Turkey’s Unknown Schindlers
In a recent article I asked the real historians in our midst what Turkey’s role was in saving Jews during the Holocaust. I 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.
No survey of the profession was needed. An exhaustive bibliographic search gave the answer, loud and clear. Historians know very little about the first question and nothing about the second.
So I, a non-historian, published a book, An Ambassador and a Mensch: The Story of a Turkish Diplomat in Vichy France.
The book has two unabashed goals. One is to educate those who should know so that they can be better informed in teaching others. The second is to convince Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust remembrance agency, to alter its ways of bestowing the title of “Righteous among the Nations” and to honor the members of the Turkish legation in occupied and Vichy France for saving a large group of Jews.
The book reveals the little known role played by a Turkish diplomat, Behiç Erkin, Ambassador to France, who, along with his staff, saved Turkish Jews living in France from certain death during World War II. 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’s 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. They 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—and often their lives—were at risk and their diplomatic peers from Western countries offered no support. Comparatively few of France’s Turkish Jewish community were deported and died in Eastern Europe’s concentration camps and crematoria, 8.2% versus 25% for all French Jewry. The likelihood of these differences having happened by chance is one in over a trillion. These findings make it obvious that there must have been agents of change on the ground.
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. This latter evidence comes primarily, although not exclusively, from the testimonies now available through the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s survivor testimonies project. Cold, hard facts become personalized when names and faces of real people are attributed to them. By 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.
Ambassador Behiç Erkin and the other courageous Turkish diplomats in France were instrumental in saving Jews from the Holocaust. Yet too few have heard of their noble and often harrowing efforts during one of humanity's darkest years.
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’s 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 still requires.
NOTES
(1) Shaw, S.J. Turkey and the Holocaust, (London: Macmillan Press, 1993).
(2) According to Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), one of the most influential philosophers of science in the twentieth century, “it takes a revolution to change established paradigms” in the academic world. See: T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, or T. Kuhn “What are Scientific Revolutions?” in The Probabilistic Revolution edited by L. Krüger, L. Daston, and M. Heidelberger, 7-22.