Muslim – History of Sorts

Muslims Who Saved Jews During the Holocaust

This may be a bit controversial in light of the current situation, but it is an important subject to be addressed. Nowadays there are those who would want you to believe that all Muslims want to kill all Jews, and vice versa. However, that is not the case, it isn’t the case now and it wasn’t the case during World War II.

I had done a piece on the Palestinian leader Amin Al Husseini, an ally of Adolf Hitler, recently, but I am a great believer in balance, hence I am doing this post today. There were many Muslims who saved Jews during the Holocaust, I will be focusing on a few of them.

The photograph above is of Abdelkader Mesli.

Abdelkader Mesli was born in 1902 in Khemis, French Algeria. When he was 17, he left his native country for France and arrived in Marseille. He worked as a docker, carpenter, mine worker, and salesman. In the early 1930s, he was appointed imam of the Grand Mosque of Paris, a position he held voluntarily. At the same time, he was listed in the records of the North African Affairs Service of the Paris Prefecture, which was responsible for spying and monitoring the activities of North Africans in mainland France.

When World War II broke out, Abdelkader Mesli got involved with Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the mosque, in rescuing Jews by issuing false certificates of Muslim faith. This act saved between 500 and 1600 people according to historians.

In 1942, Abdelkader Mesli was sent to Bordeaux as the Muslim chaplain at the Château du Hâ by Kaddour Benghabrit after Abdelkader Mesli was suspected by the German authorities. He organized escapes there and continued to issue false certificates, despite the suspicions of the Kommandatur. From February 1943 onwards, he became involved in a French Resistance organization by joining the Army Resistance Organization (ORA) In this capacity, he handled forged documents and provided shelter for escaped African soldiers. He had connections with Paul and Roger Valroff, who were his friends and provided assistance. Paul Valroff wrote numerous letters to him, invited him to take care of his son Roger, and expressed his gratitude. For example, on 6 September 1943, Paul Valroff wrote to Abdelkader Mesli:

“I apologize for imposing on you, and I thank you in advance for whatever you will do for a son. I hope to come to Bordeaux very soon and will be delighted to see you again. My dear friend, I send you all my friendship. The staff of the mosque asked me to send their regards to you.”

On 5 July 1944, Abdelkader Mesli was betrayed and arrested alongside Roger Valroff in a restaurant in Bordeaux by the Gestapo, and his home was raided by the French collaborationist police. They confiscated from his home: three suits, an overcoat, two pairs of shoes, six shirts, three pairs of underwear, a dozen handkerchiefs, a gold watch, a gold ring with a stone, and a batch of goods reserved for Muslims.

On August 8, 1944, the Nazis deported Abdelkader Mesli to Dachau. The transport took several weeks. Many of the prisoners did not survive the torturous journey in the middle of summer in southern France, which is why the deportation went down in history as a so-called “ghost train.”

Abdelkader Mesli was held in Dachau until September 1944. He was then transferred to a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he had to do brutal forced labor building an underground armaments project.

The National Socialists held Abdelkader in the Dachau concentration camp until September 1944. They then transferred him to a subcamp of Mauthausen

Despite extensive interrogations and torture, he did not divulge any resistant secrets. He survived the war and died in 1961.

Selahattin Ülkümen was a Turkish diplomat and consul in Rhodes during the Second World War, who assisted many local Jews to escape the Holocaust.

