Wartime Saving of The Jews
Abdul-Wahab, the son of an aristocratic family, was 31 when German troops occupied Tunisia in November 1942. Tunisia was then home to approximately 100,000 Jews. Under the Nazis' anti-Semitic policies, they were forced to wear yellow badges and were subject to fines and having their property confiscated. More than 5,000 Tunisian Jews were sent to forced labor camps, where 46 are known to have died. Another 160 Tunisian Jews in France were sent to European death camps - which might have been the fate of Jews in Tunisia itself, had Nazi rule lasted longer.
Abdul-Wahab, an interlocutor between the Nazis and the population of the coastal town of Mahdia, heard that German officers were planning to rape a local Jewish woman, Odette Boukhris; instead, he hid her, her family, and several other Jewish families, about two dozen in all, at his farm outside town for four months, until the occupation ended.
Read more about this topic: Khaled Abdul-Wahab
Famous quotes containing the words wartime, saving and/or jews:
“The man who gets drunk in peacetime is a coward. The man who gets drunk in wartime goes on being a coward.”
—José Bergamín (1895–1983)
“Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“No doubt Jews are most obnoxious creatures. Any competent historian or psychoanalyst can bring a mass of incontrovertible evidence to prove that it would have been better for the world if the Jews had never existed. But I, as an Irishman, can, with patriotic relish, demonstrate the same of the English. Also of the Irish.... We all live in glass houses. Is it wise to throw stones at the Jews? Is it wise to throw stones at all?”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)