{"id":21957,"date":"2010-09-13T05:36:42","date_gmt":"2010-09-13T03:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=21957"},"modified":"2014-01-05T20:45:22","modified_gmt":"2014-01-05T18:45:22","slug":"turkeys-unknown-schindlers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2010\/09\/13\/turkeys-unknown-schindlers\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkey\u2019s Unknown Schindlers"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Arnold Reisman
\narnoldreisman2@gmail.com<\/span><\/h4>\n

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

In a recent article I asked the real historians in our midst what Turkey\u2019s role was in saving Jews during the Holocaust. \u00a0I followed by talking about the role of Turkish diplomats in saving close to 3,000 Jews living in France who were able to claim some Turkish connection.<\/p>\n

No survey of the profession was needed. \u00a0An exhaustive bibliographic search gave the answer, loud and clear. \u00a0Historians know very little about the first question and nothing about the second.<\/p>\n

So I, a non-historian, published a book, An Ambassador and a Mensch: The Story of a Turkish Diplomat in Vichy France<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"An
An Ambassador and a Mensch: The Story of a Turkish Diplomat in Vichy France<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The book has two unabashed goals. \u00a0One is to educate those who should know so that they can be better informed in teaching others.\u00a0 The second is to convince Yad Vashem, Israel\u2019s official Holocaust remembrance agency, to alter its ways of bestowing the title of \u201cRighteous among the Nations\u201d and to honor the members of the Turkish legation in occupied and Vichy France for saving a large group of Jews.<\/p>\n

The book reveals the little known role played by a Turkish diplomat, Behi\u00e7 Erkin, Ambassador to France, who, along with his staff, saved Turkish Jews living in France from certain death during World War II.\u00a0 Since Stanford Shaw (1) first chronicled this episode in 1993, it has been uniformly assumed that the Turkish government in Ankara was solidly behind Erkin\u2019s actions. The recent findings of contemporary documents from various U.S. government archives, however, confirms that the intervention on behalf of French Jews with Turkish origins was not official Turkish policy at all but the determined undertaking of members of the Turkish diplomatic corps in France. \u00a0They acted independently against the extant policy of Ankara, risking the wrath and ire of their own government as well as those of Germany and Vichy France. Their careers\u2014and often their lives\u2014were at risk and their diplomatic peers from Western countries offered no support. \u00a0Comparatively few of France\u2019s Turkish Jewish community were deported and died in Eastern Europe\u2019s concentration camps and crematoria, 8.2% versus 25% for all French Jewry. \u00a0The likelihood of these differences having happened by chance is one in over a trillion. \u00a0These findings make it obvious that there must have been agents of change on the ground.<\/p>\n

The approach used in this book incorporates hard historical facts, officially accepted population data, statistical analysis, archival documents from the FDR Presidential Library, Yad Vashem, Turkish, German, and French official government archives, as well as oral histories taken from those directly involved. \u00a0This latter evidence comes primarily, although not exclusively, from the testimonies now available through the USC Shoah Foundation Institute\u2019s survivor testimonies project. \u00a0Cold, hard facts become personalized when names and faces of real people are attributed to them. \u00a0By reproducing a multitude of archival documents and testimonies, most of which have been unexamined by historians, I have shed light on an overlooked part of history that will help shift the paradigm (2) which has prevailed for over half a century in the relevant literature.<\/p>\n

Ambassador Behi\u00e7 Erkin and the other courageous Turkish diplomats in France were instrumental in saving Jews from the Holocaust. \u00a0Yet too few have heard of their noble and often harrowing efforts during one of humanity’s darkest years.<\/p>\n

For their acts the Turkish diplomats deserve to be recognized as Righteous among the Nations, even if it means that Yad Vashem will have to change its rules of how the selections are made. The law of large numbers (a French Jew without Turkish roots had a 3.7 greater chance of having perished in Hitler\u2019s ovens than did his French cohort having some Turkish connection) and a preponderance of anecdotal and archival information should be substituted for the three survivor testimonies that Yad Vashem<\/em> still requires.<\/p>\n

NOTES<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(1) Shaw, S.J. Turkey and the Holocaust,<\/em> (London: Macmillan Press, 1993).<\/p>\n

(2) According to Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), one of the most influential philosophers of science in the twentieth century, \u201cit takes a revolution to change established paradigms\u201d in the academic world.\u00a0 See: T. Kuhn,\u00a0 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions<\/em>, or\u00a0 T. Kuhn \u201cWhat are Scientific Revolutions?\u201d in The Probabilistic Revolution<\/em> edited by L. Kr\u00fcger, L. Daston, and M. Heidelberger, 7-22.<\/p>\n

Related Links<\/h3>\n
    \n
  • Arnold Reisman: Turkey and the Holocaust<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Arnold Reisman arnoldreisman2@gmail.com 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":22041,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21957","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=21957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21957\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}