On July 19, 1944, all Jewish males over the age of 16 were ordered to report immediately to German headquarters with their identity cards and work permits. The Turkish consul knew the meaning of “temporary resettlement on a neighboring island.” He visited the German commander General von Kleeman, gambling that he could at least claim jurisdiction over the Turkish Jews. His reason: “The Turkish Republic is a neutral country and not involved in the war by any means.” Ulkumen’s gamble paid off and 42 Jews, some of whom were of doubtful Turkish nationality, were released and remained under his protection. Among the survivors was Maurice Soriano who survived due to his marriage to a Turkish citizen, Viktoria. Daniel Turiel and his wife Mathilde were also among the lucky ones and they said; “The only reason we were saved was through the relentless efforts of the Turkish Consul and the luck of one spouse in every Jewish family holding a Turkish passport.” Mathilde explained how Ulkumen acted on their behalf: Only about 15 men and women were Turkish, but Mr. Ulkumen included in his list 25 to 30 more people who he knew were no longer Turkish citizens since they had let their citizenship lapse. He also insisted that according to Turkish law, spouses of Turkish citizens were considered to be citizens themselves, and demanded their release. By his pretense that all those he listed were Turkish, he was able to save more people. Among those who were saved were Alberto and Renata Amato and their daughter Lina, who were Italian citizens. The remaining 1,700 Jews of Rhodes were herded into three boats and deported to Auschwitz. On August 2, 1944, Turkey ceased its diplomatic relations with Germany, and Ulkumen returned to Turkey. On December 13, 1989, Yad Vashem recognized Selahattin Ulkumen as Righteous among the Nations.

Koçerri, Kasem Jakup Kasem Jakup Koçerri was a farmer and a shephard in the village of Beshisht with business contacts in the city of Vlorë, about 180 km southwest of the capital city of Tirana, near the Adriatic Sea. There, he became acquainted with Jakov Solomoni, with whom he had commercial relations, and his wife and their four children. One of them, Moshe, was a young storekeeper, who on July 4, 1943, married a young Jewish woman of Greek origin, Janet. Four months before their wedding, her family had been sent from Salonika to Auschwitz. After Italy’s surrender and the occupation of Albania by the Germans in September 1943, the Germans began to apply their racial policy against the Jews. One day, when the anti-Jewish measures became harsher, Moshe’s father met urgently with his friend Kasem Jakup and asked him to help hide the young couple, Moshe and Janet. One day in March 1944, when Vlorë was surrounded by the Germans, Kasem Jakup Koçerri came to the Solomoni home in order to collect the couple. He left the horses in the forest, near the city, and under cover of darkness and winter, the three rode for hours until they reached the Koçerri home. Their house was located on a hill from which it was possible to observe what was happening in the vicinity. The arrival of the two “guests” was kept secret by the Koçerri family since they knew that the Germans and collaborators were carrying out searches for hidden Jews. Moshe and Janet Solomoni hid with them for four months, relying on the kindheartedness of their friend Kasem Jakup, until the Liberation. The other members of the Solomoni family also survived. After the war, Kasem Jakup remained in contact with the couple that he had rescued during the period of the German occupation of Albania. Moshe and Janet Solomoni remained in Albania, and only in 1991, after the fall of the communist regime, were able to immigrate to Israel. On August 8, 2000, Yad Vashem recognized Kasem Jakup Koçerri as Righteous Among the Nations.

Finishing up with the words of the Imam, Abdelkader Mesli said, “The worst enemy of man is ignorance.”

Sources

https://arolsen-archives.org/news/abdelkader-mesli-ein-imam-in-der-resistance/

https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/righteous/4017979

https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/righteous/10571260

Click to access Selahattin_%C3%9Clk%C3%BCmen.pdf

https://fr.timesofisrael.com/abdelkader-mesli-limam-parisien-qui-a-sauve-des-juifs-pendant-la-shoah

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Under Beslenei’s Sky: A Tale of Courage—Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum

On December 17, I received an invitation and the privilege to attend a presentation organized by The Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum. The presentation was titled—Under Beslenei’s Sky: A Tale of Courage.

This story is about good people doing what was right despite their differences. It was the rescue of the Leningrad Jewish children in Beslenei on August 24. 1942, in all of Beslenei, Cherkess Autonomous Oblast, Russian SFSR, USSR, when the local Circassian villagers adopted evacuated children from the Leningrad orphanage, most of whom were Jewish, and managed to forge documents with the purpose, to prove to Nazis that the children were of local descent. The majority of Circassians are Muslim.

Following is the recording of the presentation of the unknown heroic story of Beslenei, a small village at the heart of the Caucasus. During the Holocaust, the Circassian-Muslim people of Beslenei adopted orphaned children, some of whom were Jewish, who had fled the siege of Leningrad, putting their entire community at risk.

