The 'Iranian Schindler' who saved Jews from the Nazis

Thousands of Iranian Jews and their descendants owe their lives to a Muslim diplomat in wartime Paris, according to a new book. In The Lion's Shadow tells how Abdol-Hossein Sardari risked everything to help fellow Iranians escape the Nazis.

Eliane Senahi Cohanim was seven years old when she fled France with her family. She remembers clutching her favourite doll and lying as still as she could, pretending to be asleep, whenever their train came to a halt at a Nazi checkpoint.

"I remember everywhere, when we were running away, they would ask for our passports, and I remember my father would hand them the passports and they would look at them. And then they would look at us. It was scary. It was very, very scary."

Mrs Cohanim and her family were part of a small, close-knit community of Iranian Jews living in and around Paris. Her father, George Senahi, was a prosperous textile merchant and the family lived in a large, comfortable house in Montmorency, about 25km (15.5 miles) north of the French capital.

'Trembling'

When the Nazis invaded, the Senahis attempted to escape to Tehran, hiding for a while in the French countryside, before being forced to return to Paris, now in the full grip of the Gestapo.

"I remember their attitude. The way they would walk with their black boots. Just looking at them at that time was scary for a child, I think," recalls Mrs Cohanim, speaking from her home in California.

Like others in the Iranian Jewish community, Mr Senahi turned for help to the young head of Iran's diplomatic mission in Paris. Abdol-Hossein Sardari was able to provide the Senahi family with the passports and travel documents they needed for safe-passage through Nazi-occupied Europe, a month-long journey that was still fraught with danger.

"At the borders, my father was always really trembling," recalls Mrs Cohanim but, she adds, he was a "strong man" who had given the family "great confidence that everything would be OK."
Unlikely hero

The 78-year-old grandmother has lived for the past 30 years in California with her husband Nasser Cohanim, a successful banker. Mrs Cohanim has no doubt to whom she and her younger brother Claude owe their lives.

"I remember my father always telling that it was thanks to Mr Sardari that we could come out. My uncles and aunts and grandparents lived there in Paris. It was thanks to him they weren't hurt. The ones that didn't have him, they took them and you never heard about them again."

Of Mr Sardari, she says: "I think he was like Schindler, at that time, helping the Jews in Paris."

Like Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories, Sardari was an unlikely hero.
Nazi propaganda

In his book In the Lion's Shadow, author Fariborz Mokhtari paints a picture of a bachelor and bon viveur who suddenly found himself head of Iran's legation house, or diplomatic mission, at the start of World War II. Although officially neutral, Iran was keen to maintain its strong trading relationship with Germany. This arrangement suited Hitler. The Nazi propaganda machine declared Iranians an Aryan nation and racially akin to the Germans.

Iranian Jews in Paris still faced harassment and persecution and were often identified to the authorities by informers. In some cases, the Gestapo was alerted when newborn Jewish boys were circumcised at the hospital. Their terrified mothers were ordered to report to the Office of Jewish Affairs to be issued with the yellow patches Jews were forced to wear on their clothes and to have their documents stamped with their racial identity.

But Sardari used his influence and German contacts to gain exemptions from Nazi race laws for more than 2,000 Iranian Jews, and possibly others, arguing that they did not have blood ties to European Jewry. He was also able to help many Iranians, including members of Jewish community, return to Tehran by issuing them with the new-style Iranian passports they needed to travel across Europe.

A change of regime in Iran, in 1925, had led to the introduction of a new passport and identity card. Many Iranians living in Europe did not have this document, while others, who had married non-Iranians, had not bothered to get Iranian passports for their spouses or children.

When Britain and Russia invaded Iran in September 1941, Sardari's humanitarian task become more perilous. Iran signed a treaty with the Allies and Sardari was ordered by Tehran to return home as soon as possible.

Racial purity

But despite being stripped of his diplomatic immunity and status, Sardari resolved to remain in France and carry on helping the Iranian Jews, at considerable risk to his own safety, using money from his inheritance to keep his office going.

The story he spun to the Nazis, in a series of letters and reports, was that the Persian Emperor Cyrus had freed Jewish exiles in Babylon in 538 BC and they had returned to their homes. However, he told the Nazis, at some later point a small number of Iranians began to find the teachings of the Prophet Moses attractive - and these Mousaique, or Iranian Followers of Moses, which he dubbed "Djuguten," were not part of the Jewish race.

Using all of his lawyer's skill, he exploited the internal contradictions and idiocies of the Nazis' ideology to gain special treatment for the "Djuguten", as the archive material published in Mr Mokhtari's new book shows.

