One autumn day in 1943, Nazi stormtroopers barged into a medical office in Berlin. A tall young Muslim woman with dark hair sat at the receptionist’s desk, sorting medical samples. She looked up and smiled, showing her dimples: How could she help them?

The brownshirts barked that they needed to see Dr. Helmy at once. Remaining calm despite the situation, she assured them that the doctor, her uncle, would be with them in just one moment.

The Gestapo raided the office, but they couldn’t find what they were looking for — evidence that Mohamed Helmy was secretly treating and helping Jews. Little did they know that the proof was staring right at them. 

The doctor’s Muslim assistant wasn’t really Muslim. She wasn’t his niece. And although everyone called her Nadia, her real name was Anna, and she was Jewish. 

“Anna and Dr. Helmy,” by German journalist Ronen Steinke (Oxford University Press), tells the incredible story of how the Egyptian-born Helmy saved the life of Anna Boros, a young Romanian-born Jewish girl, by passing her off as his Muslim niece for years. “It’s a story of hope in these times of hatred,” Steinke writes, revealing an entire network of Arab Muslims in Berlin who helped their Jewish comrades escape the Nazis during the war.

“I’m very happy about [the book], and I think its message is very important,” said Carla Greenspan, Anna’s surviving daughter. “It shows that people can care for each other regardless of their religion or race.”

Mohamed Helmy was born to a wealthy family in Egypt in 1901, and went to Berlin in 1922 to study medicine. He eventually got a job in Berlin’s premiere Jewish hospital, which was raided by the Gestapo in 1933. Stormtroopers rounded up all its Jewish doctors and tortured and beat them — some to death — replacing them with Nazis “dressed up in white coats and devoid of any technical expertise,” as one nurse recalled.

Helmy — the only Muslim doctor on staff, at 33 — was spared. While Nazis clearly did not considered Arabs to be Aryan, Steinke writes that German strategists “were keen to incentivize [prominent] Muslims like him to get on board with the regime.” The hospital management therefore felt “compelled” to keep Helmy on board, much to his surprise.  Still, he chafed under the new order, refusing to greet his colleagues with “Heil Hitler” and mocking their incompetence behind their backs. He resumed treating Jewish patients secretly, traveling to their houses for appointments during working hours at the hospital. (Helmy did spend about a year in a Gestapo prison in 1940 along with nine fellow Egyptians, but was released and given his own practice, because the government wanted to recruit him as an ally.)

Anna first encountered Helmy when she was 11 years old. Her grandmother, Cecilie,  needed to see an internist, and one of her friends told her about the Arab doctor making secret house calls to Jewish patients. He visited the family’s home in 1936, and became a confidant, advising them on money matters, hiding valuables for them and eventually finding a hiding place for Cecilie when she was summoned to a labor camp. Anna was born in Romania, but moved to Berlin with her newly divorced mother, Julie, when she was two, to live with Cecilie. 

Anna was a smart, pretty girl who radiated a kind of quiet confidence and refused to wear a yellow badge. At first, her Romanian citizenship afforded her a kind of protection, but in 1942, when she was 16, she received a summons from the Romanian consulate. By then, “we had already heard that the Jews weren’t being sent to Romania, but to camps in Poland,” Anna later recalled. Her family begged Helmy for help.

A brilliant yet dangerous plan was hatched. Anna would go live with Helmy and his fiancee, Emmy, pretending to be his Muslim niece “Nadia,” working as a receptionist at his medical office. She proved an adept pupil, analyzing blood and urine samples under a microscope and faking Arabic conversations with her “uncle” when necessary.

The two continued to outpace the Nazis on the hunt for Anna, whose name was on a list of missing Jewish persons after she failed to show up for her summons. Helmy tried to adopt her, attempted to get her an Egyptian passport, and even had her convert to Islam so she could “marry” one of his Arab friends, a jazz musician who helped Jewish musicians escape Germany. None of these schemes — which would have allowed her to at least get out of the country more easily — worked. The pair kept being “thwarted by insurmountable difficulties,” Helmy later said.

In January 1945, Anna’s mother Julie arrived at the doctor’s door in tears, saying that she had revealed her daughter’s whereabouts under questioning. Helmy went to the Nazis with a letter Anna wrote, saying that she had deceived him about her identity and she was really Jewish and going to live with an aunt in Dessau.

“You must find her!” Helmy wailed, putting on a performance as he gave Anna time to go to another remote hiding place. Either the Gestapo believed his ruse, or they didn’t have time to check his claim. A few months later, the Soviets arrived in Berlin. The war was over.

After the war, Anna met a Polish Jew named Chaim Gutman in Berlin, and the two married, eventually moving to New York City and settling in Canarsie. The pair had three children. She continued writing letters to Dr. Helmy — who stayed in Berlin and eventually married Emmy — throughout her life, and even visited him twice in Germany. He died in 1982, and she died in 1986. Later, Anna’s surviving family advocated to include Helmy’s name among the 25,000 individuals who helped Jews during World War II at the Yad Vashem Holocast memorial in Jerusalem — the only Arab Muslim’s name included.

“My mother was always indebted to him. appreciative of what he did for her,” said Greenspan. “He was like a father figure to her through all the years.”