by Zeyno Baran & Onur Sazak
The Weekly Standard
02/16/2009, Volume 014, Issue 21
How a Turkish diplomat saved 20,000 Jews during the Holocaust.
Turkey's reaction to the recent Israel-Hamas war in Gaza has scared many of us who believed that anti-Semitism could never take root in our country. The mass protests outside the Israeli consulate in Istanbul, the defacing of a synagogue in Izmir, the anti-Semitic graffiti and newspaper articles have raised a frightening prospect. It is tragic that a country that had been the savior of so many Jews--first during the Spanish Inquisition and later during World War II--has been transformed into one whose Jewish minority lives in fear. This eruption has been building. For several years this decade, for instance, Hitler's Mein Kampf was a bestseller in Turkey. Such facts make all the more important the appearance in 2007 of The Ambassador, Emir Kivircik's biography of his grandfather, Behic Erkin, the courageous Turkish diplomat who saved 20,000 Jews in France from the Holocaust. Too few have heard of his gallantry or his righteous actions during one of humanity's darkest times.
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