Posted on 06/10/2003 1:30:38 AM PDT by yonif
Selahattin Ulkumen, a Turkish diplomat who saved Jews on the Nazi-occupied island of Rhodes from being sent to concentration camps during World War II, has died. He was 89.
Ulkumen, frail and bedridden for years, died Saturday at the Etiler nursing home in Istanbul, the home said Monday.
As Turkey's consul-general on Rhodes when Jews were being ordered to report for deportation in 1944, he stood up against the deportations and protested to the German commander in charge.
In July 1944, he issued exit visas to Turkish Jews living on the island and their non-Turkish children and spouses. Forty-two Jewish families were spared.
His house in Rhodes was bombed in retaliation, and his pregnant wife later died from injuries.
The Jerusalem Yad Vashem Holocaust museum awarded Ulkumen the title of Righteous Among the Nations in 1990.
"All I did was carry out my duty as a human being," Ulkumen told the Vatan newspaper in an interview.
In 2001, Ulkumen and two other diplomats, Necdet Kent and Namik Kemal Yolga, were honored with the Supreme Service Medal - Turkey's highest honor - as well as a medal from Israel for saving Jews. Israel's ambassador to Turkey at the time, Uri Bar-Ner, expressed thanks at the ceremony for saving "our Jewish brothers at the darkest moment in history."
The diplomats were known as the "Turkish Schindlers," after Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist whose efforts to save more than 1,000 Jews from Nazi death camps were recounted in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."
Kent, who gave Turkish citizenship to dozens of Turkish Jews without identity papers, died last year. Yolga gave identity papers to Jews in France.
Ulkumen retired from Turkey's foreign service in 1979.
A funeral service was scheduled Monday at Istanbul's Levent Mosque.
President Eisenhower's son has a book out, and he said that after he went into the concentration camps (when they were liberated), he couldn't stand to even look at a German.
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