As New York’s World Trade Center billowed toxic smoke that awful September day, Robert Satloff watched transfixed, thinking the twin towers looked oddly familiar.
“I saw the chimneys of the death camps,” he said. “I knew then I wanted to do something to reach those still undecided about the Holocaust.”
Satloff addressed a full house at the San Francisco Jewish BookFest on Sunday, Nov. 5 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. Satloff was there to promote his book “Among the Righteous: Lost Stories of the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands.”
He was joined by fellow author Sandy Tolan, whose latest book is called “The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East.”
Tolan is a reporter with NPR; Satloff an expert on Middle East issues and executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Though different in subject and tone, their two books both shatter conventional wisdom about Middle East history.
Soon after 9/11, Satloff moved to Rabat, Morocco, to launch a search. He wanted to find Arabs who, like their Polish or Italian counterparts, might have rescued Jews during the war years. Satloff would have settled for even one such righteous Muslim.
“The Jews never looked hard,” he says of those few heroes, “and the Arabs didn’t want to be found.”
But remarkably, after a four-year, 11-country search, he did find a few people who fit the description. They contributed the lost stories in his book. One Tunisian Arab hid Jews on his farm. One imam in Paris rescued some from Nazi deportation.
“I told stories nobody wanted to tell,” added Satloff. “The Holocaust is overwhelmingly an Ashkenazi narrative. Only this year has Yad Vashem [Israel’s Holocaust memorial] issued a curriculum to teach about Jews in Arab lands during the Holocaust. I was looking for the Arab Wallenburg.”
Satloff pointed out that multiple forced labor camps, with many Jews among the prisoners, cropped up in Arab countries during the war.
Tolan’s book tells the true story of a Palestinian Arab family living in what is now Ramle, Israel, before 1948. During the War of Independence, the family was driven out of its home, and a Bulgarian Jewish refugee family moved in, oblivious to the previous owners.
Many years later, the man’s Arab cousins made their way to the town, knocked on the door and were greeted by a 19-year-old Jewish woman. The men explained who they were and asked to enter.
Though understandably nervous, the young woman invited them in.
The lemon tree of his book title refers to a tree in the backyard of the Ramle home, which now houses Open House, a Jewish-Arab community center.
Tolan said the challenge for him was to take no poetic license, to thoroughly research every aspect of the story, and yet still have it read like a novel. In the process, he stepped on the toes of both the Palestinian and the Israeli narratives.
“It’s beyond legitimate dispute that many Arabs were driven out of their homes,” said Tolan of Israel in 1948. “The dispossession of the Palestinians is a huge reason why the conflict goes on. The early history of Israel was written by the warriors.”
Satloff is in a unique position to bring his message to the Arab world. Fluent in Arabic, he hosts a weekly news and interview program on al-Hurra, the U.S. government-supported Arabic satellite TV network broadcast across the Middle East. He uses that venue, as well as the positive reaction to his book, to work towards reconciliation.
“The State Department is sending me to the Middle East to talk to Arabs about the Holocaust,” he says. “I want to take a positive approach. Was there ever an Arab who saved a Jew? If so, then you could lance the boil.”