Abdol Hossein Sardari (c. 1895 - 1981) was an Iranian statesman and diplomat to whom thousands of Iranian Jews and their descendants owe their lives in wartime Paris. He is known as the "Schindler of Iran": Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist saved more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories.
Sardari was an unlikely hero. Sardari trained as a lawyer in Switzerland before becoming a diplomat. In his book In the Lion's Shadow, author Fariborz Mokhtari paints a picture of a bachelor and bon viveur who suddenly found himself head of Iran's legation house, or diplomatic mission, at the start of World War II.
In June 1940, following the German invasion of France, Iranian ambassador Anoushirvan Sepahbodi left for Vichy in the unoccupied zone to reconstitute the Embassy there. This left Sardari, the Consul General of Iran, in charge of consular affairs in Paris. In this capacity, Sardari appealed on several occasions to exempt Iranian and other Central Asian Jews living in German-occupied France from anti-Jewish measures decreed by French and German authorities.
At the beginning of World War II, about 150 Jews from Iran, Afghanistan, and Bukhara (a city in the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan and the former cultural center of the ancient Persian Empire) resided in France. Sharing linguistic and cultural ties, many of these Central Asian Jews, fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, had settled in Paris during the 1920s.
Following the German occupation of northern France in 1940, representatives of these three communities presented themselves to Vichy French officials and the German occupation authorities as "Jugutis" (Djougoutes in French). Jugutis were the descendants of Persian Jews who, forced to convert to Islam in 1838, continued to practice Judaism privately in their homes. Official identity papers, such as passports, generally identified Jugutis as Muslims.
A change of regime in Iran, in 1925, had led to the introduction of a new passport and identity card. Many Iranians living in Europe did not have this document, while others, who had married non-Iranians, had not bothered to get Iranian passports for their spouses or children. Sardari was able to help many Iranians, including members of Jewish community, return to Tehran by issuing them with the new-style Iranian passports they needed to travel across Europe.
On September 27, 1940, the German occupation authorities issued an ordinance requiring all Jews residing in France to register with the police. The Nazi propaganda machine, however, had declared Iranians an Aryan nation and racially akin to the Germans.
The story Sardari spun to the Nazis, in a series of letters and reports, was that the Persian Emperor Cyrus had freed Jewish exiles in Babylon in 538 BC and they had returned to their homes. However, he told the Nazis, at some later point a small number of Iranians began to find the teachings of the Prophet Moses attractive - and these Mousaique, or Iranian Followers of Moses, which he dubbed "jugutis," were not part of the Jewish race.
In a letter dated October 29, 1940, Sardari tried to convince Vichy officials, whose laws were binding in occupied France, that Jugutis were assimilated to non-Jewish Persians by culture and intermarriage and should not be considered Jews under Vichy law. Writing on letterhead for the "Imperial Consulate of Iran," Sardari affirmed:
According to an ethnographic and historical study regarding the Jewish religious communities of non-Jewish race in Russia received by this consulate and validated by the [German] Embassy in Paris on October 28, 1940…the indigenous Jews (Jugutis) of the territories of the former Khanates of Boukhara, Khiva, and Khokand (presently within the Soviet Republics of Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan) are considered to be of the same [ethnic] origin as those of Persia.
According to the study, the Jugutis of Central Asia belong to the Jewish community only by virtue of their observance of the principal rites of Judaism. By virtue of their blood, their language, and their customs, they are assimilated into the indigenous race and are of the same biological stock as their neighbors, the Persians and the Sartes (Uzbeks).
The leader of the Juguti community in Paris during the war was Dr. Asaf Atchildi, a physician from Samarkand (a city in Uzbekistan). In a 1965 memoir, he remembered the dangers that members of his community faced during the German occupation. In the summer of 1941, six Jugutis who had registered with the police were arrested and most of them were imprisoned in the Drancy internment camp outside Paris. Some of them--according to Atchildi--were held as hostages held in retaliation for acts of anti-German resistance.
