President Manuel Quezon of the Philippine Commonwealth broadcast from Washington to Manila. For the 25 minutes he was on the air, Quezon discussed woman suffrage and urged the 10-year independence program be limited to a shorter period. April 5, 1937. Photo: Library of Congress.
When we tell the story of the Holocaust, the names that rise most often are European. Anne Frank in Amsterdam. Schindler in Kraków. The French resistance. These are vital stories, but if the telling stops there a deeper truth is lost: resistance to evil was not confined to Europe or to the West.
Across the world, people who were themselves colonized, displaced, and occupied recognized the shared humanity of Jews under Nazi persecution, and they acted.
Si Kaddour Benghabrit was the rector of the Great Mosque in Paris. Photo: Public domain.
One of those often-forgotten figures was Si Kaddour Benghabrit, rector of the Great Mosque of Paris. During the Nazi occupation, when deportations and arrests terrorized Jewish families, he and his staff quietly issued certificates of Muslim identity. With these papers, more than 500 Jews were able to pass as North African Muslims, evade capture, and live another day. Some even hid within the mosque itself. The Qur’an commands the protection of life, and Benghabrit lived that command with remarkable courage.
Thousands of miles away, in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Philippines, another act of defiance took shape. President Manuel Quezon worked with American High Commissioner Paul McNutt and Jewish relief groups to welcome around 1,200 Jewish refugees to Manila. Quezon even dreamed of building a Jewish settlement on the island of Mindoro, a place of new beginnings.
His words still echo, “The people of the Philippines will have in this land a place where they can live in freedom.”
For a nation itself living under colonial rule, this was not only politics, it was empathy, born of knowing what it means to live without freedom.
In Asia, Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania, became known as the “Japanese Schindler.”
Against his government’s orders, he wrote thousands of visas by hand, his arm cramping from the effort. Each visa meant escape across Siberia, through Japan, and often onward to Shanghai.
And Shanghai itself, war-torn, crowded, under Japanese occupation, became an open city where nearly 20,000 Jews found refuge because it required no entry visas. There, Chinese residents and Jewish refugees lived side by side, proof that even in poverty and hardship, compassion builds community.
Even Turkey, neutral during most of the war, quietly extended protection.
Its diplomats shielded Sephardic Jews in France and Greece, sometimes stretching legal definitions to cover whole families. Turkey also allowed refugees passage to Palestine, defying pressure from Nazi Germany.
What ties these stories together is not geography, but courage. Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists. Leaders of nations and administrators in mosques. Diplomats with pens, islanders with open doors, families who shared their food and shelter.
They remind us that the Holocaust was not only a Jewish tragedy, not only a European one. It was a crime against humanity. And humanity, East and West, colonized and colonizer, believer and unbeliever alike, rose up to resist.
For Christians, these acts echo their Gospel.
Jesus said in Matthew 25 that when the hungry are fed, when the stranger is welcomed, when the vulnerable are protected, it is done unto him.
These stories are testimonies of that truth, lived not only by Christians, but by people of every faith, and even those with no faith but compassion.
In our own time, there is still a temptation to draw lines of division, Christian and Muslim, East and West, refugee and citizen.
History offers another witness: when the image of God is recognized in one another, when life is defended against hatred, the legacy of Benghabrit in Paris, Quezon in Manila, Sugihara in Kaunas, and the unnamed families in Shanghai and Istanbul is carried forward.
Their courage is now the call.
