Two Unlikely Heroes, Then And Now
Inspired by the story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to save Jews during the Holocaust, a persecuted Iranian reformist now speaks out for Israel.
In Schindler’s shadow: Omid Safari has become a defiant critic of his native Iran and a supporter of the State of Israel.
Can watching a movie change your life?
Consider the story of Omid Safari.
Born in Iran in 1980, a year after the Islamic revolution, he was taught to hate and fear Israel and Jews, and to believe the Holocaust was a myth. But about 10 years ago, on the recommendation of a friend, Safari bought a DVD of “Schindler’s List,” the powerful 1993 film that won the Academy Award for Best Film and Best Director for Steven Spielberg. It is based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a flawed and manipulative Catholic German businessman who hired Jews to work in his Polish factory during World War II and, after witnessing the Nazis’ murderous cruelty, ended up risking his life to save many of them.
The effect of the film on Safari was immediate and profound. “Those two hours changed everything. I watched it five times that week,” he told me during an exclusive interview, via Zoom, from his home in the Netherlands, where he and his Lebanese wife and young daughter have lived for the last three years.
After watching the Spielberg film, Safari began to question all that he had learned in school and from Iran’s government media that insisted the Holocaust was “a big lie.” He promised himself that someday he would go to Poland and learn the truth with his own eyes.
By that point in his life, Safari had long since determined that the Islamic regime was immoral and dangerous, and he had paid a high price for his reformist political activities. As a university student, he was arrested, jailed and tortured on three separate occasions for publicly criticizing Iran’s sham elections and “religious dictatorship.” He served an eight-month term, then 15 months and then two years in harsh jail cells, often in solitary confinement. “They destroyed my life,” he said of his captors, “but each time I was motivated to continue with more power from within.”
Safari said he was told that he could be free to leave Iran and have his education paid for if he confessed, but he didn’t want his friends to think he “sold out.”
“I felt it was my duty to do my best for freedom, even to give my life for the future,” he told me. “I thought that one day, if I had children, they would ask ‘what did you do for us?’ and what should I answer?”
Dark And Depressing Years
Eventually, in late 2008, after having been imprisoned a total of almost four years, Safari was allowed to leave Iran. He attributes this, at least in part, to the rise of social media at the time, and increasing attention on the regime’s autocratic ways. He sought unsuccessfully to live in Turkey and settled on Lebanon -- a move he came to regret. Although he met and married a Lebanese woman, a physician, and received a small monthly pension through the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Safari found Lebanon, torn by civil strife, to be dangerous and confining. “I was unable to work and afraid to leave home. Those years were dark and depressing. Life has problems,” he said.
Most pressing was the fact that, after becoming a father, his daughter at seven months was found to have a brain tumor and underwent extensive chemotherapy three times. She is blind in her right eye and has partial vision in her left eye.
During this time, Safari traveled within Lebanon and came close enough to Israel to see across the border. “It looked like California to me – trees, fruit, clean, beautiful,” he recalled. “There was just a fence on the border, and I was tempted to jump over. But my wife said that Israel wouldn’t believe I oppose Hezbollah and the regime in Iran.”
Safari’s views on Israel changed dramatically when he lived in Lebanon.
“I grew up in Iran thinking that Israelis were killers, including women and children,” he told me. “Every night on the TV news they would show Israeli soldiers with guns facing women with small children. We were told Israel kicked the Palestinians out of their country. But when I was in Lebanon, I saw how Iran was sending so much money” to support Hezbollah, “but not to poor people in Iran.”
Safari came to believe that Israel is the legitimate homeland of the Jewish people, “so why can’t Jews have a country in their own land?” But to express such views publicly in Lebanon is dangerous, he said.
‘I Wanted To See For Myself’
After years of seeking permission to leave Lebanon, Safari and his wife and daughter were able to move to The Netherlands three years ago with the help of several high-placed UN diplomats. Though his daughter, now seven, still has a tumor on her optic nerve, she is able to go to school. And by March 2020, Safari had saved enough money to fulfill his decade-long wish to visit Poland and “see for myself what happened at Auschwitz.”
Over the years he had immersed himself in accounts of the Holocaust and of Israel through books and Internet searches.
The three-day experience was riveting. “When I visited Schindler’s factory, it was so emotional. I felt he was speaking there. I remembered all the dialogue [from the movie] and felt I was working there.”
The next day he visited Auschwitz and Birkenau and came to realize “how much damage humans can do. It was painful to see the piles of human hair, glasses, shoes, and the gas chambers. The walls and doors had something to say to me.”
Safari came back from Poland deeply depressed. “I wanted to write about it, but I didn’t want problems for my family,” he explained. “But then I thought to myself, if Oskar Schindler thought like that, he would not have done what he did to make the world better.”
So late last year Safari sat down and wrote an essay about his experience in Poland and the impact “Schindler’s List” had on him. He compared Iran’s propaganda machine and distortion of reality to the tactics of the Nazis.
Safari concluded the piece by expressing his wish to personally thank Steven Spielberg and “tell him how, in just two hours, his beautiful movie … encouraged me … to take a journey to find the truth and to be able to write this text today.”
He submitted the piece to The Times of Israel, a highly respected Jerusalem-based website, but got no response for two months. Safari worried that his essay would be rejected because he’s Iranian. But the piece was published in February and attracted attention from around the world. More than 36,000 people responded on Facebook. There was much praise for his courage in speaking out. “But I received many insults and threats,” he said. “I was accused of working for the CIA or the Mossad, though I expected that.”
He acknowledged that he “broke the taboo” by criticizing the Islamic government. “I’m still afraid of the regime,” he told me. “I know it’s really dangerous. But once you start something, you have to see it through, and I will continue to the last second of my life.”
Safari said that of all reactions to his essay he received, he was most gratified to learn that Steven Spielberg was touched by his tribute.
Does Safari see himself as a 21st century Schindler, risking his life to defy and decry a murderous regime?
“I don’t say I’m a second Schindler,” he told me. “But if someone hears my name, I want them to say I tried to do something. And I want my daughter to be proud of me.”
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