National Archives of Mauritius

Transcription

I was born in Baghdad in 1949. I am in the middle of three brothers. The pictures were with my parents. There were two Jewish schools. So as we were going through cleaning and mending a binder full of school documents I looked up and there was your name! OK! That’s correct, this is my name, number 18. The Jewish community in Iraq is the oldest in the world following the destruction of the first temple. The British came to Iraq in 1917 when they conquered the country following the Ottoman collapse in World War I. They found members of the Jewish community can read, speak English and French besides Arabic. So they hired a lot of them to the new administration. The British stayed in Iraq until 1932 when Iraq became independent. In the same grouping of school documents we found a, I’m not sure, Sabiha? Yes, that’s my cousin. If about 120,000 left in 1950, 1951, the number of those who stayed behind, roughly between 8,000 to 10,000. And in 1967 there were about 3,100, 3,200 only. One of the parts of the collection that we’ve just started to work on is a collection of foldered school photographs. Yeah, sure. I know the person, he lives in London. His sister lives in Maryland. The school was closed officially in 1974. Probably, they forced the management to get all the documents. And they ended up with the basement of the Iraqi intelligence. Number eight, lives in Israel. Number nine was assassinated in 1973. We stayed until 1970. We left illegally. We went to the northern part of the country. The smugglers took us until the border by car but from there we had to walk. And while we were walking a dog started to bark in the night. And all the projectors from the top of the mountain were turned on towards us and we knew that was the end. But surprisingly after ten minutes the projectors were turned off and the smugglers came back. And we arrived walking safely to Iran. Twelve in London, 13 in Israel, 14 in London, 15 in London. In 2002 when I was in Montreal for a visit, I was invited to my cousin’s daughter’s bat mitzvah. Someone there came to me and recognized me by name. He said, “I used to be one of four people who used to watch you on behalf of the Iraqi intelligence.” My first question was to him, “What are you doing at my cousin’s bat mitzvah?” So he said, “Oh! My son-in-law is her father’s partner here in Montreal.” When you see all these lists of students that were your classmates or others that you knew, you wonder how everyone got scattered all over the world in different countries.