Other Jugutis, who had also registered with the police and now feared arrest, avoided staying in their own homes. Using a German attestation to the Prefect of Police in Paris in early February 1942 that Jugutis were not to be subject to Vichy's anti-Jewish laws, Atchildi obtained the release of two of the prisoners from Drancy. Atchildi attributed the idea of the "Juguti" argument to fellow members of the community, the Kachurine family, who engaged the lawyer Julien Kraehling to represent them.
In August 1941, Soviet and British forces had occupied Iran. Because they perceived him to be pro-Axis, the Allies forced the Iranian ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925-1941) to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammed Reza (1941-1979). As Iran now stood under occupation of the Allies, Swiss diplomats assumed responsibility for protecting Iranian interests in France and elsewhere in occupied Europe in November 1941, and made appeals on behalf of the Iranian Jews.
The Iranian ambassador in Vichy was recalled by his government, but Sardari remained in Paris, continuing to work unofficially on behalf of Iranians, including Iranian Jews, residing in France. According to Asaf Atchildi, on February 11, 1942, Sardari wrote to him asking him, as the leader of the Jugutis in France, to include Jews of Iranian nationality on the list of Jugutis he had prepared for the Vichy authorities.
In letters dated September 29, 1942, and March 17, 1943, Sardari communicated with German officials concerning the status of Iranian Jews residing in Paris and surrounding towns in an effort to protect them from arrest and deportation. Soon after, on May 4, 1943, the names of 41 Iranians were included on a list of 91 individuals of "Jugutis originally indigenous to Iran, Afghanistan, Bukhara (Central Asia) residing in Paris and surrounding towns," prepared by Atchildi for Vichy officials (within the Commissariat-Général for Jewish Affairs).
The actions of Sardari, working in concert with Atchildi, paralleled an acceleration of deportations, as the Germans implemented the “Final Solution” in France. On July 16, 1942, French police arrested more than 13,000 foreign and stateless Jews residing in Paris. French authorities incarcerated single adults and childless couples in Drancy and held families--more than 8,000 men, women, and children--under inhumane conditions at the Vélodrome d'hiver (a covered sports arena) prior to their transfer to transit camps in La Loiret Département during the following week. One month later, in August, the Germans deported virtually all of those detained on July 16, 1942 by train via Drancy to Auschwitz; few survived.
High-level investigations were launched in Berlin, with "experts" on racial purity drafted in to give an opinion on whether this Iranian sect - which the book suggests may well have been Sardari's own invention - were Jewish or not. The experts were non-committal and suggested that more funding was needed for research.
By December 1942, Sardari's pleas had reached Adolf Eichmann, the senior Nazi in charge of Jewish affairs, who dismissed them, in a letter published in Mr Mokhtari's book, as "the usual Jewish tricks and attempts at camouflage".
Sardari continued to argue on March 17, 1943 that the Jugutis should not be considered racially Jewish. He reported that they were a largely assimilated minority whose members frequently intermarried with non-Jews and spoke Iranian, not Yiddish or Hebrew. Sardari also pointed out that Jugutis in Iran had "all the rights and all the civil, legal, and military rights and responsibilities as Muslims."
In the spring of 1943, as a consequence of Sardari's appeals, submitted in cooperation with Atchildi via Kraehling and Swiss diplomats, the Germans agreed to exempt the Jugutis residing in the occupied zone from anti-Jewish measures; in mid-1943, Vichy authorities adopted the same policy. Historian Warren Green has attributed the German response to the Jugutis and other Caucasian and Central Asian Jewish ethnic groups in France, such as the Russian Karaites and the Gruzinian Jews of Georgia, as part of a broader German policy to cultivate ties with non-Slavic, anti-Communist ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union.
