Peloni: It was shocking to me to learn many years ago that Abdol Hossein Sardari was not counted among the Righteous Gentiles in Yad Vashem. As a blockbuster film came to be made surrounding the exploits of Oskar Schindler, the Iranian counsel who was responsible for saving twice the number of lives saved by Schindler, is still not afforded this honor today. Sardari’s ingenuity secured him a reprimand by his own govt, and upon being recalled, Sardari refused to return home while his important work in France required him to remain in Vichy France as the Jews of France where being shipped to their death. He improvised a Jewish sect, devised a name for it, Djuguten, and assured the German authorities that these Jews held Aryan heritage and were therefore exempt from the Nazi liquidation policies. Of course it was all a simple fantasy concocted by Sardari, who used his authority to save some twelve hundred families, only some of whom had any relationship to Iran. In doing so, Sardari even ran afoul of the diabolical Adolf Eichmann whose fastidious devotion to eliminating the Jews needs no description. Sardari’s story is truly remarkable, and it remains truly perplexing that he should not be honored as a Righteous Gentile.
You’ve probably never heard the name Abdol Hossein Sardari, who was Iran’s consul in Nazi-occupied Paris. When he realized Iranian Jews in France were being marked for extermination by the Hitler Regime, he didn’t look away. He didn’t wait for permission. He acted.
Abdol Hossein Sardari. Photo by PersiaDigest.com, Public Domain, Wikipedia
@drdanielschatz He began issuing Iranian passports — passports that deliberately left out the holder’s religion. First for Iranian Jews. Then for ANY Jew he could reach. But here’s where it gets truly amazing: He walked into rooms full of Nazi officials and argued — to their faces — that Iranian Jews weren’t “racially Jewish” but Aryan. He used the Nazis’ own twisted ideology as a weapon against them. And it worked.
When Tehran ordered him home, he refused. When the embassy ran out of money, he used his own. When Jews needed a place to hide, he opened the Iranian consulate itself — sheltering families and guarding their belongings while they fled. He even extended this protection beyond Iranian citizens, giving documents to many non-Iranian Jews to help them escape Nazi persecution. He is estimated to have saved between 2,000 and 3,000 Jewish lives. Schindler saved 1,200.
Years later, the Islamic Republic executed his nephew, former Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda, and helped erase much of the family’s legacy from Iran’s public memory.
Sardari never took any credit for his efforts during the war. When contacted by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem three years before his death, Sardari responded, “As you may know, I had the pleasure of being the Iranian consul in Paris during the German occupation of France, and as such, it was my duty to save all Iranians, including Iranian Jews.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.