The panel members were Yigal Cohen, museum CEO and former principal of the Anne Frank High School in Galilee; David Shawgen, academic advisor and researcher at the Circassian Museum in Kfar Kamal; Zoher Thawcho, a Circassian-Israeli who was similarly drawn to this story; and Lana Harshuk, a Circassian-Israeli educator at the Anne Frank High School.

Source

https://www.gfh.org.il/eng

Dr Mohamed Helmy—Righteous Among the Nations

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.

Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader in Mandatory Palestine and Adolf Hitler.

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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A Descendant of Prophet Mohammed who Saved Jews

SI ALI

What happens if you set aside different religious beliefs and ideologies and when you look at only humanity? Hate and indifference disappear, and respect for each other prevails. This was true during the darkest time in history and is still true today.

Prior to the outbreak of World War II, Si Ali Sakkat had been a government minister in Tunisia and had also been the mayor of the capital Tunis. Si Ali Sakkat was a Tunisian nobleman, heir to an ancient liberal family, and a descendant of Prophet Mohammed.

By 1940, he was enjoying retirement on his farm at the base of Jebel Zaghouan.

mountain

The nearby Zaghouan farm was a Vichy and Nazi forced labour camp for Jews. The Jewish slave labourers repaired the airfield, which was a regular target of Allied bombing raids.

labor

The local Tunisian population witnessed how the Nazis who ran the camp beat Jews on a regularly.

During one of those allied bombings, approximately 60 Jews managed to escape the camp and sought refuge at Sakkat’s farm. He hid them and cared for them until Tunisia was liberated by the Allied forces. If the Nazis would have found out he would have more than likely been sentenced to death.

sources

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2016-02-02/ty-article/.premium/the-muslim-schindlers-who-saved-jews-from-the-nazis/0000017f-e028-db22-a17f-fcb99fa10000

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/muslims-who-saved-jews-from-holocaust-commemorated-in-i-am-your-protector-campiagn-a6851356.html

Program

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Abdol Hossein Sardari-Beating the Nazis at their own game.

sardari-main-965x543

An Iranian official risking his life to save Jews? This scenario, while unlikely nowadays, actually happened during the Holocaust.

Iranian diplomat Abdol Hossein Sardari provided critical assistance to Iranian Jews in occupied France (1940-1944). In June 1940, following the German invasion of France, Iranian ambassador Anoushirvan Sepahbodi left for Vichy in the unoccupied zone to reconstitute the Embassy there. This left Sardari, the Consul General of Iran, in charge of consular affairs in Paris. In this capacity, Sardari appealed on several occasions to exempt Iranian and other Central Asian Jews living in German-occupied France from anti-Jewish measures decreed by French and German authorities.

At the beginning of World War II, about 150 Jews from Iran, Afghanistan, and Bukhara (a city in the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan and the former cultural center of the ancient Persian Empire) resided in France. Sharing linguistic and cultural ties, many of these Central Asian Jews, fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, had settled in Paris during the 1920s. Following the German occupation of northern France in 1940, representatives of these three communities presented themselves to Vichy French officials and the German occupation authorities as “Jugutis” (Djougoutes in French). Jugutis were the descendants of Persian Jews who, forced to convert to Islam in 1838, continued to practice Judaism privately in their homes. Official identity papers, such as passports, generally identified Jugutis as Muslims.

Sardari was in charge of the Iranian consular office in Paris in 1942. There was a sizeable community of Iranian Jews in Paris when Adolf Hitler invaded and occupied the city.

synagogue_in_tehran_qajar_period

Leaning on the national socialist perception that Germans were Aryan, Nazi Germany and Iran had an agreement which protected all Iranian citizens against German acts of aggression. Sardari was able to protect Iranian Jews, whose families had been present in Iran since the time of the Persian Empire. (Cyrus the Great personally ordered the Jews of Babylonia to be freed from Babylonian slavery.)

cyrus_ii_le_grand_et_les_hebreux

He very strongly argued this point to the Germans and specifically ascertained that the Iranian Jews were protected under these statutes. The Nazis grudgingly agreed and accordingly, many Persian Jews were saved from harassment and eventually deportation by the Nazi regime.