Most of the Jugutis living in France survived the German occupation. One member of the community, Ebrahim Morady, was present in 1994 at a ceremony honoring Sardari at the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Tolerance in Los Angeles, California. Morady, along with his parents and two other family members, appears on a list of 38 names that Sardari identified in an appeal to a German diplomat, L. Krafft von Dellmensingen, in Paris on March 17, 1943. The names of the four Moradys also appear on the list of 91 names submitted by Atchildi to Vichy officials on May 4, 1943.
The number of blank passports in Sardari's safe is estimated to have been between 500 and 1,000. In his book, Mr Mokhtari suggests that if each was issued for an average of two to three people "this could have saved over 2,000 individuals". Sardari's nephew, Fereydoun Hoveyda, who was Iran's ambassador to the UN in the 1970s, stated in a 1998 interview that Sardari also helped to protect non-Iranian Jews in Paris during the war by issuing 1,500 Iranian passports to endangered Jews during 1942.
The book “In The Lion's Shadow” tells the personal stories of some who Abdol-Hossein Sardari helped escape the Nazis.
Eliane Senahi Cohanim was seven years old when she fled France with her family. She remembers clutching her favourite doll and lying as still as she could, pretending to be asleep, whenever their train came to a halt at a Nazi checkpoint.
"I remember everywhere, when we were running away, they would ask for our passports, and I remember my father would hand them the passports and they would look at them. And then they would look at us. It was scary. It was very, very scary."
Mrs Cohanim and her family were part of a small, close-knit community of Iranian Jews living in and around Paris. Her father, George Senahi, was a prosperous textile merchant and the family lived in a large, comfortable house in Montmorency, about 25km (15.5 miles) north of the French capital. When the Nazis invaded, the Senahis attempted to escape to Tehran, hiding for a while in the French countryside, before being forced to return to Paris, now in the full grip of the Gestapo.
"I remember their attitude. The way they would walk with their black boots. Just looking at them at that time was scary for a child, I think," recalls Mrs Cohanim, speaking from her home in California. Like others in the Iranian Jewish community, Mr Senahi turned for help to the young head of Iran's diplomatic mission in Paris.
Abdol-Hossein Sardari was able to provide the Senahi family with the passports and travel documents they needed for safe-passage through Nazi-occupied Europe, a month-long journey that was still fraught with danger. "At the borders, my father was always really trembling," recalls Mrs Cohanim but, she adds, he was a "strong man" who had given the family "great confidence that everything would be OK."
The 78-year-old grandmother has lived for the past 30 years in California with her husband Nasser Cohanim, a successful banker. Mrs Cohanim has no doubt to whom she and her younger brother Claude owe their lives. "I remember my father always telling that it was thanks to Mr Sardari that we could come out.
"My uncles and aunts and grandparents lived there in Paris. It was thanks to him they weren't hurt. "The ones that didn't have him, they took them and you never heard about them again."
After World War II, Sardari remained in the Iranian foreign service, serving as chargé d'affaires in Brussels. Sardari's later life was blighted by many misfortunes. In 1952 he was recalled by the post-war Iranian Government to Tehran to face charges of misconduct and embezzlement relating to wartime issuing of passports. He cleared his name in 1955 and left the diplomatic corps to join the National Iranian Oil Company.
He lost his pension rights and property in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and faced poverty in his final years. He died alone in Croydon, South London, England in 1981, living in a bedsit, a form of rented accommodation common in Great Britain consisting of a single room and shared bathroom.
Sardari has been honored by Jewish organizations such as the convention in Beverly Hills, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center on multiple occasions. In April 1978, three years before his death, Abdol Hossein Sardari responded to the queries of Yad Vashem, the Israeli national Holocaust Memorial, about his actions in this way: "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.
Mr Mokhtari hopes that by telling his story, through the testimony of survivors, including Mrs Cohanim, he will bring it to a wider audience but also shatter "popular misconceptions" about Iran and the Iranians. "Here you have a Muslim Iranian who goes out of his way, risks his life, certainly risks his career and property and everything else, to save fellow Iranians," he says. "There is no distinction 'I am Muslim, he is Jew' or whatever."