High-level investigations were launched in Berlin, with "experts" on racial purity drafted in to give an opinion on whether this Iranian sect - which the book suggests may well have been Sardari's own invention - were Jewish or not. The experts were non-committal and suggested that more funding was needed for research.

Lonely death

By December 1942, Sardari's pleas had reached Adolf Eichmann, the senior Nazi in charge of Jewish affairs, who dismissed them, in a letter published in Mr Mokhtari's book, as "the usual Jewish tricks and attempts at camouflage". But Sardari somehow managed to carry on helping families escape from Paris, at a time when an estimated 100,000 Jews were deported from France to death camps.

The number of blank passports in Sardari's safe is estimated to have been between 500 and 1,000. In his book, Mr Mokhtari suggests that if each was issued for an average of two to three people "this could have saved over 2,000 individuals".

Sardari never sought recognition for his work during his lifetime, insisting he had only been doing his duty. He died a lonely death in a bedsit in Croydon, south London, in 1981, after losing his ambassador's pension and Tehran properties in the Iranian revolution. He was posthumously recognised for his humanitarian work in 2004 at a ceremony at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles.

Mr Mokhtari hopes that by telling his story, through the testimony of survivors, including Mrs Cohanim, he will bring it to a wider audience but also shatter "popular misconceptions" about Iran and the Iranians.

"Here you have a Muslim Iranian who goes out of his way, risks his life, certainly risks his career and property and everything else, to save fellow Iranians," he says. "There is no distinction 'I am Muslim, he is Jew' or whatever."

He believes the story illustrates the "general cultural propensity of Iranians to be tolerant" which is often overlooked in the current political climate.

BBC

Thanks to Zaahid for the heads-up

Zentai loses appeal against extradition

On his 88th birthday, alleged Nazi war criminal Charles Zentai has lost a Federal Court appeal to avoid extradition to Hungary to face war crimes charges.

The full bench of the court delivered its judgment in Perth today, granting a stay of 14 days on the execution of the extradition warrant on Zentai. The Hungarian government alleges the Hungarian-born Zentai, a resident of the southern Perth suburb of Willeton, was one of three men who tortured Jewish teenager Peter Balazs in Budapest in November 1944, leading to his death. Zentai denies the accusation and has fought against his extradition since a warrant was issued for his arrest in 2005.

Perth magistrate Barbara Lane last year ruled the former Hungarian soldier was eligible to be surrendered for extradition to face the charge. Zentai's lawyers appealed the decision in the Federal Court, but it was upheld by Justice John Gilmour in March.

The lawyers took the legal fight to the full bench of the Federal Court in August. They argued that under a treaty between Australia and Hungary, the crime was not an offence when it was allegedly committed.

Zentai has the option of applying to the High Court for leave to appeal.

Last year, the High Court dismissed an appeal by Zentai and two others challenging the validity of Australia's extradition law, claiming the law involved a "constitutionally impermissible" attempt by the commonwealth to impose a duty upon magistrates as holders of a state statutory office. Attorney-General Robert McClelland has the final say on Zentai's extradition.

Mr McClelland has delegated the decision to Home Affairs Minister Brendan O'Connor, who has already invited submissions on the matter.

A spokesman for Mr O'Connor said once the appeals process was exhausted and Mr O'Connor was asked to make a decision, it would come "expeditiously". Zentai's bail was renewed and he was to attend a cardiologist's appointment ordered by the attorney-general's office on Thursday afternoon. His son Ernie Steiner said outside the court the family would consider its options in the next two weeks.

"We're leaving all options open at the moment, because we haven't read the full extent of the judgment. There may be things in there that are worth pursuing," he said.

The cost of seeking leave for the case to be heard in the High Court was cause for hesitation to push the case further, with the legal bill topping $200,000 to date, Mr Steiner said.

"There is a hesitation (to go to the High Court); the cost is a factor but we'll do what needs to be done," he told reporters.

Mr Steiner said he had lodged a 570-page submission with Mr O'Connor and said the minister could be his father's best hope of avoiding extradition.

"As far as that goes we've never been able to present any arguments about my father's innocence in the courts in Australia," he said. "Obviously I am very concerned for my father, and I've had to ask him some very direct questions, and I'm convinced through my own family history, statements he made in 1994 when my mother was still alive, about the date of his departure from Budapest. He wasn't even there. So this is really a travesty, this whole thing."

Zentai turned 88 today. Mr Steiner said he understood that his father would be remanded in custody after 14 days when the stay lapses.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre lists him among their top 10 wanted war criminals. The Jewish human rights group says Zentai and two others beat Balazs because he was not wearing a Jewish star. If Zentai is extradited, he will be the first Australian ever extradited to face charges of alleged war crimes.

news.com.au

Kevin Myers: Why I wish Nazi-hunters well in search for death camp fiend

Inmates were worked to death on a daily basis
in Nazi concentration camps such as Mauthausen

Nazi-hunters from the Simon Weisenthal Centre are, apparently, close to tracking down the war criminal Aribert Heim in South America.

