Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands
by Robert Satloff
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert SatloffEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2006-10-30
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 251
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Book Reviews of Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands
Book Review: A Jewish Diogenes in Search of the Righteous. More needed.
Summary: 5 Stars
The book opens with a reference to a line in Casablanca by SS Major Strasser: "It is possible that the French Authorities will find a reason to put him (Victor Lazlo) in a concentration camp here." I never found that line remarkable because where the Nazis went, so did concentration camps, but I never before considered the corollary that there were also local collaborators who built, supplied and manned the camps and helped to round up Jews, as well as the antithesis of these, righteous people who came to their aid.
Satloff believes that Arab acknowledgment of their past vis a vis the Jews could lead to an acceptance (in Arabic "sulha") of the State of Israel. He also feels that there are several reasons for this not occurring and he encountered resistance amongst both Arabs and Jews telling the stories. For Arabs to reveal the acts of honor and sacrifice they would also need to bring forth the acts of shame and conflict with a tendency of modesty towards acts of generousity. In the cases where Satloff interviewed family members of rescuers he discovered that the stories were not passed down, at least not in any detail. Another reason is that the generation who opposed the Nazis were also seen as collaborators with the Free French and Italians - the liberation of Arab countries from Nazi/Fascist rule was replaced by other European colonial rule. A third is the myth amongst Arabs that the creation of Israel was compensation for a European crime in which the Arabs had no complicity at all. To speak Amongst Jews still living in Arab countries (there are about 5000 in Morocco, 2000 in Tunisia) there is a fierce loyalty and fear of the rulers on who's protection they rely and a reluctance to show any appearance of potential disloyalty.
Still Satloff is able to uncover several positive stories that deserve to be celebrated.
I highly recommend this book to begin understanding what happened to the now vanished Jewish communities of North Africa. More scholarly research such as this is needed now as the generation of primary narrative sources are now old and dying of old age. More also needs to be told of the other inhabitants of the camps as well as what happened to them afterwards, not just military prisoners, but also those who were rounded up for ideological reason.
Also recommended: Locked Doors: The Seizure of Jewish Property in Arab Countries
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