Turkey was neutral -- they weren’t: diplomat-heroes of the Holocaust (1)
by
Mark Lieberman*

The lodestar guiding them was found in Article 88 of the 1923 Constitution, which stated unequivocally and unambiguously, “The name Turk, as a political term, shall be understood to include all citizens of the Turkish Republic, without distinction of, or reference to, race or religion” -- 27 words these heroes cited again and again to Nazi murderers and a short sentence that would save thousands of lives.

Although there had been a Jewish presence in Asia Minor for millennia, Jews only became a sizable minority with the rise of the Ottoman Empire. Immediately after taking the city, Sultan Mehmed II appointed a chief rabbi -- and gave him an honored place at the divan. Describing Europe as “the great torture chamber,” in 1454 the chief rabbi of Edirne urged Europe’s Jews to come to the Ottoman Empire: “Is it not better for you to live under Muslims than under Christians?”

The reign of Mehmed’s son, Beyazid II coincided with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain -- an event which Beyazid found fortuitous: “Ye call Ferdinand a wise king who makes his land poor and ours rich,” the sultan wrote in his invitation to Sephardic Jews. Not only did Beyazid welcome the outcasts, he went so far as to send Adm. Kemal Reis’s flotilla to carry them from Spain to safety. By the end of the 16th century there were 30,000 Jews in İstanbul, worshipping at any of 44 synagogues.

Over the centuries, as Europe oppressed and expelled its Jewish citizens, the fortunate ones who had found refuge in Turkey survived, prosperous and unmolested, so that by the beginning of World War II there were 500,000 Jews living in the former Ottoman Empire.

The Turkish neutrality proclaimed at the outset of World War II protected them, but the Turks of Jewish descent who had left their homeland were in jeopardy as nation after nation fell to Hitler. In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship and erased their human and civil rights. As Nazi domination spread across the continent, all Europe’s Jews -- including those of the Turkish diaspora -- were at risk. With the inception of the Final Solution in 1942, that risk became mortal danger.

Now entered upon the scene our heroes…

To the Nazis, the 20,000 Turkish Jews residing in France and the few remaining on the island of Rhodes were parasitic vermin to be exterminated. But to Kent, Erkin and Ülkümen, these would-be-victims were something else, something infinitely more precious: They were fellow citizens to be protected and saved.

When Kent died in 2002, the Daily Telegraph’s obituary was headlined “True courage of one who had to act” -- a succinct statement of Kent’s wartime career as consul general in Marseilles between 1941 and 1944.

In 2001, a year before his death, Kent received Turkey’s Supreme Service Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor. At the same ceremony he also received a medal from the state of Israel that bore a quotation from the Talmud: “Saving one life is like saving all the world.” But Kent saved many…

As Professor Arnold Reisman points out in his definitive book “Shoah: Turkey, the US and the UK”: “Turkish diplomats serving in France…dedicated many of their working hours to Jews. They provided official documents such as citizenship cards and passports to thousands of Jews and thus saved their lives.” But in the case of Kent, help went far beyond issuing safe conduct documents.

For example, late in 1943 Kent learned that 80 Turkish Jews had been captured and herded onto a train bound for Auschwitz. He immediately rushed to the St. Charles station. Recalling the incident, Kent said: “The one single memory of that evening which will never be erased from my mind is the inscription…on one of the wagons: ‘This wagon may be loaded with 20 head of cattle and 500 kilograms of grass’.” After a brief confrontation with the Nazi officers, Consul General Kent jumped aboard the train to join his fellow Turks.

At the next station the Gestapo pleaded with Kent to leave the train, to no avail. “I explained that more than 80 Turkish citizens had been loaded onto these animal wagons because they were Jews and that I was the representative of a government that rejected such treatment.”

The Jews were set free.

At a 2001 ceremony Kent told his audience: “I would never forget…the expressions of gratitude in the eyes of the people we rescued…the inner peace I felt when I reached my bed towards morning.” Withal, Kent, who subsequently served as ambassador to Thailand, India, Sweden and Poland, remained matter-of-fact about his wartime heroics. “What I have done is what I should have done,” he said.

Would that diplomats from Allied nations had seen matters as clearly.

Even had he not saved thousands of lives during World War II, Ambassador Erkin’s rank in the pantheon of Turkish heroes would have been assured. An intimate of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Erkin was a commander who won key battles during the Dardanelles campaign -- for which he received the German Iron Cross 1st Class. After the war, Erkin oversaw the creation of the Turkish railway system, served in Parliament and was minister of public works.

He was one of only 37 Turks whose surnames were personally selected by Atatürk. In light of his heroics during World War II, its meaning is appropriate: Erkin means freethinking, independent -- as the Nazi warlords were to discover.

In 1939 President İsmet İnönü summoned Erkin and presented him with the challenge of a lifetime: He was appointed ambassador to France, arriving in Paris on Aug. 13, 1939 -- just 18 days before Germany seized Poland. Following the fall of France, the Turkish embassy was moved to Vichy, which would become the center of Erkin’s campaign to save Turkish Jews. Like the old soldier he was, Ambassador Erkin opened a multi-front counterattack against the Germans and their Vichy collaborators.

