Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury - my Zionist friend from Bangladesh

My friend Joosje Asser conducted investigating in all kinds of archives, and I heard there were a lot of very shady things going on. It did not feel right. Since Joosje is a writer who worked with a team on a series about the Jewish Council of Amsterdam, I learned a lot. I learned about the collaboration of the Dutch with the Nazis, I learned about the royal family’s connection to the Nazis. I learned about the very bad attitude of the Dutch government after the Holocaust – and also that of the Dutch Jewish community, some of whose members seemed to care only about themselves and money in their pockets. I was horrified! I could not believe I had lived there for my whole life, without knowing what really went on.

My family used to be a big family. My grandmother was happily married and she was the only daughter of a family of eight. She had five brothers. She gave birth to my mom in 1936 and my uncle in 1942. The times were changing for all of them. When my mom was born, there were already ugly things going on. People had to move from other parts of the country to the ghetto. Food became a luxury. Jews were not allowed into places. My mom could not go swimming; she could only stay outside the pool and watch. And then it got worse. They had to go into hiding. My grandmother’s older brother found a place for her two children and they never saw each other again. My mom was really lucky, my uncle not so much. My grandparents were murdered three days after they went on the train to Auschwitz.

Shoaib, as I call him, comes from Bangladesh and his story is incredible, almost unbelievable. Shoaib told me that he is a Muslim and a Zionist. He stands for Israel and the Jews. He literally fights our battle. In 2003, as he was getting ready to board a flight to Israel (He was invited to attend a Tel Aviv seminar of the International Forum for the Literature and Culture of Peace), he was arrested at the airport in Dhaka because the Bengali government thought he was a member of the Mossad and charged him with sedition. He spent seven years in jail, where he was tortured, threatened really badly, and not allowed to go to the funeral of his mom.

His family went through awful times. But his belief was and remains strong.

When he came out of jail in 2018, he picked up where he left off and ever since, his English-language Weekly Blitz newspaper is growing and showing that antisemitism or Jew-hatred is not acceptable at all. He is the editor and owner of the tabloid, which has been published every Wednesday since 2003.

He will help us show how bad the situation is in the Netherlands, where my family once owned a beautiful home in Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter. Shoaib and I talk a lot. We talk about his life and the things he does for our country that he loves so much. When South African immigrant Eli Kay was murdered near the Western Wall in Jerusalem last year, his newspaper made sure that they ran the article faster than anyone else. He writes about Israel before other papers around the world.

My Zionist friend from Bangladesh, thank you so much for being our friend!  ■