The Arab Schindler: Family of first ever Arab honoured for saving a Jew from Nazis rejects prize… because they hate Israel
Egyptian doctor Mohamed Helmy was honored posthumously last month by Israel’s Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem for hiding a Jew in Berlin during wartime.
The 'Righteous Among the Nations' award is the highest Israel can bestow upon non-Jews in recognition for helping people to survive the genocide - at great personal risk - which claimed six million lives.
Brave: Dr Mohamed Helmy secretly hid Anna Boros in his cottage near Berlin to save her from being sent to a death camp like Belzec, in occupied Poland, pictured, guarded by armed Nazis
But the family of the heroic doctor - the first Muslim ever to be recognised for his bravery in such a way - say they want nothing to do with it.
'If any other country offered to honor Helmy, we would have been happy with it,' said Mervat Hassan, the wife of Helmy’s great-nephew. 'But not from Israel. I do, however, respect Judaism as a religion, and I respect Jews. Islam recognizes Judaism as a heavenly religion.'
Helmy lived in Berlin and hid several Jews during the Holocaust. Born in 1901 in Khartoum, in what was then Egypt and is now Sudan, to an Egyptian father and a German mother, he went to Berlin in 1922 - 11 years before the Nazis came to power - to study medicine.
In 1938 the Nuremberg Laws, intended to remove Jews from all spheres of public life, were enacted against him when he was banned from his medical practice because racial quacks said he was not considered 'Ayran' - the term Nazis used to denote those they considered unworthy of equal status with Germans.
Auschwitz: Ms Boros, a Jew, would likely have been sent to Auschwitz in occupied Poland, pictured, if Dr Helmy had not risked his life by hiding her in his Berlin home
Rejected: Despite putting his own life on the line for someone else, Dr Helmy's family have rejected an honour from the Jewish remembrance group Yad Vashem. Pictured, the train tracks at Birkenau, Auschwitz
When the war began the regime started to systematically deport the capital's Jews to destinations in occupied Poland for extermination, including Auschwitz and Treblinka. Dr Helmy hid 21-year-old Anna Boros, a family friend, at a cottage on the outskirts of the city, and provided her relatives with medical care against the strict instructions of the Nazi high command.
After Boros’s relatives admitted to Gestapo interrogators that he was hiding her he arranged for her to hide at an acquaintance’s house. Anna and four family members eventually escaped to Israel.
'The Gestapo knew that Dr Helmy was our family physician, and they knew that he owned a cottage. He managed to evade all their interrogations,' Boros, later Mrs Gutman, wrote after the war, according to Yad Vashem’s citation. 'Dr Helmy did everything for me out of the generosity of his heart, and I will be grateful to him for eternity.'
Yad Vashem painstakingly tries to recognise the bravery of all non-Jews who risked their own lives to help others. Perhaps the most famous of the Righteous Among the Nations heroes is Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist immortalised in the Spielberg film Schindler's List who saved almost the entire Jewish workforce of his factory in Krakow, Poland, from death in the gas chambers.
The late Dr Mohamed Helmy's family refuse to accept the certificate, shown here by Irena Steinfeldt, an official at Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial
Dr Helmy's family in Egypt reject the award because it comes from Israel-based Yad Vashem, which remembers those who risked their lives to save Jews. Pictured, photographs of Jewish victims of the Nazis in the Hall of Names of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem
Yad Vashem said it was disappointed at the rejection of the honour stating: 'We regret that political sentiment seems to have overcome the human aspect, and we hope that one day the latter will prevail.
'In a world of total moral collapse, there was a small minority who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values. Bystanders were the rule; rescuers were the exception. Helmy was one of them.'
Dr Helmy died in 1982. After the war, he stayed in Germany with his fiancée whom he married. His Egyptian relatives sometimes visited, including a great nephew and his wife who now rejects the award on behalf of surviving relatives.
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