Nazi stormtroopers stormed into a Berlin medical office one autumn day in 1943. At the receptionist’s desk, a tall young Muslim woman with dark hair was sorting medical samples. She raised her head and smiled, revealing her dimples: How could she possibly assist them?
The brownshirts screamed that Dr. Helmy needed to be seen right away. Despite the crisis, she maintained her composure and promised them that the doctor, her uncle, would be there in a flash.
The Gestapo raided the office, but they were unable to locate evidence that Mohamed Helmy was surreptitiously treating and aiding Jews. They had no idea that the proof was right in front of their eyes.
The Muslim doctor’s aide wasn’t actually Muslim. She wasn’t his niece in any way. Her real name was Anna, and she was Jewish, despite the fact that everyone called her Nadia.
The extraordinary account of how the Egyptian-born Helmy saved the life of Anna Boros, a young Romanian-born Jewish girl, by passing her off as his Muslim niece for years is told in German journalist Ronen Steinke’s book “Anna and Dr. Helmy” (Oxford University Press). “It’s a storey of hope in these times of hostility,” Steinke writes, describing a vast network of Arab Muslims in Berlin who assisted their Jewish compatriots in escaping the Nazis during War.
“I’m very happy about [the book], and I think its message is very important,” said Carla Greenspan, Anna’s surviving daughter. “It shows that people can care for each other regardless of their religion or race.”
Mohamed Helmy was born in Egypt in 1901 to a wealthy family and studied medicine in Berlin in 1922. In 1933, the Gestapo invaded Berlin’s leading Jewish hospital, and he eventually secured a job there. Stormtroopers picked up all of the hospital’s Jewish doctors and tortured and beaten them — some to death — before replacing them with Nazis “clad in white coats and devoid of any technical skill,” according to one nurse.
Helmy, the sole Muslim doctor on staff and a 33-year-old Muslim, was saved. While the Nazis certainly did not believe Arabs to be Aryans, German strategists “were desperate to persuade [prominent] Muslims like him to join the dictatorship,” according to Steinke. Helmy was surprised to learn that the hospital management felt “compelled” to retain him on board. Despite this, he resented the new regime, refusing to greet his coworkers with “Heil Hitler” and criticising their ineptness behind their backs.
He resumed surreptitiously treating Jewish patients, travelling to their homes for appointments during hospital hours. (In 1940, Helmy spent a year in a Gestapo prison with nine other Egyptians, but he was released and granted his own practise because the government wanted him to.
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