Arnold Reisman is an engineer and a retired professor of operations research at Case Western Reserve University. Born in Lodz in 1934, he came to the United States after World War II and is the author of numerous books about Holocaust refugees in Turkey, including Turkey’s Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk’s Vision (New Academia, 2006).<\/p>\n
Turkey is now center stage in many discussions and policy debates worldwide. \u00a0When it comes to the State of Israel and Turkey\u2019s small remaining Jewish community, the news coming out of Turkey is not good.<\/p>\n
But what about the historical relationship between Jews and Turks?\u00a0 Most historians are quite aware that Jews lived and prospered throughout the Ottoman Empire, and, until the last decade of the Empire\u2019s existence, they prospered in Palestine as well.\u00a0 But what about the Holocaust, which took place outside of Turkey\u2019s borders?<\/p>\n
Ask a historian what Turkey\u2019s role in World War II and most will answer that Turkey was neutral. \u00a0That is correct\u2014at least until Turkey declared war on Germany and Japan on February 23, 1945.<\/p>\n
Ask a historian what Turkey\u2019s role in saving Jews during the Holocaust was and most will say, \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d \u00a0Some will be very negative and blame Turkey for the Struma<\/em>\u2014a derelict ship carrying over seven hundred illegal refugees from Romania to Palestine, all but one of whom perished when the ship was towed out of Istanbul by the Turkish Coast Guard and sent adrift in the Black Sea. \u00a0Their facts are correct, but the reasons for the tragedy are in great part misdirected. \u00a0Turkey had a law which allowed transit rights through its territorial waters for all those who had valid visas to other destinations. \u00a0Even after lengthy negotiations spanning three continents, however, Great Britain refused to provide such visas. \u00a0For reasons still unknown, the ship was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine.<\/p>\n Ask a historian if any ships succeeded in transiting Turkey\u2019s territorial waters with Jewish refugees and reached Palestine [illegally] prior the formation of Israel as a state in 1948, and most will say, \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d \u00a0The fact is that a number of ships did so succeed. \u00a0Among these waere the Velos<\/em> in 1934; the Draga\/Eli<\/em> in 1938; the Assimi,<\/em> the Rim\/Aghios Nickolaos IV<\/em>, the Astir\/Marsis,<\/em> the Parita<\/em>, the Tiger Hill<\/em> and the Sakarya <\/em>in 1939; the Marien <\/em>in 1941; and the Milka I,<\/em> Milka II, <\/em>the Kazbek, <\/em>the Belasitsa, <\/em>and the Salahattin<\/em> in 1944. \u00a0A number of ships with Jewish immigrants also transited Turkey between the end of the war and the formation of the State of Israel in 1948.<\/p>\n Ask a historian what Turkey\u2019s role was in saving nearly two hundred eminent intellectuals and providing them with jobs commensurate with their academic stature and most will have no idea, even though at least two books have been published on the subject in English (Turkey and the Holocaust<\/em> by S.J. Shaw and Turkey\u2019s Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and<\/em> Atat\u00fcrk’s Vision<\/em> by Arnold Reisman)<\/p>\n Tell a historian that among those so saved was Arthur von Hippel, the acknowledged father of nanotechnology; Erich Auerbach, who while in Turkey penned the Mimesis<\/em>, a seminal text that laid the foundation for a unified theory of representation that spans the entire history of Western literature; Benno Landsberger and Hans G. G\u00fcterbock, who after the war made the University of Chicago\u2019s Oriental Institute world-famous; Dr. Rudolph Nissen, famous for developing a widely used operation to prevent esophageal reflux and who performed an exploratory laparotomy on Albert Einstein, and most historians will be astonished to hear about it.<\/p>\n Lastly, ask a historian about the role of Turkish diplomats in saving close to three thousand Jews with Turkish connections living in France and nearly all will say, \u201cI have never heard of it.\u201d Yet in my forthcoming book Ambassador and a Mentsch: The Story of a Turkish Diplomat in Vichy France<\/em>, <\/em>I found, <\/em>using Yad Vashem\u2019s official population data, that a French Jew without Turkish roots had a 3.7 greater chance of dying in Hitler\u2019s ovens than a French Jew who had Turkish connections. \u00a0The reason was the intervention of the Turkish legation staff in both occupied and in Vichy France. \u00a0Headed by Ambassador Behic Erkin, the diplomats worked night and day to save Jews, and they did this against the will of their government in Ankara. Thus they were risking their careers while often risking their lives. For this they deserve to be recognized as Righteous Among the Nations even if it means that Yad Vashem will have to change its rules of how these selections are made. \u00a0The law of large numbers should be substituted for the three survivor testimonies required in the past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Arnold Reisman Arnold Reisman is an engineer and a retired professor of operations research at Case Western Reserve University. Born in Lodz in 1934, he came to the United States after World War II and is the author of numerous books about Holocaust refugees in Turkey, including Turkey’s Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":52500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,922],"tags":[9721],"class_list":["post-19186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-armenian-question","category-world","tag-armenian-question"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}