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Egyptian doctor defying Nazi Germany
Mohamed and Anna - In plain sight, © Taliya Finkel
On the occasion of the Holocaust memorial day Yom Hashoah, the German Embassy, together with the Embassy of Israel screened the film „Mohamed and Anna, in plain sight“ by the filmmaker Taliya Finkel on the Egyptian physician Mohamed Helmy who saved a Jewish family from the Holocaust in Berlin during World War II.
Mohamed Helmy was born in Khartoum and moved in 1922 to Berlin to study medicine. After graduation he worked at the Robert Koch Institute, but he was soon dismissed from his job in 1937 and began to suffer Nazi racism in various ways, as he was prevented from working in public hospitals or from marrying his German fiancée after the Nazis came to power. Despite the dangers to his own life, he was known to criticize and mock Hitler and Nazism, as he was arrested in 1939 with a number of Egyptians, but was soon released.
During the war, Helmy continued to treat his Jewish and other patients in his clinic, including the family of the Jewish girl Anna Boros, whom he hid in his home and disguised her as his Muslim niece. He helped the mother and father of Anna, Julie and Georg Wehr and her grandmother Cecilie Rudnik, and during the war he provided them with medical care and medicines.
After the war, Helmy married Emmy. They did not have children and remained in Germany until their death, where Mohamed Helmy died in 1982.
In 2013, he was named the Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.