When you opened your Google page today, you would have seen a doodle celebrating the 122nd birthday of the birthday of Dr Mohamed Helmy. Before I go into the important story of this great man, I want to highlight a disturbing trend that is becoming more and more of a problem. Warnings are now given about the Holocaust. When I opened the doodle this morning it opened up this warning for me.
Not only is this disrespectful to those who were murdered during the Holocaust, but also to the survivors and indeed to the heroes like Dr Mohamed Helmy, because it diminishes the good work they have done.
Dr Mohamed Helmy is the first Arab to be recognized as a righteous person by Yad Vashem for his courageous actions during World War II.
He was born on July 25, 1901, to an Egyptian father and a German mother in Khartoum, the present-day capital of Sudan. Helmy moved to Germany in 1922, where he studied medicine. After completing his studies, he went to work at the Robert Koch Hospital in Berlin. He became head of the urology department.
Helmy witnessed the dismissal of Jewish doctors from the hospital following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the implementation of anti-Jewish legislation. According to Nazi racial laws, Helmy was classified as a “Hamite” after Ham, the son of Noah in the Old Testament. This term was adopted from 19th-century racial science and used to classify natives of North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the historical region of South Arabia. Those classified as Hamitic were considered non-Aryan and subject to harassment and persecution.
Helmy’s colleagues were also aware that the consultant was continuing to treat Jewish patients — even driving out to their homes during work hours
Helmy was fired from the hospital in 1938 and barred from practising medicine. , and was also not allowed to marry his German fiancée, Annie Ernst. Moreover, in 1939 and again in 1940 he was arrested together with other Egyptian nationals but released a year later because of health problems.
Most of the Egyptians interned in Wülzburg were not released until June 1941. The Egyptian embassy was able to secure Helmy’s early release in 1940 due to his poor health. Until May 1941, he was forced to report to the police twice a day and provide proof every four weeks that he was unfit for internment.
After his release, Helmy was conscripted to the practice of Dr Johannes Wedekind in Charlottenburg. While there, he wrote sick notes for foreign workers to help them return home and also for Germans to help them avoid conscription for heavy labour or militia service.
Despite being constantly targeted by the regime, Helmy spoke out against Nazi policies, and notwithstanding the great danger, risked his life and helped his Jewish friends. When the deportations of the Jews from Berlin began, and Anna Boros (Gutman after the war), a family friend, was in need of a hiding place, Helmy brought her to a cabin he owned in the Berlin neighbourhood of Buch, which became her safe haven until the end of the war. At times of danger when he was under police investigation, Helmy would arrange for her to hide elsewhere. “A good friend of our family, Dr Helmy, hid me in his cabin in Berlin-Buch from 10 March until the end of the war. As of 1942 I no longer had any contact with the outside world. The Gestapo knew that Dr Helmy was our family physician, and they knew that he owned a cabin in Berlin-Buch,” Anna Gutman wrote after the war. “He managed to evade all their interrogations. In such cases he would bring me to friends where I would stay for several days, introducing me as his cousin from Dresden. When the danger would pass, I would return to his cabin… Dr Helmy did everything for me out of the generosity of his heart and I will be grateful to him for eternity.”
Helmy also provided assistance to Boros’ mother, Julianna; her stepfather, Georg Wehr; and her grandmother, Cecilie Rudnik. He arranged for Rudnik to be hidden in the home of Frieda Szturmann, a German friend of his. For over a year, Szturmann hid and shared her food rations with the elderly woman.
In 1943, Helmy was summoned to the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, the notorious Berlin headquarters of the SS. He was tasked with providing Muslim guests including the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, with medical care.
Helmy arranged for Boros to hide elsewhere, doing everything in his power to protect her. He obtained a certificate from the Central Islamic Institute in Berlin attesting to Boros’ conversion to Islam and also arranged for a marriage certificate (in Arabic) stating that she was married to an Egyptian man in a ceremony held in Helmy’s home.
In 1944, Julianna Wehr was arrested and during her interrogation, revealed that Helmy was hiding her daughter, Anna. Helmy immediately took Boros to Szturmann’s home. Helmy had Boros write him a letter stating that she had deceived him about her true identity and was leaving to search for her mother and to seek out her aunt in Dessau. Helmy was able to avoid arrest by showing the letter to the Gestapo.
Thanks to the help and courage of Dr Helmy and Frieda Szturmann the four family members survived the Holocaust. After the war, they immigrated to the United States, but never forgot their rescuers, and in the 1950s and early 1960’s wrote letters on their behalf to the Berlin Senate so that they would be honoured as rescuers of Jews.
Dr Helmy remained in Berlin and was finally able to marry his fiancée. He died in 1982. Frieda Szturmann passed away in 1962.
In 1960, Anna, who emigrated to the United States after the war, swore an affidavit requesting Berlin’s mayor honour Helmy. He was, she said, a “wonderful human being” who had never sought gratitude for his wartime bravery. While Helmy had still not been recognized at the time of his death in 1982, 30 years later, in 2013, Yad Vashem decided to honour the doctor, making him the first Arab to join the list of the “Righteous Among the Nations.” Helmy’s relatives in Cairo, however, refused to accept an award issued by Israel.
The Israeli filmmaker Taliya Finkel was researching Helmy’s story since 2014. In 2017 her film “Mohamed and Anna – In Plain Sight” was released on the Israeli TV channel Kan 11. Finkel had located and made contact with Helmy’s nephew Dr Nasser Kotby, who agreed to participate in a new film and to be the 1st Arab to ever talk about the holocaust in a film. Finkel offered Dr Kotby to accept the Yad Vashem award in Berlin and Kotby agreed. He is the 1st Arab to ever receive the Righteous Among the Nations award in a ceremony that took place on October 27, 2018.
sources
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/mohamed-helmy
https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/helmy-szturmann.html
https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-an-egyptian-doctor-saved-a-jewish-teen-in-nazi-berlin/
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/dr-mohamed-helmy
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