But Sardari went further. Once he realized the full nature of Nazi ambitions, he began issuing hundreds of Iranian passports for non-Iranian Jews to save them from persecution.

iranian_biometric_passport_cover

Sardari’s plan actually worked. When Jews were forced to wear the yellow Star of David, a directive was issued that Iranian Jews should be exempt. In addition, Sardari gave out between 500 and 1,000 Iranian passports, without the consent of his superiors. This saved 2,000 to 3,000 Jewish lives, as passports were issued for entire families. His actions were later confirmed and applauded by the government of Iran.

Sardari’s later life was blighted by many misfortunes, including the disappearance of his Chinese lover during the Chinese Civil War in 1948, charges of embezzlement by the post-war Iranian Government, and penury in his final years due to the loss of his pension rights and property in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. After a period spent living in a bed-sit in Croydon, he moved to Nottingham where he died in 1981.

Sardari has been honored by Jewish organizations such as the convention in Beverly Hills, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center on multiple occasions.

simon_wiesenthal_center

Sardari never took any credit for what he did. When Yad Vashem asked him in 1978, three years before he died a poor exile in London, about his wartime activities, he responded: “As you may know, I had the pleasure of being the Iranian consul in Paris during the German occupation of France, and as such it was my duty to save all Iranians, including Iranian Jews.

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Forgotten History-The Hardaga & the Kabiljo families:Holocaust and Bosnian Muslim Genocide survivors

hardag

There really isn’t such a thing as a happy Holocaust story but I think this is probably could be seen as a ‘happy’ story.

It doesn’t only portray extreme bravery but also that deep down, good people are the same, regardless of what religious differences they have. Especially in the present time where there are so many negative stories about Muslims , it is important that a story like the one of these 2 families gets told.

The story spans approximately 50 years and is about the Hardaga and Kabiljo(aka Kavilio) families

During the Second World War, the Germans invaded Yugoslavia. After they seized Sarajevo in 1941, the Gestapo opened an office across the street from the home of Mustafa Hardaga, a local furniture salesman.

mustafa

The Nazi occupation was vicious. The city’s old synagogue was looted, 400-year-old Torah scrolls were burned.

At night, the Hardagas could hear the screams of prisoners being tortured in Gestapo jail cells.

Amid the brutality, Hardaga and his wife Zejneba agreed to take in Hardaga’s friend and business partner Yosef Kabiljo(Kavilio), whose own home had been destroyed during a Nazi bombing raid. Kabiljo, his wife and daughter were Jewish. They hid behind clothes in the back of a walk-in closet when the Gestapo came to the Hardaga home to check documents.

“We were only 10 metres away from the Germans and hiding the Kabiljo s right under their noses,” said Salih Hardaga, Sara’s brother, who was born a year before the Germans invaded Yugoslavia.

The Hardagas were conservative Muslims, with the women covering their faces with a veil in the presence of strangers.

“Never before had a strange man stayed with them,” Yosef Kabiljo testified later to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial authority. “They welcomed us with the words: ‘Josef, you are our brother, and your children are like our children. Feel at home and whatever we own is yours.’”

The Hardaga women never again wore veils in front of Kabiljo.

“When I was growing up, my mother Zejneba always said, ‘You can’t control how rich you will be, or how smart or successful you will be,’” Pecanac said. “But she said you can control how good you will be.”

veil

The Kabiljos stayed with the Hardagas until Josef Kavilio was able to move his wife and children to Mostar, a Bosnian city that was under Italian rule.

Kabiljo stayed behind to liquidate his business but he could not escape detection forever. Eventually he was arrested and imprisoned by the Ustasa.

ustas

Because of the heavy snow, the prisoners could not be transferred from Sarajevo to the infamous Jasenovac camp near Zagreb, where the Croatians systematically killed Serbs, Jews and Roma.

Instead the prisoners were taken, with their legs chained, to clear the roads from snow. This is where Zejneba saw Kvilio. Kavilio later testified that he saw her standing at the street corner, her face traditionally veiled, watching the plight of their family friend with tears in her eyes. Undisturbed by the danger, she began to bring food to the prisoners.

