Righteous among the Arabs

Quite by accident Faiza Abdul Wahab discovered her father Khaled's Jewish connection three years ago. "I rediscovered my father," she says excitedly sitting in a Paris café. "It's a shame I can’t listen to him relate the whole story."

Dr. Robert Satloff, a historian specializing in the Middle East is the man through which Faiza, 45, discovered her father's unknown efforts to save Tunisian Jews during World War II.

In his book "Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach Into Arab Lands" Satloff documented his search for Arabs who saved Jews in North Africa during the Holocaust. In 2007, Faiza read a Sunday Times interview with him and was first exposed to things her father never told her.

"I opened the magazine," she remembers. "And I read about the amazing affair. I asked myself how was it that the historian never contacted me. I searched his e-mail and wrote to him: 'Reading your book was an amazing revelation for me. My father never spoke about what he did during the war. Your wonderful work allowed me to learn who he really was and understand why relations between Jews and Arabs were always so important to me.'

Robert phoned me immediately after. He said he questioned my family in Tunisia but none of them knew how to contact me."

The relationship between the two has since tightened and Satloff has informed her of every new detail he found about her father, particularly regarding his efforts to declare him a Righteous Among the Nations.

Courage to Care award

Weeks after their first encounter, Faiza attended the Holocaust memorial ceremony at the Weisenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles as Satloff received the Daniel Pearl award for his contribution to the promotion of tolerance between Muslims and Jews.

The heads of the Anti-Defamation League, who presented Satloff with the award, asked the historian whether he could assist them in granting the "Courage to Care" award, their version of the Righteous among the Nations title, to an Arab individual. Satloff immediately contacted Faiza asking whether she would be willing to accept the notation on behalf of her father. She naturally agreed. Several weeks later Faiza accepted a Menorah with her father's name engraved on it at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Shortly after the September 11 attacks Satloff, a Jew, decided to investigate whether there were Arabs who helped Jews during the Holocaust. He believed that by telling one such story he might be able to make Arabs perceive the Holocaust differently. After a year of research he received an e-mail from 71-year-old Annie Buchris from Los Angeles.

She told him she grew up in Mahdia, Tunisia and that during the war an Arab man welcomed her and her family into his home and hid them in his farm away from a German officer who lusted after her mother.

Satloff was living in Morocco with his wife and two children at the time where he could conduct his research. He hired an interviewer who taped Annie's testimony. For an entire day on 2003 Buchris told her story. She died two months later.

Yad Vashem's Hall of Names

One night, there was a knock at the door. Standing there was Khaled, the son of Hassan Hosni Abdul Wahab, a rich landowner and former state official. Hassan Hosni and Annie's father Jacob were close friends, and Khaled informed them they were in great danger. He then made arrangements to transfer them to a safe place.

Years later Buchris learned that Khaled used to meet with the German soldiers and get information from them. That's how he found out they had created a brothel housing Jewish girls. One of the German officers also told him that one particularly attractive woman had caught his eye. Khaled realized the woman was Buchris's wife. He got the German soldier intoxicated with wine and drove to the oil factory.

The Buchris family and their neighbors – some 25 people – quickly packed their belongings and were taken to Khaled's family's farm, where they stayed for four months. Each family got a small room. Near the farm was a Red Cross camp tending to injured German soldiers and many of farm's employees knew about the Jews but never spoke of it. In April 1943, when the British entered Mahdia all the families returned to their homes. 

Khaled Abdul Wahab was born in 1911 and died at the age of 86. As a member of a wealth family he often traveled overseas as a young man, most frequently to France. In the early 1930s he studied art and architecture in New York and later worked on preserving Tunisia's archeological heritage.

Yad Vashem criteria

Meanwhile, Satloff has not given up his efforts to convince Yad Vashem to grant Khaled the Righteous among the Nations title, but to no avail. "I reached the sad conclusion that there are no Arabs in the list of Righteous among the Nations," he says. "Firstly, many Arabs or their heirs didn't want or were afraid of their stories being published. And secondly, the Jews did not put enough efforts into it."

"There are three committees in Yad Vashem who review applications for the title of Righteous Among the Nations and each is comprised of 10 individuals. The plenum chairman is retired Supreme Court Judge Jacob Turkel. The decision is made with a majority of at least two thirds of the votes.

"Three years ago after a long correspondence with Satloff I did a little research of my own of the events in Mahdia and learned that Wahab did not risk his own life doing the noble deed he did. Even Judge Turkel reviewed the testimonies and confirmed the committee's conclusions. No one is doubting the noble nature of Abdul Wahab but clearly the Germans knew Jews were staying at the farm and did not try to hurt them. Meaning, he did not hide the Jewish families but hosted them."

On the 10-year anniversary to her father's death Faiza lit a memorial candle at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. "It was by accident and there something wonderfully symbolic about it rediscovering my father in those days. He was endlessly faithful to his Jewish friends.

"I arrived in Tunisia from Paris when I was 13 after losing my mother. I didn’t speak any Arabic, could not communicate and the ones who welcomed me the most were the Jews. Last year on Yom Kippur I went to the Sephardic synagogue because I wanted to hear the prayers again. And on Facebook, for instance, 80% of my friends are Jews."

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