Ever wonder why we, as Filipino don't even need visa in order to visit Israel? And why Israelis can also visit the Philippines freely without visa for 59 days?
The answer is that, we played a huge role in saving Jewish refugees during the holocaust. As we all know, holocaust is one of the most popular cultural genocide that ever happened in the history of our world. Led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, their main goal is to exterminate all the Jewish people in Germany to create his ideal world of pure white people with blue eyes, blonde hair and fair complexion.
The Nazis killed around 6 million Jews during the holocaust but some of them luckily escaped the terror. When first world countries like the United States and United Kingdom refused to accept refugees, our small, developing country, Philippines wholeheartedly accepted a total number of 1,200 Jewish people during the holocaust.
According to Michelle Ephraim--whose father, Frank Ephraim escaped to the Philippines, our country served as a safe haven for them during the holocaust. The Jews lived in a typical Filipino neighborhood and wore something similar to what Filipino people used to wear before. The first president of the Commonwealth Government, Manuel L. Quezon, wanted to accept more but he didn’t because we can’t handle much people because we were just a small country with a numerous amount of needs.
When the Jews came to our country, they witnessed the war between the Japanese and Filipino-American soldiers in Manila. But what happened next really surprised them. The refugees were treated better than most of the Filipino and American people because of their passport with a “swastika” on it. The Japanese people thought that they were allies so, they did not harm them. Though they were treated nicely by the intruders, the experiences during the war were indeed traumatic. According to some Jews, they used to hide in the ditch, not knowing when and where will be the next bomb would fall. Fires, gunshots and dead rotting bodies were everywhere.
But after all the awful experiences during the war, majority of the Jews said that the war in the Philippines was “preferable” than staying at concentration camps.
After the holocaust, the Jews went back to Germany, majority of them immigrated to Israel which we all know today as the land of Jews.
In 2009, the Jews erected a monument for the Philippines at Holocaust Memorial Park in Israel to remember and honour our courageous act.
The moral of the story:
It doesn’t require wealth to offer help and lend a hand, a simple act of courage and bravery is enough to make our world a better place.