Josef Kavilio eventually managed to escape and returned to the Hardaga home. The family welcomed him warmly and nursed him back to health. The Gestapo headquarters were nearby, and the danger was immense. In his testimony Josef described the notices on the walls threatening those who would hide Serbs and Jews with the death penalty. Not wanting to endanger the Hardagas life, Josef decided to flee to Mostar and join his family.

After September 1943, when the Italian areas came under German occupation, the Kavilio family had to move yet again. They fled to the mountains and joined the partisans.

partians

After the war they returned to Sarajevo. Again they stayed with the Hardagas until they could find a place of their own. The Hardagas also returned the jewelry that the Kavilio family had left with them for safekeeping.

Their saviours paid a steep price for helping Jews. Mustafa Hardaga’s Father in Law, Ahmed Sadik, was executed by the Nazis because he helped to forge documents with Christian names for Jewish families like the Kavilios and had hid a Jewish family in his house.

Half a century later, the Hardagas were themselves saved by the Kavilios during the Bosnian Civil War.

Threatened by the continuous shelling of Sarajevo, the Kavilio family appealed to the President of Bosnia to permit their erstwhile saviours to travel to Israel.

In 1992, shattered Bosnia was on fire. The phone lines to Sarajevo were down, leaving friends and family worried about their loved ones. Salih Hardaga, who had moved to Mexico in 1974, watched TV news programs, hoping for a glimpse of his sister or mother in Sarajevo.

In Jerusalem, too, the Kabiljos tuned in to the evening newscasts, unsure whether the Hardagas were still alive. While Mustafa Hardaga had died during the 1960s, the Kabiljos had stayed in touch with Zejneba and Pecanac, who was born in 1957.

They contacted an Israeli journalist who was heading to cover the war. The journalist passed on a message to a local community organization in Sarajevo that the Kabiljo family was searching for Zejneba.

A message was sent back to Israel that Zejneba, then 76, and her youngest daughter Sara were still in Sarajevo.

“There was no talk about leaving Sarajevo because there was no time,” Pecanac said. “One day things were OK. The next, soldiers were surrounding the city, the city was split into sections, and there were UN troops and snipers and bombings.

Pecanac was stunned to hear the Kabiljos were trying to help.

She had heard the full family story only in 1984, when the Kabiljo family asked Yad Vashem to recognize the Hardagas and Ahmed Sadik as Righteous Among the Nations, an honour given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Zejneba at the Hall of Remembrance, Yad Vashem 1985, courtesy of Yad Vashem hardag mem

“My dad had died and my mother didn’t talk about it very much,” Pecanac said of the family’s heroism.

After learning that Zejneba was still alive, the Kabiljos again contacted Yad Vashem and officials agreed to help organize a rescue.

In early 1994, Pecanac, Branimir, Sacha and Zejneba joined 300 other refugees on a convoy of six buses that streaked through the shattered streets of Sarajevo.

“I remember we passed 34 checkpoints, and all the soldiers at the checkpoints wanted were U.S. dollars,” Pecanac said. “But without the help of the Kabiljos, we would not have been on the bus. When Yad Vashem wrote a letter to the president of Bosnia, asking that we be allowed to leave, he said no. It only happened after the Kabiljos managed to get the case all the way to (Israeli Prime Minister) Yitzhak Rabin.

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The Hardaga family was given its choice of destinations. Pecanac and her mother picked Jerusalem.

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The rescue was extraordinary — one family saving another from genocide, only to see the favour returned half a century later.

“Imagine that you are in such a state and need help and you get it from the same family your family saved 50 years earlier,” said Pecanac, who converted to Judaism and now works for Yad Vashem. “It is an amazing story.”

A few months after Zejneba and her family arrived in Jerusalem, they were asked to meet Rabin.

“We went in and talked for a bit and my mother turned to Rabin and said, ‘Can I offer you some advice?’” Pecanac said. “The whole place went quiet. Who was this old woman to give advice to the prime minister of Israel?

“He said OK, and she said, ‘Please, try to make peace in the Middle East. Don’t let Jerusalem become Sarajevo.’”

Forgotten History-Noor Inayat Khan

Nowadays it has become so easy to blame Muslims for all evil in the world. And I get why people think that way, given all the awful acts of terror which have been committed in the name of Islam in the recent past and are still happening.