Now, I have mixed feelings about the Simon Weisenthal Centre. Whereas we should all applaud its pursuit of Nazi war criminals, its neglect of Soviet war criminals, whose crimes are comparable with those of the Nazis, most especially in the Baltic states, suggest that it is more interested in Jewish victimhood than Jewish culpability. This is understandable. But it should remind us not to accept the Weisenthal Centre on its own assessment of itself — a truth, of course, which applies to us all.

I certainly wish it well in its pursuit of Heim, in the year of the 70th anniversary of the place in which he murdered so freely.

The concentration camp at Mauthausen — the name is Austrian dialect for a toll-booth, and what a toll it took — was opened in 1938, having been chosen because of the granite quarries nearby. Granite, henceforth, defined Mauthausen; and whereas Auschwitz might be the quintessence of Nazi insanity, Mauthausen was the embodiment of its utter evil, for it was here that people were mass murdered by labour. The Nazis, naturally, even had an official term for it: Vernichtung Durch Arbeit — ‘extermination through work’.

Of all the grotesque barbarities of the Third Reich, one of the most bizarre was the reason for establishing the gas chambers of Auschwitz and elsewhere. The demoralising effect upon SS executioners of killing women and children, by gunfire, day after day.

But the Vernichtung Durch Arbeit principle showed no such sensitivity towards Mauthausen guards, who were apparently made of sterner than the usual SS Totenkopverbande stuff, and the very heart of their operation was the Staircase of Death.

Mauthausen's granite quarry was well below the level of the connecting road. So hods were strapped on to the backs of prisoners into which 40 kilogram granite blocks were placed. The prisoners, six abreast in unbroken columns, were made to carry their loads up the 186 steps of a steep granite staircase from the quarry to the road, with several hundred men on the staircase simultaneously.

Prisoners who faltered were beaten to death, or shot, as the others bore their loads upwards, in a slow, ghastly rhythm.

Sometimes, an exhausted prisoner, or prisoners would collapse and, falling backward down the 35 degree slope, would cause a gathering avalanche of hod, and granite and human, in which many men might be crushed or killed. That was it, dawn to dusk, the serried ranks of stripe-clad prisoners bearing their unbearable burdens upwards. The one sure escape was death, and only mankind's passionate attachment to life made such a place feasible.

Logic should have told the prisoners they could not survive, and so should turn on their guards. Yet hoping against all the evidence of their senses, they worked on, until the final escape, though exhaustion, despair, or the lash.

Yet Vernichtung Durch Arbeit was not Mauthausen's only means of ending life. SS guards used to organise races for hod-bearing prisoners up the steps. Those who came last were shot. Winners were sometimes then given the choice of pushing a fellow prisoner to his death down the steep side of the quarry, the chirpily named ‘parachutists' wall’ — Fallschirmspringerwand, or being shot themselves.

In all, for various different reasons, some 36,318 Mauthausen inmates met their end with a bullet (who else but the Nazis would keep such records? Who? Well, the Soviets, actually). This figure presumably included the 50 Jews commandant SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer Franz Ziereis gave to his son, as a birthday present, for target practice.

Actually Mauthausen was relatively unusual, for it was generously catholic in its appetites. Its toll included 47 allied aircrew who were deliberately worked to death there, as were many German Christians who refused to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler. Of the 1,000 non-Jewish Poles sent there after the Warsaw Rising, only 100 survived. Yet in this litany of butchery, there is something particularly poignant about the fate of one group of prisoners.

Many thousands of Spanish Republicans who had fled to France after Franco's victory, were still interned in camps there when France fell.

The Germans dispatched them to Mauthausen and, over the next five years, most were systematically worked to death. By January 1945, just 3,000 were still alive.

During the final four months of the war, 2,163 of the remaining Spaniards were murdered. In the heart of this hell was SS doctor Aribert Heim. At war's end, amid the utter chaos of Germany, he was able to escape, and to become a gynaecologist in Baden-Baden, until finally suspicion fell on him in the 1960s. He then — or so it is believed — fled to South America. And though Heim is certainly not the worst of the war criminals who supervised the murder machine of Mauthausen, as one the last surviving examples of the human depravity of the Third Reich, he will do.

Of the 28,000 Jews in the camp when it was liberated by US troops on April 25, 1945, 3,000 soon died. One of the surviving Jews was Simon Weisenthal.

And oh, how many Nazis were to bitterly regret that unintended oversight?

Belfast Telegraph