Hitler used as evidence that the world would not react to the mass murder of the Jews. "Who remembers the Armenians?" Hitler purportedly said.

TURKEY'S rescue of Jews took place mainly in Nazi-occupied France, where diplomats insisted that the country's 10,000 Turkish Jews be accorded the same protections as French citizens in Turkey. When the French government demanded that Jews wear a yellow star and started confiscating their property, the Turkish diplomats vigorously protested. They yanked all the Turkish Jews they could fmd from trains, transit camps and concentration camps, and provided them with passage to Turkey.

"If you were in my place you would do the same thing," said former Turkish vice consul to Vichy-run Marseilles, Necdet Kent, who, 60 years ago, boarded a train full of Jews claiming Turkish citizenship being sent to a concentration camp. Three hours later, an SS guard relented and pulled him and 70 others off of the train, and the consulate sent them to Istanbul for the duration of the war. "Turkey was the only country in Paris that was helping, protecting and trying to protect the Jews," said ambassador Namik Yolga, who was stationed in Paris."rm a human being, I couldn't do anything else," said Kent.

Selahattin Ulkemen, the consul-general in Rhodes, became the only Turk to be awarded the Righteous Among the Nations for his rescue of Turkish Jews. Ulkemen protested Nazi deportation orders and issued exit visas to all 42 Turkish Jews living on Rhodes, as the rest of the Jews on Rhodes were deported and killed by the Nazis.

Well before diplomats were forced to start saving lives, the Turkish government provided German professors, scientists, and musicians with jobs at its universities and institutions. The professors were Jewish and non- Jewish Germans who were deemed unfit to teach by the Nazis. There were 200 altogether, two-thirds of whom were considered to be Jewish by the Nazis. Even further back, in 1492, the Ottoman sultan had sent a fleet to pick up Jews escaping the Spanish Expulsion in order to import Western ideas. In 1933, Turkish president Kemal Ataturk welcomed 200 Jewish and non-Jewish professors fleeing the Nazis with a similar refuge, including permission to bring their families and assistants for an unlimited time.

Among those welcomed into Turkey was an architect who built the presidential palace, the parliament, state opera and theater, and ministry of defense. "There was a saying that Istanbul University was the best German university outside of Germany," notes a Turkish assistant to a Jewish professor.

The Catholic church in Turkey also tried to save Jews. In an era when the Church was notorious for turning its back on Jewish suffering, the Vatican's representative in Istanbul, archbishop Joseph Roncalli, handed out documents providing them with the Holy See's protection, and was said to have issued false baptismal certificates to Jews, though proof that such certificates were used has not yet been found. In 1962, after he became Pope John XXIII, Roncalli officially absolved Jews of responsibility for the death of Jesus - a move widely attributed to his experiences during the Holocaust.

The film also documents Heinrich Himmler's"Jews for Trucks" offer, which was negotiated, unsuccessfully, among Jewish Agency officials in Istanbul. However, as Chaim Barlas, the Yishuv's chief representative in

Turkey, is said to have written in a letter, "It is a miracle that even this small number has escaped from hell."