But the fact is the criminals who commit these acts use Islam for their own twisted political ideology and has very little to do with Islam. The biggest group of victims are Muslims themselves.

Next time you want to say that Muslims are a threat to our western freedom, spare a thought for Muslims like Noor Inayat Khan who gave her life for our Western freedom.

Khan was a wartime British secret agent of Indian descent who was the first female radio operator sent into Nazi-occupied France by the Special Operations Executive (SOE). She was arrested and eventually executed by the Gestapo.

Noor Inayat Khan was born on New Year’s Day 1914 in Moscow to an Indian father and an American mother. She was a direct descendant of Tipu Sultan, the 18th century Muslim ruler of Mysore. Khan’s father was a musician and Sufi teacher. He moved his family first to London and then to Paris, where Khan was educated and later worked writing childrens’ stories. Khan escaped to England after the fall of France and in November 1940 she joined the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force). In late 1942, she was recruited to join SOE as a radio operator. Although some of those who trained her were unsure about her suitability, Nevertheless, her fluent French and her competency in wireless operation—coupled with a shortage of experienced agents—made her a desirable candidate for service in Nazi-occupied France. On 16/17 June 1943, cryptonymed ‘Madeleine’/W/T operator ‘Nurse’ and under the cover identity of Jeanne-Marie Regnier, Assistant Section Officer/Ensign Inayat Khan was flown to landing ground B/20A ‘Indigestion’ in Northern France on a night landing doubleL ysander operation, code named Teacher/Nurse/Chaplain/Monk. She was met by Henri Déricourt who turned out to be a double agent.

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She travelled to Paris, and with two other women, Diana Rowden (code named Paulette/Chaplain), and Cecily Lefort (code named Alice/Teacher), joined the Physician network led by Francis Suttill (code named Prosper).

Over the next month and a half, all the other Physician network radio operators were arrested by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), along with hundreds of Resistance personnel associated with Prosper. Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, head of F Section, later claimed that in spite of the danger, Inayat Khan rejected an offer to return to Britain, although it was certainly in SOE’s interest that she stay in the field in the aftermath of the round-up of their largest network. As the only remaining wireless operator still at large in Paris, Inayat Khan continued to transmit to London messages from agents of what remained of the Prosper/Physician circuit, a network she also worked to keep intact despite the mass arrests of its members. She was now the most wanted British agent in Paris with SD officers sent out to look for her at subway stations, and an accurate description of her widely circulated among German security officers. With wireless detection vans in close pursuit, Inayat Khan could transmit for only twenty minutes at one time in one place, but constantly moving from place to place, she managed to escape capture while maintaining wireless communication with London: “She refused to abandon what had become the most important and dangerous post in France and did excellent work

Inayat Khan was betrayed to the Germans, either by Henri Déricourt or by Renée Garry. Déricourt (code name Gilbert) was an SOE officer and former French Air Force pilot who had been suspected of working as a double agent for the Sicherheitsdienst. Garry was the sister of Henri Garry, Inayat Khan’s organizer in the Cinema network (later renamed Phono).Allegedly paid 100,000 francs, Renée Garry’s actions have been attributed by some to jealousy due to Garry’s suspicion that she had lost the affections of SOE agent France Antelme to Inayat Khan

On or around 13 October 1943, Inayat Khan was arrested and interrogated at the SD Headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch in Paris.

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Though SOE trainers had expressed doubts about her gentle and unworldly character, on her arrest she fought so fiercely that SD officers were afraid of her.She was thenceforth treated as an extremely dangerous prisoner. There is no evidence of her being tortured, but her interrogation lasted over a month. During that time, she attempted escape twice. Hans Kieffer, the former head of the SD in Paris, testified after the war that she did not give the Gestapo a single piece of information, but lied consistently. However other sources indicate that she chatted amiably with an out-of-uniform Alsatian interrogator, and provided personal detail that enabled the SD to answer random checks in the form of questions about her childhood and family.

