The Arab Doctor and the Jewish Girl: Ronen Steinke (1943)
Ronen Steinke, author of Anna & Dr Helmy: How an Arab Doctor Saved a Jewish Girl in Hitler’s Berlin
In this episode of Travels Through Time we meet two extraordinarily brave people who formed an unlikely friendship in Hitler's Berlin.
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Their names were Dr Mohammed Helmy – a Muslim Egyptian doctor who had been living in Berlin since coming to study there in 1922 – and Anna Boros, a sixteen year old Jewish girl. When the Nazi regime's persecution of Jewish people started to escalate, Anna's mother approached Dr Helmy to ask for his help. His solution was to form a unique and daring plan that would fool the Gestapo just enough times to save Anna's life.
Anna and Dr Helmy's story is the subject of a new book by our guest today, the journalist and author Ronen Steinke. Ronen is also a political commentator for Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany's leading broadsheet newspaper and has published a number of works in Germany on the Nazi period.
Ronen first came across this story after reading a newspaper article about Dr Helmy, who is the only Arab to be listed as one of the “Righteous Among Nations” at the Israeli Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem. The list honours the more than 25,000 non-Jewish people who saved Jews during the Second World War.
As well as visiting some of the most dramatic moments in Anna and Dr Helmy’s story, in this episode Ronen takes us to the Berlin Mosque and shares the often neglected history of the city’s Arab community in the early decades of the twentieth century. Up until the outbreak of the war, the Berlin Mosque was a place that had been open to visitors and had attracted visitors like Albert Einstein – and a place where a particular friendship with the city's Jews had been visible since the mid-1920s.
Ronen Steinke’s book Anna & Dr Helmy: How an Arab Doctor Saved a Jewish Girl in Hitler's Berlin is published by Oxford University Press.
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Show Notes
Scene One: 1943. The Berlin mosque. A place that had fascinated Berliners and inspired the imagination of intellectuals and artists, now in 1943, this mosque was forcibly placed under the control of the Nazi-friendly Mufti of Jerusalem, a guest of honour of the SS.
Scene Two: 1943. The doctor's practice of Dr Mohammed Helmy in the well-to-do Charlottenburg district of Berlin. The Gestapo barge in, they are looking for a Jewish girl who has gone to ground in order to escape deportation: Anna. They don't find her however, they are met only by the doctor and his Arab assistant, and so they leave empty-handed. The beauty of this scene is: They have been duped.
Scene Three: 10 June 1943. The appartment of Dr Mohammed Helmy in the rough Moabit neighbourhood of Berlin. Nighttime. A secret meeting. Along with a fellow Egyptian, Dr Helmy helps the Jewish girl Anna whom he is hiding to convert to Islam. The idea is to save her life.
Momento: An instrument from one of Berlin’s jazz clubs.
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Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Ronen Steinke
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
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About Ronen Steinke
Ronen Steinke is the author of new book Anna & Dr Helmy: How an Arab Doctor Saves a Jewish Girl in Hitler’s Berlin. He is also a political commentator for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany's leading broadsheet newspaper and has published a number of works in Germany on the Nazi period, including his biography of Fritz Bauer, the courageous German Jewish judge and prosecutor who played an instrumental role in bringing the holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann to justice, and whose story was dramatized in the 2015 film The People vs. Fritz Bauer.
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