After 60 years one may think that all Holocaust stories have been told in one way or another.  Robert Satloff's new book, "Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands" (PublicAffairs, 2006) is an essential addition to our understanding of this darkest period of the 20th Century.

Satloff, executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, investigates the lost history of Arabs and Jews in Axis-occupied North Africa during World War II.  The timing of the book is propitious: It appears as Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism is multiplying around the world and as Holocaust denial in the Muslim world is on the rise.
 
Ironically, the idea for the book was born out of the ashes of 9/11, as the author, an expert on Arab and Islamic politics, walked along Manhattan's empty Fifth Avenue worrying about his wife's safety, and ruminating on the audacity of the killers who hijacked planes to kill people.  In "Among the Righteous," Satloff takes us on a personal and profound journey to discover the answer to a seemingly simple question: "Did any Arabs save any Jews during the Holocaust?"
 
Like pulp detective Philip Marlowe searching for the Maltese Falcon, Satloff spent four years sifting through clues from 11 countries looking to solve this mystery. Satloff's quest starts out by trying to find an Arab Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazi ovens, or a Muslim Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews.  After years of painstaking research, Satloff was indeed able to confirm the identities of several Arabs who saved Jews in North African countries such as Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, which in the early 1940s were under the control of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Vichy France.

In one fascinating discovery, Satloff locates a Tunisian Jew named Anny Boukris whose family was saved by Khaled Abdelwahhab, a former Tunisian minister, who hid several Jewish families on his family's olive farm. Boukris had never discussed her family's story before. But Satloff went even further. His passion and perseverance led him to the daughter of Abdelwahhab, who had never heard the story of her father's heroism. This fact anchors one of the most important findings of the book: the nearly complete lack of Arab knowledge about heroic Arab acts towards Jews during the Holocaust. 

Much of it is willful, a kind of repressed memory of an entire people. He points out that there are no Holocaust education programs or textbooks in any Arab country. Amazingly, Arab governments denied Satloff access to official government records that could have provided more examples and details about Arab heroism towards Jews.  Sadly, some Arab family members also were reticent to acknowledge the courageous acts of their relatives, afraid they would be "accused of saving Jews."

On the other side, Satloff notes Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial, has never acknowledged any Arabs for rescuing Jews, and he urges it to do so. This recommendation comprises another central theme in the book: Satloff wants Arabs to be made aware of their role during the Holocaust, not only for their own sake, but to help stem the rising tide of Holocaust denial, consistently promoted in the Arab and Muslim press, and by leaders such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah's Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.

Satloff rightly explains that because most Arabs live in repressed, closed societies, their government-sponsored schools teach a distorted and redacted version of their own history. "This phenomenon has produced a generation of Arabs that knows little about the details and texture of their own history, especially the modern history of the republics, monarchies and principalities in which they live today," he writes. Worse, this phenomenon has until now given Arabs "a free pass when it comes to denying or minimizing the Holocaust. Virtually alone among peoples of the world, Arabs have effectively claimed – and won – exemption from the global campaign to remember the most audacious crime in history."  Indeed, Satloff reveals that only one Arab government leader of the thousands who have visited Washington, D.C., has ever left a record of an official visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Satloff, whose expertise is in Arab and Islamic politics, leads readers to the heart of the Catch-22 facing present-day Arab and Muslim Holocaust deniers: if they claim and complain that Israel was founded because of the Holocaust, then logic demands they must also accept the reality of the Holocaust. But this has been nearly impossible for them to do. As Satloff writes: "In the eyes of many Arabs, the catastrophe of Israel's founding would not have occurred if the catastrophe of the Holocaust had not occurred first; accepting the uniqueness and enormity of the latter therefore runs the risk of accepting the validity and legitimacy of the former."

With this book, Satloff's noble quest is to combat Arab ignorance of the Holocaust, making it accessible to them by revealing the heroic stories of Arab rescuers of Jews. As he explains, "it dawned on me that we do no favors to Arabs to exempt them from this history, whatever connection the Holocaust may have to their political dispute with Israel."

But the rest of what Satloff uncovered about the Arab role during the Holocaust is grim. The persecution of Jews by Arabs was widespread, with government laws passed to strip Jews of their jobs, homes and assets. These laws, and subsequent government measures and persecution, helped drive Jews from their ancestral homes in many Arab lands, creating hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees that the international community has not recognized to this day. Ironically, the few Sephardic Jews still living in Arab lands have also repressed their memory of their persecution during the Holocaust.  The nearly 5,000 Sephardic Jews who perished remain a footnote of history.

Satloff found no death camps in Axis-occupied North Africa, but he was able to identify more than 100 concentration camps and slave labor camps created mostly to hold Jews, who were tortured and murdered at the hands of Arab guards and others. Satloff reports that a sizable number of Arabs performed their jobs eagerly. "Sometimes their zealousness was characterized by gratuitous violence that bordered on the sadistic." Like Europe's Judenrat, North African Jewish councils, called "consistories," were set up  to administer Nazi demands for slave laborers and to hand over Jewish property and assets.

Despite the tales of brutality and horror heaped upon Jews by their Arab neighbors – tragically similar to the Holocaust stories from Europe - Satloff ends the book on a note of hope.

He believes that growing numbers of Arabs are ready to hear the untold stories about the Arab encounter with the Holocaust.  Perhaps this book can help launch a new kind of dialogue between Arabs and Jews.  If nothing else, "Among the Righteous" does an important service in documenting both the good and the evil committed by Arabs towards their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust, which Satloff correctly calls "the worst genocide of all."

Abraham H. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, is National Director of the Anti-Defamation League and author of "Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism."

The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.