Border Lines

That first trip to Pakistan was dedicated to setting up a rescue operation for Iranian Jews who opted to flee southeast across the Iran-Pakistan border instead of northwest through Turkey. They would make their way to Zahedan, a town in eastern Iran close to the Pakistani border, and from there pay smugglers to get them across the mountains.

But crossing those treacherous mountains was no easy matter. Mahnaz Rashti of Los Angeles, who escaped from Iran in 1987 at the age of 22, remembers how “it was so dark I couldn’t even see my own hand. It was so, so frightening. I knew these men were smugglers, criminals, but I had to trust them with my life. The path was so narrow, they told us, ‘Don’t look to the side — just keep walking and hold my hand.’ They could have done anything to us — killed us, robbed us — no one would have known. But they protected us. If parents had known what kind of passage their children would have to take over the mountains, they would never have sent them. But at the time, I had so much adrenaline racing through my body that I didn’t think about it. There was no way back anyway, only the way ahead, even though we had no idea where we were going.”

Once over the mountains, the next danger loomed — the border. There were Pakistani guards on the border, but as they were usually bribed, they rarely stopped the escapees, Sanders relates. “They knew exactly what was going on but they couldn’t care less. As far as they were concerned, the Jews were bringing money into their country, so it was okay.”

But sometimes, if they didn’t get enough money, the guards would shoot at the escapees. That’s what happened to Sima Michael, who today lives in Beit Shemesh. Sima escaped in 1987, fleeing through Zahedan to Karachi and then on to Israel via Amsterdam.

“We were a group of 13, including an elderly grandmother and a tiny baby. My sister and I were young girls, without our parents — they didn’t get out until years later. We walked for a day and a half to cross the mountains, then we stopped in a hut. They gave us biscuits and Coke and we changed our clothes into Pakistani outfits, so that we wouldn’t attract attention to ourselves. Then, close to the border, we were told to get into an open, flat-back truck. We all had to lie down, side by side, like sardines. The truck drove across the border quickly and suddenly we heard shooting all around us — like we were in an action movie. By a miracle, no one was hit and we got away safely.”

The nearest major city on the other side of the border was Quetta, where there was a UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) office that granted the escapees refugee status. From then on they were relatively safe and would make their way south to Karachi. There they found lodgings in “flophouses” — cheap hotels — until they could make arrangements to move on. When this channel of escape was first opened, there was a way out.

“There was a Mrs. Rachamim, an Afghan Jewish woman, who helped them out,” Sanders explains. “She was amazing — she even had a shul in her house for the refugees. Somehow, she would get documents for the escapees. I don’t know how she did it and I don’t know if the documents were genuine or not, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t. But then she got arrested, and so there was a buildup of Iranian Jews in Karachi, all stuck there, taking over the cheap lodgings.”

Arthur Cohen, though, had “friends in high places” thanks to his wartime work. “I am not at liberty to reveal who these people were,” Sanders apologizes. “At some point in the future we may need to use the Pakistan escape route again and we don’t want to jeopardize it. Suffice it to say that these people helped to get us reliable documents and also arranged for the necessary offices in Karachi and Islamabad to help us in any way they could. We were financed by businessmen Manny Weiss and his colleagues, partners in a large, successful European metal ore and oil corporation.”

Due to Cohen’s connections, he and Sanders were able to set up a system that gave the escapees papers allowing them to leave Pakistan via Holland. They couldn’t enter Holland, but were allowed to stop off there as transit passengers en route to their final destination. Cohen’s and Sanders’s job was to collect the escapees’ personal information and pass it on to the person who would make up the papers. They also had to arrange a NOC (“non-objection certificate”) — basically an exit visa — from the Pakistanis, who would take their time about giving the stamp.

Some of the refugees — usually those with connections and money — would go to the US, traveling from Karachi to Amsterdam and then on to Vienna. Austria was a safe third country for processing, allowing the Joint and HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) to set up transit facilities in Vienna while the Iranian Jews were waiting for their US visas. Other escapees, who had no money or family, would go to Israel directly from Amsterdam. Soon, the system was up and running, and the first group of 150 escapees left on a KLM flight to Amsterdam.

Sanders can’t tell you exactly how each family found out about the escape route and the temporary setup in Karachi, but he can say that there was a word-of-mouth chain via family and friends. They would cross the border in small groups and once on the other side would try to get in touch with their families abroad. An Iranian-Jewish organization in the US would check out the names to make sure they were really connected, and would then pass on the names to Sanders and Cohen.

The two men spent three weeks in Pakistan that first time — in Karachi with the refugees, as well as flying to Islamabad to speak with officials. It was the month of Av, and on Tishah B’Av they were in Karachi. Time was of essence and they had to remain strong with their wits about them — and Cohen’s rav ruled that they shouldn’t fast, as it was a case of pikuach nefesh.

