JERUSALEM POST

A Radler

(March 18) - NEW YORK - Every so often, a new heroic account of Jews being saved from the death camps of the Holocaust is added to the small list of good deeds carried out during the Nazi era. From the legend of the king of Denmark wearing a Jewish star, to the story of Japanese ambassador Chiune Sugihara who saved 2,000 Lithuanian Jews against his government's wishes, stories of such heroic acts crop up once in a while, but are all too few and far between.

Today, nearly 60 years after the Holocaust, one would expect the stockpiles of such stories to be near depletion.

Desperate Hours, however, a new documentary about Turkey's role in the Holocaust, is proof that there are still stories to be told and people to be lauded.

The little-known story of this neutral Muslim country's saving of20,OOO Jews, most of whom made their way to Palestine, should be emphasized in light of the good deed itself. However, this film also serves as a reminder that with the current levels of European and Muslim anti-Semitism, including Holocaust denial and the culture of hatred in some parts of the world against the West, people may need to display such courage again. Screened in New York last month by the Anti-Defamation League and the Center for Jewish History, the movie highlights individual Turks' daring and heroic rescue of Turkish Jewry living in France, and its position as a haven for German elites and Zionist officials with the Yishuv movement, who used Istanbul as a base to rescue European Jewry and bring them to Palestine. Ordinary Turks' tolerance of the Jewish influx - or their lack of reaction to it, as seen in the film - seems particularly striking in such an era.

With Istanbul located less than 100 kilometers away from Nazi-occupied Europe, some may question how Turkish diplomats and clergy could have done more than they did: rescue Turkish Jews and provide transit visas to anyone with an end visa for a third country. It can also be noted that, like in many instances in which Jews were saved, the actions of so few saved so many.

Desperate Hours was written and co produced by Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, and directed and co produced by Victoria Barrett. It has been screened on Turkey's CNN affiliate, and TV stations in the US and Israel are looking into screening it, said Berenbaum.

In the film, Turkey's less laudable Holocaust-related history is also documented, including its refusal to allow 760 Romanian-Jewish passengers aboard the SS Struma to land in Istanbul. The ship is rumored to have been torpedoed by a Russian submarine, and just one passenger, David Stoliar, survived. Another important point - which was not included in the film - is that it was Turkey's alleged genocide of one million Armenians that