In the summer of 1940, a letter arrived at the Casablanca home of Nelly (Rachel Hélène) Benatar. It was not addressed to her, but to her husband, Moïse. The problem was that Moïse Benatar had died a year and a half earlier.
The letter had been written by Ferdinand Marburger, a stamp dealer from Paris who had known Moïse in the past but had never heard the news of his death. At the time, Marburger was being held, along with other refugees from war-torn Europe, aboard one of the ships anchored in the port of Casablanca.
For two weeks, he wrote, the authorities had refused to allow them to disembark. The passengers were hungry, thirsty, and sick, especially the children. Enclosed with the letter was evidence: a piece of stale bread, a sample of the food they were being given on board.
And so, almost by chance, Europe’s refugee crisis – a crisis that none of the countries of the free world could, or was willing to, solve – arrived on the doorstep of a 41-year-old Jewish widow and lawyer.
Benatar had no previous experience managing a crisis of this kind. She was not a soldier, politician, or leader, at least not in the conventional sense of those terms. Yet in the years that followed, she would go on to lead one of the most remarkable relief operations in North Africa during the Second World War.
Using the only weapons she knew: letters, stamps, lists, receipts, and forms, she transformed herself into a well-oiled rescue machine – a commander fighting from behind rickety wooden desks, a shrewd political operator in a world in which Jews were, at best, unwelcome.
An officer of paperwork.
Rachel Hélène Cazès, known as Nelly to her family, was born in Tangier in 1898 into a prosperous Sephardic Jewish family. She grew up in a multilingual world of French, Spanish, and Haketia – the Judeo-Spanish language of northern Morocco – and received an education that was exceptional for a girl of her time. After her family moved to the more cosmopolitan city of Casablanca, she completed her studies at the French girls’ secondary school run by the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU).
This record is part of the Israeli Archives Network (IAW) project and is available through a collaboration between Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, the Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage, and the National Library of Israel.
In 1920, she married Moïse Benatar, her childhood sweetheart and a stamp dealer. They had three children, but only two survived to adulthood. The grief of losing their infant daughter did not prevent the young couple from making an unconventional decision: Nelly wanted to study law, and Moïse – almost scandalously for the time – supported her desire.
Since there was no suitable institution of higher education in Morocco, she began her studies by correspondence, long before Zoom entered our lives, communicating with the University of Bordeaux. At the age of 35, she passed the bar examinations, becoming the first native-born Moroccan woman to qualify as a lawyer.
She decided not to seek employment at one of the established law firms, perhaps because “none of them would have accepted a woman into their ranks, certainly not on an equal footing with male lawyers,” and instead opened her own practice in Casablanca.
It was not long before she became not only a successful professional but also a public activist. She wrote for the Casablanca-based Zionist newspaper L’Avenir Illustré, was one of the founders of the WIZO branch in Casablanca and served as its president, and in 1936 became the first woman to serve on the executive committee of the Moroccan Zionist Congress.
But in January 1939, months before the outbreak of the Second World War, tragedy once again knocked on the door of the Benatar family: Moïse, not yet 40, fell ill and died within days. Nelly was left a widow and the mother of two young children.
Before she had even had time to adjust to her new circumstances, the news from Europe grew increasingly horrific. Then, in the summer of 1940, France fell.
Thousands of people – Jews and non-Jews, opponents of the Nazis, Spanish Republicans, and others – tried to use the shores of North Africa as an escape route from a Europe engulfed in war.
Casablanca, which Hollywood would later transform into a romantic city of cafés, piano music, transit visas, and one Humphrey Bogart, was in reality a place where masses of people waited, and waited, and waited, with no idea whether the piece of paper that could save their lives would ever arrive.
After receiving Marburger’s letter and the piece of bread, Benatar went to the office of the French official responsible for the city on behalf of the Vichy government. She did not raise her voice or become agitated. She was calm and effective, and knew how to persuade people to do what she wanted. She had not come to complain. Instead, she placed a plan of action on his desk: the establishment of a refugee relief committee with the help of prominent members of Casablanca’s Jewish community. To her surprise, the authorities, who had no idea what to do with the thousands of foreigners arriving on their doorstep, agreed – on the condition that she would head the committee herself.
The committee soon became a fully operational headquarters. Its members found beds and rooms, distributed food, clothing, hygiene products, and medicine, located relatives, raised funds, treated the sick, and helped refugees obtain visas and tickets for ships. Benatar established contact with the JDC and Jewish refugee and migration organizations around the world, while maintaining a relentless correspondence with police officers, government officials, consuls, and government offices.
It was not glamorous work. Most of the time, there were no smiling faces or rounds of applause. A young man was saved because someone found the right address for him. A family was reunited because a form reached the right office at exactly the right moment. A refugee made it safely out of a camp because a determined lawyer knew which desk to place her file on and which official to pressure.
Before long, the Vichy regime – the authoritarian French government that collaborated with Nazi Germany – which had begun to understand what she was doing, decided to put a stop to her activities. Her Jewish identity was used as grounds for revoking her license to practice law, and the committee she had established was officially shut down.
“So what?” Benatar said to her secretary, and simply reopened it under a different name. A modest sign went up on the new office: “Hélène Benatar – Refugees.” Vichy officials and the German delegation continued to keep a close eye on her, but she did not flinch. She continued her work.
