Later this week, Yad Vashem will for the first time recognize
an Arab, Dr. Mohamed Helmy, as a Righteous Among the Nations for saving
the lives of four of his Jewish friends in the Holocaust. An Egyptian urologist who moved to Berlin in 1922, Dr. Helmy was
working for the Robert Koch Institute, but was fired in 1937 for being
non-Aryan. He was arrested by the Nazis, but was released shortly
thereafter and allowed to return to his home. When the Nazis began
deporting Berlin’s Jews, Dr. Helmy hid Anna Boros, a 21-year-old family
friend, in his cabin in the city’s Buch neighborhood, where she assumed a
false identity, pretended to be married to a Muslim man, and wore a
hijab. Dr. Helmy also helped hide Boros’s mother Julie, her stepfather
Gerog Wehr, and her grandmother, Cecilie Rudnik, and was himself nearly
caught after the family was discovered and tortured in 1944. Having all survived, the family emigrated to the United States after
the war, but continued to return to Berlin and visit Dr. Helmy. They
also wrote letters to the local German government extolling the virtues
of their rescuer, who died in 1982. In 2013, Yad Vashem recognized Dr. Helmy as a Righteous Gentile, but his family refused to accept the honor because the institute is based in Israel.