Once they had a system working, the men could leave and run the operation from Amsterdam, using Cohen’s prized fax machine — somewhat of a rarity at the time.

In the fall, Sanders returned to Karachi, this time with a Dutch nobleman known as “the baron.” Frits C.C. Baron van Tuyll van Serooskerken, a member of the old Dutch aristocracy, belonged to the Order of St. John, was a board member of the Dutch Red Cross, and a member of the Noah’s Ark charity organization, of which Cohen was also a member. The Noah’s Ark organization was nondenominational and ready to help anyone who needed it, and so the baron offered to assist with the Pakistan project, using funds he had personally raised.

“The baron was an adventurous guy,” Sanders says with a smile. “But then, so was Cohen — and me too. You had to have a lust for adventure in addition to the ideology.”

Indeed, what prompted Sanders to get involved? “At first, my motivation was to help Cohen out,” he says, “but I also knew that people had risked their lives to save my parents during the war — they had obtained false papers and gone into hiding with non-Jews. And so I felt I had an obligation to help others too, and I understood what it’s like to be on the run and to need a helping hand.”

For all his adventurous spirit, was there ever any real danger to Sanders or his colleagues?

“I’m not sure,” he speculates. “I never felt that I was in any immediate danger. The closest I came to trouble was when my visa was refused for my second trip. On the application form I wrote — admittedly naively — that I was going to help Jewish refugees. The visa was refused. They had written ‘Jew’ in the passport and then crossed it out. So I got myself a new passport, threw the old one away, and had a visa specialist reapply for me. We also had dealings with one of the big guys in the Karachi underworld, sounding him out for future assistance and slipping him an envelope with cash. How dangerous this was, I really don’t know — in the end we didn’t need his help.”

Persian Prayers

The Iranian refugees were under great stress, aware of everything they had left behind yet unsure where they were going. They were also understandably wary and suspicious, even of those who professed to be their helpers.

“In their eyes we were officials, and that meant we were not to be trusted. I could see them thinking, ‘Who are these people? Why are they helping us without asking for any money? Is it a trap?’ ”

One of the refugee representatives, Ruben Kohanoff, told Sanders that the fact that they were helping them without taking any money was something that his fellow Iranians — many from wealthy, secular backgrounds — just couldn’t understand.

But they were still attached to their Jewish heritage, and, wary as they were, did take advantage of the Jewish connection Sanders and Cohen offered them. On Erev Shabbos, the two invited some of the Iranians over to their hotel. “Cohen would bless them with the Bircas Kohanim,” remembers Sanders. “They were extremely touched and moved.”

Even in the last minutes of their contact, when the plane was due to take off from Amsterdam, the reserved Iranians didn’t overdo the emotion, Sanders says. “There were no grateful hugs and kisses for us. For a while, I wondered why, and then I realized that they were simply in a daze, in transit in the middle of a long, unknown journey and we were just one step in that journey.”

The refugees, he realized, were not ungrateful, merely cautious. “Just as the plane was due to take off, the group presented us with a wall hanging embroidered with a Hebrew blessing, which still hangs in my home,” Sanders explains. “I think they waited until that moment to give it to us, as it was only then that they finally believed that we would really do what we promised.”

Sanders and Cohen sent over the next group of escapees a few months later. It was also a large group — over 100 people — and this time, he says, the escapees seemed to trust them a little more. “We were staying in the Holiday Inn — by Pakistani standards very fancy — and after a few days the representative of the Iranian Jews came to our room. He asked if he could place something in our safe deposit box. I agreed, and he brought out a parcel wrapped in brown paper. Inside was a pile of gold jewelry and watches — all their personal valuables that they had managed to smuggle out with them over the mountains, which they had hidden under their clothes.”

End of the Road

The system ran smoothly for years. Every few months a group of a few dozen would fly to Amsterdam. Sanders and Cohen, along with the baron, would meet them at the airport, in a special arrangement with the airport authority, to welcome them to the free world. Jewish social services agencies helped out and provided the escapees with whatever they needed, from food and medical services to toys and clothes. They would stay just a few hours and then move on, whether to Vienna or Israel.

The operation ran smoothly due almost entirely to the mesirus nefesh of people such as Sanders and Cohen, who was already in his 70s when it got underway. Says Rabbi Niederman, “He was much older than me, but I never felt it. The responsibility he took upon himself for Yiddish neshamos meant he had to be on call around the clock, ready to respond, but bli ayin hara, a person his age — he did it. It gave me a lot of chizuk.”

