Selahattin Ülkümen
On 13 December 1989 the Yad Vashem Foundation of Israel honoured Turkey’s “Righteous Among the Nations:” Selahattin Ülkümen.
In late July of 1944, the Germans began deporting the Jewish population on the Nazi-occupied Greek island of Rhodes. According to Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, Selahattin Ülkümen, the Turkish consul-general managed to save about 50 of its 1700 Jews, 13 of them Turkish citizens, the rest having some Turkish connection. In protecting those who were not Turkish citizens, he clearly acted on his own initiative. To wit, Albert Franko, already on a train to Auschwitz out of Piraeus in mainland Greece, “was taken off the train thanks to the intervention of Ülkümen, who was informed that Franko’s wife was a Turkish citizen.”
Matilda Toriel, a Turkish citizen living in Rhodes and married to an Italian citizen, recollected that on 18 July 1944, all Jews were ordered to report the next day to Gestapo headquarters. “As she prepared to enter the building, Ülkümen approached her and told her not to go in.” Even though she had never seen him before “he told her to wait until he had managed to release her husband.” Ülkümen requested that the Germans release all Turkish citizens and their families. Moreover, he added twenty-five to thirty people to the fifteen on his original list of Turkish citizens. When the Gestapo demanded to see the papers of all, Ülkümen insisted that “according to Turkish law, spouses of Turkish citizens were considered to be citizens themselves, and demanded their release.”
No such law existed. “Ülkümen had simply fabricated it in order to save the Jews. In the end, all those on Ülkümen’s list were released.” The rest of the Jews on the island, some 1,700 souls, ended up in Auschwitz. Ülkümen was declared Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Foundation of Israel on 13 December 1989, with his name being inscribed and a tree planted in his honor at the "Path of the Righteous."
References
- Arnold Reisman TURKEY'S MODERNIZATION: Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk's Vision (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishers. 2006) page 308
http://www.byegm.gov.tr/YAYINLARIMIZ/newspot/2003/july-aug/n6.htm Viewed February 3 2006.