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Although Inayat Khan did not talk about her activities under interrogation, the SD found her notebooks. Contrary to security regulations, she had copied out all the messages she had sent as an SOE operative (this may have been due to her misunderstanding what a reference to filing meant in her orders, and also the truncated nature of her security course due to the need to insert her into France as soon as possible). Although she refused to reveal any secret codes, the Germans gained enough information from them to continue sending false messages imitating her. London failed to properly investigate anomalies which would have indicated the transmissions were sent under enemy control, in particular the change in the ‘fist’ (the style of the operator’s Morse transmission though according to M R D Foot, the Sicherheitsdienst were quite adept at faking operators’ fists.As a WAAF signaller, Inayat Khan had been nicknamed ‘Bang Away Lulu’ because of her distinctively heavy-handed style, which was said to be a result of chilblains.

As a result of London’s errors, three more agents sent to France were captured by the Germans at their parachute landing, among them Madeleine Damerment, who was later executed.

Sonya Olschanezky (‘Tania’), a locally recruited SOE agent had learnt of Inayat Khan’s arrest, and had sent a message to London through her fiancé, Jacques Weil, telling Baker Street of her capture and warning HQ to suspect any transmissions from ‘Madelaine’. Colonel Maurice Buckmaster ignored the message as unreliable because he did not know who Olschanezky was. As a result, German transmissions from Inayat Khan’s radio continued to be treated as genuine, leading to the unnecessary deaths of SOE agents, including Olschanezky herself, who was executed at Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp on 6 July 1944.

When Vera Atkins investigated the deaths of missing SOE agents, she initially confused Inayat Khan with Olschanezky (they were similar in appearance), who was unknown to her, believing that Inayat Khan had been killed at Natzweiler, correcting the record only when she discovered Inayat Khan’s fate at Dachau.

On 25 November 1943, Inayat Khan escaped from the SD Headquarters, along with fellow SOE Agents John Renshaw Starr and Leon Faye, but was captured in the vicinity. There was an air raid alert as they escaped across the roof. Regulations required a count of prisoners at such times and their escape was discovered before they could get away. After refusing to sign a declaration renouncing future escape attempts, Inayat Khan was taken to Germany on 27 November 1943 “for safe custody” and imprisoned at Pforzheim in solitary confinement as a “Nacht und Nebel” (“Night and Fog”: condemned to “Disappearance without Trace”) prisoner, in complete secrecy. For ten months, she was kept there shackled at hands and feet.

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She was classified as “highly dangerous” and shackled in chains most of the time. As the prison director testified after the war, Inayat Khan remained uncooperative and continued to refuse to give any information on her work or her fellow operatives, although in her despair at the appalling nature of her confinement, other prisoners could hear her crying at night. However, by the ingenious method of scratching messages on the base of her mess cup, she was able to inform another inmate of her identity, giving the name of Nora Baker and the London address of her mother’s house

On 11 September 1944, Inayat Khan and three other SOE agents from Karlsruhe prison,Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman, and Madeleine Damerment, were moved to the Dachau Concentration Camp. In the early morning hours of 13 September 1944, the four women were executed by a shot to the back of the head. Their bodies were immediately burned in the crematorium. An anonymous Dutch prisoner, who emerged in 1958, contended that Inayat Khan was cruelly beaten by a high-ranking SS officer named Wilhelm Ruppert before being shot from behind; the beating may have been the actual cause of her death. She may also have been sexually assaulted while in custody. Her last word has been recorded as, “Liberté”.

Inayat Khan was posthumously awarded the George Cross in 1949, and a French Croix de Guerre with silver star

As she was still considered “missing” in 1946, she could not be recommended for a Member of the Order of the British Empire,but was Mentioned in Despatches instead in October 1946 Inayat Khan was the third of three Second World War FANY members to be awarded the George Cross, Britain’s highest award for gallantry not in the face of the enemy.

At the beginning of 2011, a campaign was launched to raise £100,000 for a bronze bust of her in central London close to her former home. It was claimed that this would be the first memorial in Britain to either a Muslim or an Asian woman,but Inayat Khan had already been commemorated on the FANY memorial in St Paul’s Church, Wilton Place, Knightsbridge, London,which lists the 52 members of the Corps who gave their lives on active service.

The unveiling of the bronze bust by HRH The Princess Royal took place on 8 November 2012 in Gordon Square Gardens, London.

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