Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [105]
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I’m sure that the irony of comparing his government’s ability to hunt its opponents with the Israelis’ pursuit of a Nazi criminal was lost on Rosewater. Unlike Rosewater, most Iranians aren’t anti-Semitic.
I, for one, had been fascinated by Jewish history and culture all my life. When I was between the ages of five and ten, my family lived in a neighborhood that had many Jewish people. One of Tehran’s two largest synagogues, some Jewish butchers, and the main Jewish school were very close to our house. As old communists, my parents didn’t have any predilection for or prejudice against the Jews. But other kids in the neighborhood would tell me that Jews were different from us. We didn’t know how they were different, exactly, but we always knew who the Jewish kid in the class was. That didn’t stop us from being friends with them. When I later moved to Canada, many of my Jewish friends told me that they had been taunted at school for being Jewish. I couldn’t remember that ever happening in Iran.
Jews settled in the Persian Empire more than two millennia ago. Many Iranian Jews trace their roots in the country to 2500 B.C., when the Persian king Cyrus the Great provided refuge for Hebrew people fleeing from Babylon. The Jewish prophets Ezra and Isaiah called Cyrus “the one to whom God has given all the kingdoms of the earth.” Cyrus’s name is repeated twenty-three times in the Old Testament, and he is the only Gentile to be designated as a messiah—a divinely appointed leader—in the Torah. Outside of Israel, Iran still has the largest Jewish community in the Middle East. Even though many Iranian Jews migrated to Israel and other countries after the revolution, there are still twenty-five thousand Jews in Iran.
As a child, being told that Jews were different made me think about my own identity. Why did they buy their meat from a different butcher? Why did the men and boys wear yarmulkes? I remember being fascinated by the word “Jewish,” especially when I understood that many of the people my parents, my siblings, and I admired—Karl Marx, Bob Dylan, Paul Newman—were Jewish, and that my hero, Charlie Chaplin, sympathized with the plight of the Jews. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is still one of my favorite films.
In 1993, I decided to make a film about Jewish immigration to North America as my senior-year project. I chose the story of the SS Saint Louis, a ship of Jewish immigrants who left Germany in May 1939. I found a number of the ship’s survivors in different countries around the world, and interviewed them for the film. After The Voyage of the Saint Louis became quite successful in festival circuits, and was shown on television in many countries, I was interviewed several times about why I, a Shia Muslim, had made a film about a group of Jewish refugees. I always emphasized that one of my main reasons was to show that many Iranians care about the plight of other peoples. In October 2005, many Iranians were surprised and disgusted when Ahmadinejad called the Holocaust a myth and questioned the number of Jews killed during the Second World War.
I was always very proud that I was possibly the only Muslim filmmaker who had ever made a film about the Holocaust. In fact, in 2008, when the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam organized a retrospective of my work, I insisted that they show The Voyage of the Saint Louis in order to prove that not all Iranians are as ignorant as our president.
My words came back to haunt me as I sat blindfolded in my chair in front of Rosewater. Before he started asking questions, his cell phone rang. It was his wife again. He squeezed my right ear with his free hand as he answered the phone.
“Hello, dear, how are you?” He sounded relaxed as he spoke. “I’m so sorry, azizam, my dear, you know that I’ve been busy.… I know it’s the anniversary of our marriage.” Rosewater squeezed my ear harder. I started to moan.