In search of an Arab Schindler

Did anyone else know of the "104 labour and punishment camps built by the Nazis and their allies in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco"? I didn't till I read this book review:

In search of an Arab Schindler
The Sunday Times
February 25, 2007
Howard Jacobson

Review of:
Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands
by Robert Satloff

This book has a twofold ambition: first, to remind us that the Nazis and their collaborators exported their persecution of Jews to Arab north Africa; second, to find an Arab Oscar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg who stood out against that persecution, and to have him honoured as a “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, Israel’s monument to the Holocaust, where no Arab has yet been recognised. Thus it is not simply as a historian that Robert Satloff sets about raking through the ashes, but as a man on a mission of peace — to discover evidence of as much or as little humanity as it will take for all parties to Arab/Jewish hostilities over the past 60 years to feel better about one another.

Considering which, Among the Righteous is a surprisingly muted book — an act of gentlemanly civility amid the shouting that seems to concede its ineffectiveness almost before it starts. Indeed, so careful is Satloff not to raise our hopes that he dashes them before the opening sentence is cold on the page. “Did any Arabs,” he asks, in a diminuendo of expectation, “save any Jews during the Holocaust?” Do I hear a hundred, do I hear fifty, do I hear one?

It all but gives the game away. Whatever humanity he is going to find among those ashes, it won’t put the world to rights. Such realism is not a general reflection on the character of Arabs. Satloff has an axe to grind, but it is not that one. As the search progresses — from anecdote to official record to actual sites of recorded human kindness — we are not surprised to learn that Arabs behaved the way everyone behaves in time of war. Some were benevolent, some were brutes, some just looked the other way.

What makes it difficult for Satloff to return from his travels and researches with evidence more compelling than this is the silent world in which he is obliged to operate. A silence of general ignorance — for who now knows or recalls that the Holocaust extended its reach to Arab countries, or could name a single one of the 104 labour and punishment camps built by the Nazis and their allies in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, or has heard of the tombeaux , or torture tombs of Morocco, where Jews, under the supervision of Arab guards, were ordered to lie in their own waste for weeks on end? A silence of fading memory and disappearing witness. But above all a silence of refusal typified by the “forbidden room” of the library at the University of Jordan where Satloff did his doctoral research, and that contained books frowned upon by the ruling royal family. In the instance of Satloff’s search for evidence of Arab kindness to Jew, the “forbidden room” is Arab resolve to wipe every trace of the Holocaust from its consciousness. And if that means wiping out every trace of its own humanity to Jews caught up in the tragedy, so be it.

“Soon after 9/11,” Satloff writes — and it’s here that his nerves begin to fray — “I surveyed Holocaust and tolerance-related institutions and found that not a single module, text, or programme for Holocaust education existed in an Arab country, even within the context of studying 20th-century history, modern genocides, or tolerance education.” This is not Holocaust denial but Holocaust negation. Because, in Arab eyes, the Holocaust was deployed to legitimise Zionism and Zionism was the cause of the Arabs’ own “Catastrophe”, it had to be expunged. So much Satloff knew before he started on his trek to find his Arab Schindler. But what he had not prepared himself for was how deep this negation ran even away from official discourse, and how hard it was therefore going to be to find friends or relatives of a Righteous Arab prepared to acknowledge the good he’d done, let alone accept thanks for it.

Thus the desolating emptiness at the heart of Satloff’s quest. He hears stories of heroic generosity but the corroborations he seeks are walled up in that “forbidden room”. When he finally tracks down the grandson of Si Ali Sakkat, a Tunisian Arab of noble descent, who threw open his farm to a group of Jews fleeing a nearby labour camp, lodging, feeding and protecting them, he is warned not to discuss these actions in front of the present farm labourers, who “just would not understand”. Even when an acknowledgment of past helpfulness is made, it is accompanied by irritation, embarrassment, blankness. Our times have seen many examples of history airbrushing what it finds inconvenient. But things are terrible indeed when goodness itself becomes a guilty secret to be banished from our sight.

That no Arab might want to be honoured as Righteous in an Israeli memorial to the Holocaust Satloff knows and understands, but cannot quite bear to admit. In this, there is something of the Don Quixote about him, foisting a troublesome idealism on an unwilling world. And it would be ungenerous not to allow that he does, at the last, put together a modest collection of little, unnamed, unremembered acts of kindness and of love, even identifying, just about, a solitary Schindler — Khaled Abdelwahhab, a wealthy, hedonistic Tunisian, who spirited away a Jewish family and hid them, at great risk to himself, until the Germans left.

No less importantly, Satloff’s researches have played a part in getting the German government to agree compensation to survivors of almost 100 labour camps in Arab north Africa. Which is itself a contribution to our education into the “Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands”. But how long it will be before the Arab world accepts that it, too, was touched by the Holocaust — and by that I do not only mean catastrophically — and how long it will be before both sides accept that there is no hope of peace until each agrees to swim in the other’s past, is anybody’s guess. Among the Righteous taps politely on the door. But there is no answer from the “forbidden room”.