Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Muslim helped to save Jewish child
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is marked today by the release of a film on a remarkable Tamboerskloof survivor of the Nazi terror, writes MICHAEL MORRIS
ON A sunny July 23, 1944, 1 783 Jews were crowded aboard three small boats on the island of Rhodes off the coast of Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean, and despatched to the Haidari concentration camp near Athens.
Not long after, they were forced aboard the last rail transport of the war, destined for Auschwitz. Only 151 returned.
By a near miraculous feat, one family was rescued before those crammed boats left Rhodes harbour.
And one member of that family is 81-year-old Tamboerskloof resident Lina Kantor, née Amato.
She told this story – her story, though it’s also the story of other heroes – in the Weekend Argus nearly two years ago.
Three courageous individuals stand out in the record: Sardinian communists Girolamo and his wife, Bianca Sotgiu, who were family friends of the Amatos (who took 8-year-old Lina into their care), and the Muslim Turkish consul on Rhodes, Selahattin Ülkümen, who paid tragically for his bravery in saving 43 Jews from the island on the grounds that they were Turkish citizens.
Tonight a new film, The Story of Holocaust Survivor Lina Amato, by South African film-maker Johnathan Andrews, will be screened as a prelude to the opening concert of the 2018 Johannesburg International Mozart Festival, to honour Ülkümen and the spirit of humanity that moved others like him.
This is the sentiment at the heart of Andrews’ #GETPeaceProject, a campaign of his United World Nation initiative, inspired by Lina Kantor’s story.
“GET Peace is the acronym for a project to Get Earth Together,” he said.
“The message of the movie is quite clear: there are so many reasons why we should abandon negative attitudes towards one another.”
He made the film in association with the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Turkish Embassy in Pretoria.
The Story of Holocaust Survivor Lina Amato features the present Turkish ambassador, Elif Comoglu Ulgen, Richard Freedman, director of the South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation, and Lina Kantor.
Rhodes, an Italian possession when World War II broke out in 1939, was cast into uncertainty with Italy’s capitulation in September 1943.
The islands were considered strategic, and, as the Allies moved to wrench them from Axis control, so the Germans, anticipating an assault, moved swiftly, too.
Rhodes was secured by the 7 500-strong Assault Division under Lieutenant-General Ulrich Kleemann.
Kantor described in 2016 how, as children, the war was tolerable and even exciting.
But the atmosphere changed towards the end of November, 1943. In their last major defeat of the war, the Allies lost the Dodecanese islands campaign to the Germans, and early in the new year the Gestapo arrived on Rhodes.
The war would end in a little over 16 months, yet, among other millions, thousands of Jews from the eastern Mediterranean fell victim to the Nazi horror.
As Kantor described it in 2016, when the Sotgius heard from a desperate Alberto Amato that Jewish citizens had been ordered to report to the local barracks – the men first, the women and children to follow – they took action.
In Lina’s case, they had already anticipated a protective strategy, having for some time taken her off to the Church of the Evangelismos at Mandraki to learn Latin prayers, and, if need be, pass for a gentile.
In the face of the new, more imminent threat, pregnant Bianca Sotgiu recognised an opportunity to save at least some of the Jews – on the grounds of their being Turkish, and thus neutral, citizens (which was true of
Lina Kantor’s grandmother, Rachel, even though her parents had Italian passports) – and set off on her bicycle for the home of the Turkish consul, 10km away. He told her he would think it over, and asked her to return the next day. Her 40km of cycling paid off; Ülkümen agreed that his duty was to save as many Jews as he could under the pretext of their being Turkish citizens, and he personally intervened with the island’s commander, General Kleemann.
The selective reprieve was heart-wrenching.
“The consul made a list,” Kantor remembered. “It had 43 names on it, including my parents. The list was read out at the barracks where the Jews were being kept under terrible conditions. The Gestapo opened the gates, and those 43 walked out.
“My father was a director of the Alhadeff Bank and lots of shops, and they employed many Jewish people, and I remember him telling me how, as they walked out, all these people got on their knees and begged him, ‘Please help us, please!’… and he could do nothing.”
For the consul, the consequence was the bombing of his home by the Germans, which led to his wife Mihrinissa’s dying from injuries a week after giving birth to their son, Mehmet.
But the Jews he meant to save got away safely.
After the war, the Amatos returned to Rhodes, but, as Kantor put it in 2016, “there was nothing left for us”, and the family emigrated to southern Africa. Just 12 years ago, the family moved to Cape Town from Zimbabwe.
More recently, in 2014, the Kantors returned to Rhodes to observe the 70th anniversary of the deportation of the island’s Jews, and, while there – via an internet search on a laptop while sitting at a café – discovered that Bianca Sotgiu had published a book in later life, Da Rodi a Tavolara (From Rhodes to Tavolara), in which, in a chapter called “Deportation of the Jews”, she told Lina’s story.
Just a few months before Kantor’s interview with Weekend Argus, she was reunited with a woman she had only known briefly as her 18-month-old “sister”, the Sotgiu’s baby daughter, at the time of their taking in Kantor to save her.
Andrews said this week an especially powerful moment in the film was Kantor’s speaking from the heart in “alerting us to the big question: how is it that religion can be such a problem in the world?”
In the film, she expresses a surely universal appeal in saying that “faith should be a human faith… faith in humankind”.
There is an echo, here, of the sentiments of Turkish consul Ülkümen’s son, Mehmet, born at the time of his mother’s death in the Germans’ retributive airstrike. He later recalled how his father – recognised by
Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among The Nations in 1989 – had told him that saving the Jews was not just the right thing, but the only possible thing he could do.
“He always used to say,
‘We Muslims are like Jews. We share the same father and the same God. We also share the same belief… that he who saves a single life saves a whole world’.”
Andrews hoped his film would bring home to people that “what we had in history, in some respects, still prevails today”, evident in “tensions in many areas of society all over the world”.
But, as it was for the Sotgius and the Ülkümens of the past, the challenge – the central theme of his film – remained “striving to understand the perspectives of others”.
• The film will be screened throughout the country, though dates have yet to be set.