At the same time, she joined the Mangeon Group, an anti-fascist underground organization that opposed the Vichy regime through activities such as distributing pro-British leaflets and passing information about ship movements in the Strait of Gibraltar.
During the war, detention and labor camps operated in Morocco and Algeria. Passengers arriving at North African ports from Europe were often sent to these camps almost automatically. Refugees whose visas had expired or who were deemed “undesirable” were detained there too.
One of the largest camps was Sidi El-Ayachi, near Azemmour. Others were established in the south and in the desert regions between Morocco and Algeria. Some detainees were subjected to forced labor, laying railway tracks and working on projects intended to transport coal and other minerals.
Following Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa, Nelly set out on a journey of some 1,700 kilometers between the camps. She was accompanied by her daughter Miriam and several assistants. They traveled in an old car whose windows were almost completely obscured by sand and dust, armed with travel permits – genuine or forged, whatever they could get their hands on – along with notebooks and lists. They documented who was being held in each camp, the conditions in which they were living, and who could be released.
The reports they prepared and the permits they secured helped open the camp gates, but liberation was not the end of the story. The refugees might no longer have been behind barbed-wire fences, but they emerged onto the unfriendly streets of Casablanca without money, clothing, documents, or anywhere to sleep. They were still not truly free.
And so Benatar and her colleagues set about taking care of what came next as well: finding employment, arranging medical care and housing, securing new documents, and, above all, facilitating their departure to countries where they could begin new lives.
This was unpaid work, with a 24/7 schedule, and it was not confined to the walls of an office. In the summer of 1942, Jeanne Bougerol-Martin, a 28-year-old Canadian and the widow of a French naval officer who had gone down with his ship, arrived in Casablanca. She had given birth to twins during her escape and had no one to help her care for them. While waiting for a ship to take them onward, the mother and babies lived in Nelly’s home for about six weeks, during which the busy lawyer also found herself taking on the role of a new grandmother.
Nelly wrote to a friend that she had become attached to the babies “as if they were my own children.” She arranged for the family’s onward journey and remained in contact with the mother for many years afterward. After the war, she even visited her in Minnesota. A news report from July 1942 confirms that the twins and their mother reached the United States aboard the Nyassa, together with hundreds of other refugees.
None of this would have been possible had Benatar not succeeded in enlisting Jewish organizations and private donors to provide the funds needed to keep her rescue committee operating. She even managed to reach Hollywood.
In May 1943, Warner Bros. Studios donated half a million francs to support Benatar’s work, following the success of the film Casablanca. In that fictional city, the protagonists searched for rare “letters of transit”; in the real city, Nelly sat amid endless piles of paperwork, trying to secure those same life-saving transit visas for real people.
Some of the refugees – particularly a group of Jewish families who had arrived from Greece – were helped by Benatar to reach a “transit” camp in the British-controlled area of Palestine: the Nuseirat camp in Gaza, administered by UNRRA, the international organization responsible for assisting victims of the Second World War.
After the war, some of them were transferred back to Greece, while others were smuggled into the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine.
No one could stop Benatar, and she managed to open doors to people whom other Jews around the world could not reach.
It was said that she met Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself when he came to North Africa for the Casablanca Conference. Yet no records or photographs of such a meeting have surfaced, and, in truth, the president’s tightly packed and meticulously documented schedule during the conference leaves little reason to believe that the meeting actually took place.
Years later, however, after the war, while she was still active on behalf of refugees and impoverished Jews in Morocco, she did meet Roosevelt’s widow, Eleanor, in the corridors of the United Nations.
Even after the war, Benatar’s bureaucratic machine on the side of the good did not stop. She worked with Allied relief organizations and the JDC, helped survivors locate relatives and establish new legal identities, and assisted Jews seeking to immigrate to the Land of Israel.
In the 1960s, she moved to Paris. At an age when others were retiring, she sat for the French bar examinations again and returned to work as a lawyer. In 1967, she was elected to head a Moroccan Jewish organization in Paris, despite opposition from members who believed that a woman should not lead it.
Hélène Cazès Benatar died in 1979, and her story was almost forgotten.
But the paperwork remained.
In recent years, her personal archive, held at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at the National Library of Israel, has been newly catalogued.
It contains more than 100 files holding thousands of letters, lists, reports, personal dossiers, and receipts. Lists of refugees imprisoned in camps. The names of people who received visas to the United States and Mexico. Records of sugar, soap, and medicine distribution. Requests to locate family members. Correspondence with relief organizations and government authorities, and more.
In all, Benatar left behind some 18,000 pages documenting, almost day by day, the rescue operation she led.
These documents reveal what heroism looks like when it takes place behind desks and closed doors. A kind of heroism that does not photograph well, that is not necessarily spectacular. Heroism that sometimes takes the form of a cloud of dust kicked up by an old car on its way to a camp in the desert, or of a bureaucratic lawyer who refuses to leave the office of an obstinate official.
Benatar had no uniform or rank. She belonged to none of the fighting forces in that terrible war. But she had a desk, a pen, connections, and an unwavering belief that every person deserved a name, a document, and a future. In the war she fought, those were the things that made the difference between life and death.
The Hélène Benatar Archive, held at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, was recently digitized thanks to a donation from the estate of Rachel and Eliyahu Biton, Jewish refugees from Morocco who sailed aboard the Yehuda Halevi in May 1947.