Sanders and Cohen at times had to make tough on-the-spot, life-or-death decisions. The protocol was that the group representative of the Iranian Jews would give Sanders envelopes with pictures, names, and dates to enter into the travel documents. One Shabbos morning, having nothing much to do, Sanders was about to throw out the used envelopes, when he noticed that one still held some pictures and names. No travel documents had been issued for those people, which meant they would not be able to travel with the group.

“I realized that my mistake had literally endangered some lives. I knew from my own parents how one little piece of paper could save or cost lives, and I couldn’t have it on my conscience to leave those people stranded, due to some oversight of mine.”

After some deliberation, Sanders called the official responsible for issuing the documents, who had just begun his weekend break. The official told him to come right over, and he would add the names to the documents. Sanders jumped into a taxi to the other side of Karachi, delivered the information, rode back to the hotel, and resumed Shabbos.

The Pakistan rescue operation had been going on for almost ten years, but, explains Sanders, they could see it was drawing to an end. The Iranians were getting wise to the smuggling scheme, with a disproportionate number of Jews taking strange vacations or selling their assets. The Iranian Secret Service too, had gotten wind of Sanders’s and Cohen’s dealings across the border.

“One day I got a strange phone call from some guy who claimed to be an escaped Iranian Jew. I asked him if he had come over the mountains with a group, but he said that he had come on his own via a different route — that already sounded suspicious. I invited him to my hotel room in Karachi and decided to check if he was really Jewish. I pushed my siddur over to him open to the page for Shema Yisrael, and asked him to read it. He told me, ‘I don’t read Jewish.’ Not ‘Hebrew’ but ‘Jewish’ — so I knew for sure he was a phony. The representative of the group we were helping at that time happened to be outside my hotel room. He came in and signaled to me that the guy was not kosher. And so I refused to help him. The truth is, that was probably a mistake. He was undoubtedly from the Iranian Secret Service, and we would have done better to drop him in Vienna and get him out of our way. But we were lucky — we never heard anything more from him.”

Another reason the rescue operation was grinding to a halt was that by 1995, it became possible for more people to get out of Iran legally, as long as one family member was left behind as security. And because the smugglers’ trade was drying up and they stood to lose a lot of money, they started to make problems. “Many Jews were robbed on the way, others were molested, some were betrayed to the authorities, and a few were even kidnapped and taken to Afghanistan,” Sanders says. “It just wasn’t safe anymore.

“So the route collapsed, and we tried to find an alternate route for those who couldn’t leave legally. But where? We sat down and studied the map. Iran is bordered by many countries: Turkey was problematic, Iraq was out of the question, we didn’t know how to arrange matters in Azerbaijan, and Afghanistan was in a constant state of warfare. So that left Turkmenistan.”

Sanders traveled with the baron to Ashgabat, the capital — by this time Cohen had begun phasing himself out of operations. A contact of Sanders had a business associate in Turkmenistan, and he offered to be their guide. But the men still needed to get permission to get Jews across the border from Iran. The UNHRC agreed, the Red Cross agreed, but they needed the agreement of Turkmenistan’s totalitarian ruler, T?rkmenba?y.

“We didn’t get to meet him but we did get a meeting with one of his closest advisers, who was a secular Jew and a Communist,” Sanders remembers. “Our guide warned us that it was dangerous to discuss such matters in Turkmenistan, that it could cost us our lives. But we were straight with him and he was straight with us. ‘We have one thing here — oil,’ he told us. ‘But Russia destroyed our refineries. We are independent from Russia but now we are dependent on Iran to get our oil out. We won’t jeopardize that for a few Jews.’ ”

As Sanders admits, their position was understandable, even though it meant nothing came of the plan. And while the Pakistan route had been dissolved and Turkmenistan wasn’t viable, things in Iran were changing too. While escape routes were closing, Iran was opening the doors to emigration — and Sanders settled back into private life in Amsterdam.

In 2015 Sanders and his wife made aliyah. Today, he lives a quiet life in Har Nof, enjoying family time with the five of his six children who are also living in Israel and their children, and spending much of his time learning. He is also involved in research for a book about Arthur Cohen and his activities on behalf of Am Yisrael — in many of which Sanders was personally involved. But he hasn’t forgotten the adventures of his past — or the more than 3,000 Iranians he helped smuggle into the free world, although many of them probably don’t remember him, or never even knew who he was.

He was never looking for honor or credit, and the Hashgachah pratis hasn’t been lost on him. “I had visited Pakistan back in my wilder days, but it was only later that I realized why I had to be there — so that I could help Arthur Cohen to perform the mitzvah of pidyon shevuyim. I feel privileged to have been able to take part in such a mitzvah.” —

Anyone with information about Iranian Jews who escaped via Karachi can contact Jaap Sanders via the Mishpacha office.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 643)