When the “property census” of June 1941 was announced -- a measure designed to confiscate all Jewish assets in Vichy -- Ambassador Erkin devised a solution which does him, and also the Muslim Turks of France, great credit, as recounted in “The Ambassador,” the definitive biography of Erkin, written by his grandson Emir Kıvırcık.

Convening a meeting of Muslim Turks who were long-term residents of France, Erkin outlined a plan whereby they would voluntarily cooperate to save the property of their Jewish fellow citizens. It was audacious, and it worked.

Ambassador Erkin told his audience: “These days, our Jewish citizens are faced with the possibility of losing everything they have. … As the Turkish ambassador, I wish to emphasize that as long as I remain…at this post, I consider myself entrusted with the lives and property of our Turkish citizens.”

Then the ambassador made his request. Beginning immediately, a roster would be created transferring custodianship of Jewish properties to Turkish Muslims who would hold the properties in trust. Describing the scheme as “a heavy responsibility,” the ambassador concluded by telling his audience that what they were asked to undertake was “a matter of honor…one that requires humanity.”

The majority of French Muslim Turks agreed to sign the document -- a great coup on the part of Ambassador Erkin and a great tribute to the magnanimity of those who signed.

But this was not the first time Muslim Turks had tried to save their fellow citizens. According to “The Ambassador,” “…to protect them from falling into German hands, imams at Turkish mosques (in Marseilles) provided Jewish Turks who had lost their citizenship years before with documents stating that they were Moslems.”

On July 16, 1942 the first 12,000 Jews of Paris were rounded up and sent first to the Drancy internment camp and thence to their deaths in the east. Eventually 74,000 Jews would travel the same death route. But long before the deportations began, Ambassador Erkin had devised a plan to protect them.

As far-sighted as he had ever been during the battle for the Dardanelles, Erkin had defied Ankara’s orders and kept open the Turkish consulate in occupied Paris, thereby maintaining a vital lifeline for Turkish Jews who remained in occupied France. These numbered about 10,000 “regular Jews” who had maintained their Turkish citizenship, but also included some 10,000 “irregular” Turkish Jews who had not renewed their citizenship every five years, as was required by Turkish law.

Ambassador Erkin set out to save “the irregulars” in the most direct fashion -- and in complete defiance of the Nazi occupiers. Almost immediately after his arrival he devised a simple life-saving solution. According to “The Ambassador,” without hesitation, Erkin told his assistant: “Have whoever presents an ID, document or deed belonging either to the Ottoman Empire or the Republic of Turkey fill out a citizenship application form. Then give them a citizenship affidavit.” Earlier, he had counseled, “Every Turkish Jewish citizen shall hang a sign on his or her enterprise and house showing he or she is Turkish.”

When the clerk noted that many applicants had lived all their lives in France and didn’t even speak Turkish, Ambassador Erkin brushed him aside: “Just have them memorize these…words in Turkish: ‘I’m Turkish, my relatives live on Turkish soil.’ Have them memorize them and issue them the affidavit.” As Erkin’s grandson notes in “The Ambassador,” “[Erkin’s] decision not to obey Ankara and shut down the consulate…was going to be instrumental in saving the lives of thousands of Jews.” How many more could have been saved had Allied bureaucrats been as “insubordinate” as Erkin?

But Ambassador Erkin’s greatest coup came about when he was able to effect the mass rescue of thousands of Turkish Jews at one stroke -- and to repatriate them to safety in the homeland.

Fittingly, for the architect of the Turkish rail system, the rescue took place by train. As the Nazis were shipping Jews eastward to death camps, Ambassador Erkin proposed to ship Turkish Jews westward, to Turkey. By dint of persistent diplomacy -- and not least perhaps the fact that the German consul general in Vichy was impressed by Erkin’s Iron Cross -- the ambassador obtained agreement for the free passage of Turkish Jews from France.

The first train, decorated with the star and crescent, departed from Paris in November 1942, passing through Croatia (where all 30,000 Jews were deported to their deaths) through Serbia (where the entire Jewish population of 13,000 was given up, prompting the SS commander to boast that Serbia was “a nation in which the problem of Jews…has been solved”) and finally through Bulgaria (which, to its credit, saved every one of its Jewish citizens but nonetheless gave up 14,000 foreign Jews who had sought sanctuary), finally arriving at the border town of Edirne, delivering the fortunate to their Turkish motherland.

Over the next year 11 more rescue trains crossed occupied Europe, saving the lives of more than 2,000 Turkish Jews. According to Professor Stanford J. Shaw’s “Turkey and the Jews of Europe during World War II,” the rescue operation “showed that as had been the case for more than five centuries, Turks and Jews continued to help each other in times of great crises.”

In 2007 a group of Israeli Jews with a Turkish background proposed that Ambassador Erkin be listed among the “Righteous Among Nations” -- non-Jews who had risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. His name was added to the roster at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. The application is still pending -- although an examination of the heroic deeds of Erkin would indicate that his place among the righteous is indisputable.

Images from the deportation of Jews from Marseilles. Imams at Turkish mosques in Marseilles provided Jewish Turks who had lost their citizenship years before with documents stating that they were Moslems.