Anna and Dr. Helmy: How an Arab Doctor Saved a Jewish Girl in Hitler’s Berlin, by Ronen Steinke

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'Anna and Dr. Helmy' by Ronen Steinke

The book’s subtitle describes what happened and the promised “how” is worthy of Steven Spielberg. This nonfiction account is the story of a teenage Jewish girl in 1930s-‘40s Berlin who posed as the niece-receptionist of an Egyptian physician, one of the only “non-Aryan” doctors permitted to practice in the city.

Although a Hollywood adaptation might focus on the girl, Helmy is as much the real protagonist. He was the son of upper-class Cairo who studied medicine in Berlin and stayed on despite the deteriorating political situation. His class-rooted self-assurance—arrogance?—endowed him with courage in dealing with the Nazi thugs he encountered. Helmy was also shrewd, eventually adopting a façade of support for the regime to cover his sanctuary for Jews hidden in plain sight.

The back story described by German journalist Ronen Steinke is fascinating. Kaiser Wilhelm, hoping to endear himself to the Muslim world, built a mosque in Berlin that attracted Arab residents and German converts. Some Nazis admired Islam and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem worked with them to spread propaganda across the Arab world. Helmy became the cleric’s physician during the Mufti’s Berlin exile, which was spent broadcasting lies to the Middle East, calling on Muslims to rise against the British and the Jews.

A few pieces of the story are a bit patchy. It’s a compact book composed of fascinating anecdotes, but I’d like to know how Anna survived the Red Army’s rapacious assault on Berlin. Anna and Dr. Helmy is also a valuable story of human compassion across religious-ethnic lines, of Jewish-Arab-Muslim friendship that has been eclipsed by events since World War II.