Cape Town woman nominates Righteous Gentiles

(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 71, No. 1, Pesach 2016)

And so we must know these good people who helped Jews during the Holocaust. We must learn from them, and in gratitude and hope, we must remember them. (Elie Wiesel)

On 21 July 2014, some 400 Jews assembled on the Greek island of Rhodos for a week-long programme to commemorate the deportation to Auschwitz of almost their entire centuries-old community seventy years before. They came from all over the world, from Caracas to Cancun, Seattle to Sydney, Hong Kong to Cape Town.1 The Chanukah 2014 issue of Jewish Affairs has articles by Zmira Cohen and Maurice Turiel describing their experiences at the memorial ceremonies.2 Among those who attended were the Kantor family.

Lina Kantor, neé Amato, was born on Rhodes, where her father was the manager of the Bank Solomon Alhadeff et Fils, and her mother was a musician. When the German occupiers detained the Jews prior to their deportation, her parents arranged for their Italian schoolteacher friends, Bianca and Girolamo Sotgiu, to take in eight-year old Lina. She was smuggled into their home one night without the knowledge of their neighbours, to be hidden there for her safety.

Lina remembers arriving at the Sotgiu home, a frightened little girl, and being handed the Sotgius’ toddler to hold in order to distract her from an environment of drama and tension. Bianca sent Lina to the cathedral every day, where their priest familiarised Lina with the service and taught her how to pray in Latin and make the sign of the cross.

Fortunately, Lina’s family escaped deportation and she was soon able to return to them since – unlike the rest of their family – her grandmother had refused to take Italian citizenship and had retained her Turkish nationality. This had saved them when the Turkish consul, Selahattin Ülkümen, took all the Turkish Jews under his protection. In all, 39 Jews from Rhodes and 13 from Kos owed their lives to his intervention.3

Ülkümen had gone to the German commanding officer, General von Kleeman, and demanded the release of the Jews, not only those with Turkish citizenship but their spouses and relatives as well, even though many of the latter were Italian and Greek citizens. He insisted that, according to Turkish law, spouses of Turkish citizens were considered to be citizens themselves.4 No such law existed – he had invented it to save more Jews.5

Ülkümen recalled, “The German commander said that, according to Nazi laws, all Jews are Jews and had to go to concentration camps. I objected. I said that, under Turkish law, there is no difference between whether a citizen was Jewish, Christian or Muslim. I said that I would advise my government if he didn’t release the Jewish Turks, and that it would cause an international incident. Then he agreed.”6

While von Kleeman, reluctantly, released the Jews, and they remained under Ülkümen’s protection so that Lina could return home, he maintained them under stressful conditions of constant harassment, including having to report daily to the Gestapo. All the remaining Jews on the island, some 1700, were deported to Auschwitz, where 90% were murdered.

In retaliation for Ülkümen’s interference, two German planes bombed the Turkish Consulate building, seriously injuring Ülkümen’s 28year-old pregnant wife, Mihrinissa, and killing two consular employees. Mihrinissa died from her injuries a week after giving birth to the couple’s son, Mehmet. Soon after, in August 1944, Ülkümen was deported to Piraeus on mainland Greece, and spent the remainder of the war there in confinement. He was released after the German surrender on 8 May 1945 and returned to Turkey. He died in Istanbul on 7 July 20037 after a long diplomatic career.

Mehmet followed in his father’s footsteps, eventually becoming Chief of Protocol at the UN in Geneva. He was brought to Cape Town in 2004 to open the exhibition, ‘Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honourable Diplomats’, arranged by the CT Holocaust Centre to pay tribute to foreign-service officers of various countries who had helped save Jews during the Holocaust.8 In his honour, the Sephardi community held a cocktail party. There, Mehmet added a further tragic note to the story, telling Lina that his maternal grandmother committed suicide on learning of her daughter’s death and that he had been sent to Istanbul to be brought up by his paternal grandmother.9

Mehmet also recounted his father telling 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, which as we know is deeply rooted in Jewish teaching, that he who saves a single life saves a whole world.’” 10

In 1989, Yad Vashem decided to honour Selahattin Ülkümen as a Righteous Gentile. This was part of an international project that it had begun in 1963 to pay tribute to those, called “The Righteous among the Nations”, who had risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Unlike the majority of their neighbours and colleagues, who had been bystanders, collaborators or perpetrators, these individuals had been prepared to help the victims despite the serious consequences to themselves that might result. Ülkümen’s name was inscribed at the memorial and a tree planted in his honour at the ‘Path of the Righteous’. A postage stamp honouring him was issued by Israel the following year. In 2001, Turkey granted Ülkümen her highest honour, the Supreme Service Medal, and also issued a postage stamp depicting him.

While in Rhodos last year, Lina’s son Gary made a most surprising find on the internet. It turned out that in 2002 Bianca Sotgiu had published, in her native Italian, a book called Da Rodi a Tavolara (From Rhodes to Tavolara). One chapter, titled the ‘Deportation of the Jews’, was available to download. Sitting in a café in the heart of the Juderia, Lina read the chapter, translating sentence by sentence to the family, Bianca’s own account of the rescue of the small group of Rhodesli Jews with Turkish citizenship.

