Anna & Dr Helmy by Ronen Steinke review – the Schindler of the surgery room

This meticulous account of the Arab doctor who sheltered a Jewish girl in 1930s Berlin is a remarkable story of subterfuge and courage

The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem honours 25,000 individuals who helped to save Jewish lives during the second world war. Among this roll call of the Righteous among the Nations", there is only one named Arab: Dr Mohamed Helmy. This remarkable book tells the story of Helmy's life, in particular the years in which he helped a young Jewish girl, Anna Boros (later Gutman), evade the Nazis in the heart of Berlin from 1936 until the end of the war.

Ronen Steinke, a political commentator at German broadsheet Suddeutsche Zeitung, has painstakingly pieced together these events from the state archive in Berlin, and from Gestapo correspondence, and interviews with the surviving relatives of Helmy and Gutman in New York and Cairo. His story, deftly translated by Sharon Howe, wears this research lightly. Steinke's history sheds a light on what he argues is a deliberately forgotten world, the old Arabic Berlin of the Weimar period, centred around the grand mosque in the Wilmersdorf district, which was open, progressive and far from antisemitic" and which welcomed Jewish luminaries, including Albert Einstein and philosopher Martin Buber, to its cultural events. It is a perception shared by many Muslims in western countries that the Holocaust was nothing to do with them, that Muslim migrants played no part in that history," Steinke writes. This book is evidence to the contrary."