East

Division in New York — perhaps because he sometimes

stuck his neck out and did not follow the HRW line.

Garlasco himself apparently resented what he felt was

pressure to sex up claims of Israeli violations of laws of

war in Gaza and Lebanon, or to stick by initial assessments

even when they turned out to be incorrect.

In June 2006, Garlasco had alleged that an explosion on a

Gaza beach that killed seven people had been caused by

Israeli shelling. However, after seeing the details of an

Israeli army investigation that closely examined the

relevant ballistics and blast patterns, he subsequently told

the Jerusalem Post that he had been wrong and that the

deaths were probably caused by an unexploded munition in

the sand. But this went down badly at Human Rights Watch

HQ in New York, and the admission was retracted by an

HRW press release the next day.
Emphasis mine.

New York Times, June 10, 1945 - Estimate of number of Jews murdered

The New York Times reported on June 10, 1945, about the

number of Jews killed by the Nazis. Since this is such an

early report, some of the information in this article was

later known to be inaccurate, but this is the first version of

what happened to the Jews of Europe under the Nazis.
80% OF REICH JEWS MURDERED BY NAZIS
All Those Left in Europe were Marked for Death by 1946,

AMG [Allied Military Government] Investigation Shows
Only 150,000 Survied
Extermination Plan Revealed - Russians Estimate Several

Million Died in East

FRANKFURT ON MAIN, Germany, June 8 (Delayed) (U.P.) -

The Nazis exterminated at least 80 percent of Germany's

Jews, and every remaining Jew in occupied Europe was

marked for murder before the summer of 1946, it was

revealed today.

It now is possible to give the full story of the Nazis' plan to

wipe out all of Europe's 12,000,000 Jews. Allied Military

Government authorities, after a painstaking study,

reported that a majority of the Jews in Germany met

death between 1939 and 1942. Russian officials estimate

several million Jews were exterminated at concentration

camps in Poland and White Russia during the German

occupation.

On the basis of this information, it is believed that less than

20 percent, or about 150,000 of the original group in the

Reich, survived the reign of terror. These survivors are

being returned to their homes as soon as possible.

Germans who dispossessed them are being ousted. In

most cases, this is done without serious friction, despite

the years of intensive anti-Semitic propaganda.

Synagogues Reopened

In several cities, including Aachen, Cologne, and Frankfort

on Main, synagogues have been reopened and Jewish

services conducted for the first time since November,

1938.

Some homeless Jews are cared for by the United Nations

Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Included are 500

Jewish children, mostly between the ages of 15 and 17,

but some as young as 10. They were rescued from the

Buchenwald camp and now are at Thionville in Lorraine, in

the French zone.

The Nazis' master plan was engineered by Dr. Alfred

Rosenberg, reportedly an Allied prisoner. He was aided by

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Gestapo Chief

Heinrich Himmler. The plan originally called for a "Jew-free

Reich" by April 1, 1942, as a birthday present to Adolf

Hitler, but it was slowed down by transportation difficulties.

Its first stage began after Poland fell in 1939. Jews were to

be used as slave laborers in war factories built in that

country. They were to die gradually of starvation, disease

and cold. The first contingent of Jews from Germany was

rounded up in Stettin, Cologne and Frankfort on Main -

about 50,000 in all. They were shipped to Lublin in October

and November, 1939. Transportation trouble set in and

only a few thousand were deported eastward during the

next two years.

Few left unmolested

The drive began in earnest in September, 1941. It

continued full blast until scarcely a Jew was left unmolested

in Germany or any occupied country. In Berlin the Nazis

began in 1941 to deport bout 20,000 persons eastward

each month. They were stripped, searched, robed and then

packed in trucks and rail cars. Some worked in airplane and

textile plants. Others were thrown into ghettos. Thousands

went straight to extermination camps.

Relatives and friends in the Reich seldom if ever heard of

them again. More than once the trains were stopped and

all Jews were ordered out and massacred.

The third stage of the program was launched early in 1943,

well after the original deadline for the whole plan. The Nazis

rounded up and deported Jews from France, Belgium, the

Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Some

were sent to Poland and others to concentration camps in

Germany. Tens of thousands were killed monthly in these

camps. The Nazis in 1943 began emptying the ghettos of

Warsaw, Riga, Lublin and other large cities, and started

systematic extermination by gas.

UNRRA officials expressed the belief that if the war had

lasted another year, the Nazis might have come very close

to their objective of wiping out all Jews in Europe.

Starvation Still Reported

The Vaad Hatzala Emergency Committee, with

headquarters at 32 Nassau Street, disclosed yesterday

that Jewish survivors of Nazi horror camps, freed but

temporarily residing there until they can be repatriated or

emigrated, "are living under conditions bordering upon

starvation." The committee said that it had received word

of the plight of the Jewish survivors from Isaac Sternbuch,

its representative in Switzerland, who made a cabled plea

for relief funds.

Mr. Sternbuch said all available food stocks purchased

abroad with Vaad Hatzala funds already had been

dispatched on International Red Cross trucks to

concentration camps at Landsberg, Dachau, Mauthausen

and Theresienstadt.