Bianca described how her husband provided the Amato family with news of the war. Just before curfew one night, Albert Amato came to see them. All Jews had been ordered to register for transport to a nearby island. That “nearby island”, unknown to them, was to be Auschwitz. Clearly Albert had a good sense of their likely fate. With tears in his eyes, he asked them to hide and protect Lina. The Amatos had recently lost a baby boy. The Sotgius agreed to take Lina.

Bianca and Girolamo also put into action attempts to assist other Jews. Bianca, heavily pregnant, cycled 10 km to the Consul Ülkümen, to beg him to protect any Jews with Turkish citizenship. “You are like God in what you are able to decide”, she told him. The Consul said he would think about it and asked her to return the following evening. The next day, Bianca returned to the consulate, where this time Ülkümen saw her immediately and told her that he had completed the paperwork to take the Turkish Jews under his protection.

Gary got in touch with the publisher, who gave him the contact details of the Sotgiu children in Italy. Lina phoned – and the Sotgius were delighted to establish contact and sent her a copy of their mother’s book. They have been communicating by Skype ever since. Lina is treated like family in this warm, new-found relationship.11

Gary also contacted Marco Clementi, a historian who attended the conference on the Holocaust in the Aegean that ran concurrently with the commemorative events on Rhodos. Clementi had been responsible for finally opening the locked door leading to the Rhodos Island Police Archives. Unopened for nearly seventy years, it revealed a room with one crumbling wall. Everything underneath had been destroyed, but along the other walls were 90 000 documents in bookcases, boxes and brown folders labelled in blue, yellow and red pencil – the fruits of a long forgotten, zealous bureaucracy. Among them was a five-columned, six-page list of Rhodes Island Jews, which the Washington Holocaust Museum is now cataloguing and digitizing.12

There, Clementi found a file in Lina Amato’s name. It contained a document certifying Lina’s adoption by Bianca and Girolamo Sotgiu. The Sotgius had taken the precaution of backdating the document to 1942, when they married – instead of the actual date in 1944, when they agreed to hide Lina just before the deportation of the Jews.

Part of Lina’s story is also told by Martin Gilbert13 in his book, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust”. He received the information from Lina’s father, in a letter dated 12 December 1987.

Gilbert records the story like this:

An Italian teacher from Sardinia, Girolamo Sotgiu, did what he could to help the Jews when deportation was ordered.

He started by disguising himself as a porter, Albert Amato recalled, “in order to bring some food and some comfort (with the news that there had been an attempt to kill Hitler) to the men already herded together. Secondly he told my wife that our little daughter Lina, then aged eight years old, should not go to the concentration point and he risked his life taking her and hiding her with him. Thirdly he managed to find a horse carriage (the island was under blockade and there was no petrol for the cars, nor feed for the horses), and took my mother to interview the Turkish Consul in a nearby village where the consulate had been transferred, owing to the bombing of the port and the town by the Allies.”

The Turkish Consul, Selahattin Ülkümen provided protective documents in all, for fifty two Jews on Rhodes ( and nearby Kos) who had been born on the islands before 1912, when they were part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. All fifty-two were saved. After the war, Giralamo Sotgiu returned to his native Sardinia.

As with all memories of the same event recorded by different people, the details are the same, only different, because they are reflected through different eyes. In her autobiography, Bianca recalls cycling to the Consul to beg him to save the Jews. In his letter to Martin Gilbert in 1987, Albert credits Girolamo with hiring a horse carriage to take Alberto’s mother to the Turkish consul to beg him to save them. He told Lina that Girolamo took her to the consul to ask him to include her son and daughter-in-law under his protection even though they were Italian citizens, which he did. Bianca recalls Albert coming to her husband with tears in his eyes, begging the Sotgius to take Lina. Albert recalls his own wife being begged by Girolamo for the Sotgius to do so. Whichever version is closest to the facts, the Sotgius and/or the Amatos played an unaccredited role in the rescue of the 52 Jews by approaching Consul Ülkümen. The Sotgius were prepared to put their lives in danger in order to rescue Lina.

Armed with this information, the Kantors now approached Yad Vashem to ask them to award the Sotgius with the status of Righteous Gentiles.

The Yad Vashem website observes that in a world of total moral collapse, there was a small minority who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values. These were the Righteous among the Nations. They stand in stark contrast to the mainstream of indifference and hostility that prevailed during the Holocaust. Contrary to the general trend, these rescuers regarded the Jews as fellow human beings who came within the bounds of their universe of obligation.14 The Sotgius were such people. Yad Vashem describes them as “ordinary human beings, and it is precisely their humanity that touches us and should serve as a model”. The website further explains that the centre has “recognized people from 44 countries and nationalities; there are Christians from all denominations and churches, Muslims and agnostics; men and women of all ages; they come from all walks of life; highly educated people as well as illiterate peasants; public figures as well as people from society’s margins; city dwellers and farmers from the remotest corners of Europe; university professors, teachers, physicians, clergy, nuns, Lina and her family hope that they will be able to attend the ceremony, which is planned for her birthday month, so that they can thank the Sotgius in person for their lives. As Elie Wiesel has pointed out we must remember in gratitude and hope these good people who helped Jews during the Holocaust and this is what the Kantors are doing.

Gwynne Schrire is Deputy Director of the Cape Council of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies. She is a regular contributor and a member of the Editorial Board of Jewish Affairs and has written, co-written and edited various books on aspects of local Jewish and Cape Town history.