Turk who saved Jews from Auschwitz remembered

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One response to “Turk who saved Jews from Auschwitz remembered”

1. 

   haluk

   July 27, 2008

   “Selahattin Ulkumen, the thirty-year-old Turkish Consul in Rhodes, had reason to take German threats seriously even before he saved forty-two of the Greek island’s Sephardi Jews from deportation to Auschwitz. By February 1944, Rhodes was the only Turkish mission still functioning in Axis-controlled territory. After Italy, which had ruled the Dodecanese chain since 1912, withdrew from the war in September 1943, the German army moved in. Turkey, which had remained neutral for the first four years of hostilities, started political and military talks with the British. The Germans feared that a second front would be opened through the Aegean Sea with the help of the Turks. They played the bully.

   “Our representation was closed in Bulgaria and Greece (Ulkumen explained in Tel Aviv forty-six years later). All our missions were closed at the demand of the Germans. They also asked us to close the consulate in Rhodes. Turkey objected. We said if you insist that we close the consulate in Rhodes, we shall close your consulate in Smyrna. They didn’t agree. Rhodes was the only consulate left to us in Axis-controlled territory. There was a very nervous atmosphere with the Germans in Rhodes. They wanted to intimidate Turkey. On 18 February 1944, two German planes bombed the consulate building. My wife was very seriously injured. She died six or seven months later after giving birth to our son.”

   On 20 July 1944, the Gestapo ordered all of the island’s 1,800 Jews to report to military headquarters for registration. They were descended from Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Although they had lived under the Turkish and Italian Empires, they continued to speak Ladino, a Jewish dialect of medieval Spanish. The Jews of Rhodes were tightly knit community, living in their own quarter of the old, Crusader town. Some had sought spouses among fellow Sephardim on the Turkish mainland. Ulkumen heard that all the Jews, regardless of nationality, were being herded together. A handful were Turkish citizens. He realized that they were to be sent to concentration camps:

   “I went to the commander – General von Kleeman – and asked him to release forty-two Turkish citizens, who were Jewish by religion. Where a Turk was married, for example an Italian, I said for humanitarian reasons that the whole family was Turkish. I succeeded in saving forty-two persons. Not all of them were Turkish. I don’t know how many were not Turks. If I could, I would have saved more Jews, but it was beyond my competence. The forty-two were released, but the other Jews were conducted to Auschwitz.

   “The German commander said that, according to Nazi laws, all Jews in their eyes were Jewish and had to go to concentration camps because Germany needed more manpower. I knew what their real purpose was – to kill them in the gas chambers. I objected. I said that, according to Turkish law, we didn’t differentiate between whether a citizen was Jewish, Christian or Muslim. According to Turkish law, all citizens are equal. I convinced him. I said that I would advise my Government and that it would cause an international incident. Then he agreed.”

   Asked how much he had to fear, from the Germans or his own Government, Ulkumen answered that he had acted out of conscience. That had been enough.

   Of more than 1,700 Jews transported from Rhodes to Auschwitz, only 161 returned. Most of them subsequently settled in Israel. A square in the old Jewish quarter was renamed Platia Evreon Martyron (Square of the Hebrew Martyrs). The light, airy synagogue became a place of pilgrimage, but seldom of prayer. Matilda Turiel and her two sons were among the forty-two saved by the Consul. She had been born in Turkey, but had married a Jew from Rhodes who held Italian citizenship and had acquired his nationality. Having taken her husband, the Germans ordered her to come with her sons to Gestapo headquarters. If she refused, her husband would be killed. Ulkumen, whom she had never met before, intercepted them on the way and urged them not to enter the building. He took up their case. The family survived and settled in New York. Matilda Turiel flew to Jerusalem in June 1990, when the former Consul became the first Turk, and one of the rare Muslims, to be honoured by Yad Vashem.

   At the beginning of August 1944, Turkey severed diplomatic and economic relations with Germany. Ulkumen and his wounded wife interned. The Germans would not let them leave, but moved them to the Greek mainland. He returned to Turkey on 8 May 1945. “Until then,” he said, “I hadn’t heard any news, but then I heard that all the Turkish Jews had escaped from Rhodes to the Turkish mainland. The forty-two had not been touched.”

   After the war, Ulkumen continued his diplomatic career, serving in Europe, then as Consul-General in Beirut and Cairo. Afterwards, he was Deputy Secretary-General of CENTO, the now forgotten Central Treaty Organization. His son followed him into the foreign service and became a United Nations official in Geneva. Selahattin Ulkumen, who retired to Istanbul at the age of sixty-five, never remarried.

   Asked whether anything in his personal history impelled him to risk life and liberty to save Jews, he told me, “I didn’t know the Rhodes Jews. I had had no dealings with them. In Turkey I had Jewish friends, in the university. I didn’t make any differentiation whether they were Jews or Muslims. I didn’t ask what their religion was. I had no special ties with Jews. I only had humanitarian feelings to every human being. If they had been black people, I would have done the same thing.””
   
   Source: “The Book of the Just – The Silent Heroes Who Saved Jews from Hitler”
   by Eric Silver, 1992, [Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London]