"Among the righteous"

I was ready to shut down my laptop, when a post on Facebook by a Sephardi friend from my childhood, caught my attention.
A documentary titled in French: Le Maghreb sous la croix gammée* (*The Maghreb under swastika).

Another sign… :-)

Before this documentary, there is a book by a Jewish American man, Robert Satloff.
He is a writer and a specialist of the Middle-East.
The documentary starts in Yad Vashem in the section of the glorious names of non Jews who saved Jewish people during the WWII.
But a list misses: the Arabs. Robert Satloff is seeking for a Schindler Arab: none in Yad Vashem.

When we talk about the Shoah, we focus on the Eastern Europe and the concentration camps.
We 'forgot' the North African Shoah.

What i learned in this documentary is that there were not only Sephardi Jews in work camps but some Eastern European Jews sent by the Nazis. The conditions were very hard, and many died bitten by scorpios or snakes, or deceased of dysentery and malaria.

The relations between Muslims and Jews in the Maghreb were fine compares to now indeed.
The deterioration of the relations started with the Nationalism.

A Sephardic woman said that: "When it was the Aïd, the Jews closed their stores, when it was Rosh Hashanah, the Arabs closed their stores. For Yom Kippur, everybody closed their stores."
They talked about the respect of the religion of each other. Judaism was accepted. None of these two religions tried to force to get converted to their own religion. They found a harmony, proclaiming that they were brothers and sisters.

Most of the camps have been destroyed, but they drove to the road where they used to be. You can see some ruins of the past.

The daughter of a Arab man who hid two Jewish families in his farm traveled with one of the survivors.
Moment of emotions!
They are very close.

These stories give hope for a better future between Jews and Arabs.

I have not found the original movie on YouTube, this is the link of the French version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt_kLVZH8l4&feature=share

And an article for those who don't understand my mother tongue.
I can translate if you ask for.
http://www.northjersey.com/community-news/documentary-filmmaker-highlights-righteous-arabs-1.947773?page=all

Shopping before Shabbos, Williamsburg, August 2014, ©emmarubinstein