Safiyyah’s War
Written by Hiba Noor Khan
Andersen Press, 2023, 336 pp
ISBN: 978-1839133138

France has just been invaded by the German army, and people in Paris are preparing for the occupation of their city. For Safiyyah, a bookish 10-year-old who lives with her family in the Grand Mosque, this means having to say goodbye to her Jewish best friend whose family is fleeing the Nazis. As life becomes more difficult and dangerous under the occupation, Safiyyah first observes the injustices heaped on the Jews of her city and then begins to help them with small and large acts of defiance and courage. She is not the only hero in her family. Her baba (father) helps to run the Grand Mosque, and with the Imam and Rector, manages to rescue many Jews.

Safiyyah’s War is based on a lesser-known true story of the leaders of the Grand Mosque of Paris protecting Jews from the Nazis. They did this by hiding the Jews in the Mosque, supplying them with forged Muslim identities, and then ferrying them out of Paris through the catacombs on ships in wine caskets. This text celebrates this story as it grapples with themes of home and belonging and doing the right thing.

The undergirding focus of the text is the idea that by saving one life you save humanity. We learn in the historical notes that this tenet is shared by both Muslim and Jewish traditions. In the novel, this value helps to guide Safiyyah and her family to act as if the Jews are themselves. Safiyyah’s Setti (grandmother), herself a refugee from war, tells Safiyyah, “the cries from broken hearts speak only one language” (p. 63). The characters hear these cries and do what needs to be done, such as join the army, take in refugees, and rescue cats and birds.

Through reading this novel, the reader is introduced to the role the Grand Mosque of Paris and its people played in helping to rescue hundreds of Jews. Safiyyah, according to the author’s notes, represents “all the unlikely heroes…whose courage and action changed our world forever” (p.256). Safiyyah is a fictional character who rescues fictional people. The reader does not get to know any of the Jews that she helps. Other than her best friend, the other Jews are written about without agency and with little substance. This may be because this is a story about the rescuers, not the rescued. As in Number the Stars by Lois Lowry (1989), the Holocaust is a problem to be fixed, with little to no input from the Jews who are greatly affected by the problem.

To give an agentive voice to this, the novel could be paired with Alias Anna by Susan Hood and Greg Dawson (2022), a book that chronicles how a young Jewish girl saved herself from the Holocaust, or Masters of Silence by Kathy Kacer (2018), the story of how the Jewish mime, Marcel Marceau, helped Jewish children flee France to Switzerland. It could also be read with The Grand Mosque of Paris: A Story of How Muslims Rescued Jews During the Holocaust by Karen Ruelle and Deborah DeSaix (2009) to explore more about this time.

Hiba Noor Khan is a British-Muslim author who is also a teacher and an advocate for child refugees. This is her first novel.

Melissa Wilson, Cardiff, Wales

© 2024 by Melissa Wilson

WOW Review, Volume XVI, Issue 3 by Worlds of Words is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on work by Melissa Wilson at https://wowlit.org/on-line-publications/review/xvi-3/10/

WOW review: reading across cultures
ISSN 2577-0527