Today, I’ve written about Omar Mohammed, an historian from Mosul, Iraq. I say that he is “one of the most extraordinary people you will ever encounter.” That is a big claim, and I mean it.
The Islamic State occupied his city from 2014 to 2017. They did things that the human mind scarcely has the capacity to imagine. At huge risk to himself, Mohammed chronicled it all, so that people in the future could know what had happened. So that no one could deny it. Or to make it harder for people to deny.
Mohammed expected death — murder — at any moment, and yet he lived to give testimony. He reminds me of Solzhenitsyn, a witness to evil, who, at enormous risk, worked to get this information out into the broader world.
Let me give you a passage from my piece — one of the most unexpected things I ever heard:
Mohammed worked under a tension that was almost unbearable. “It’s only because of music that I survived,” he says.
Yes. He listened to music — especially as played by Itzhak Perlman, the Israeli-American violinist. “He’s my man,” says Mohammed. One night, Mohammed was engulfed in darkness, on the verge of giving up. He put on music from Schindler’s List, the Holocaust movie from 1993, with a score by John Williams. Perlman was the featured soloist. Mohammed listened to “Jewish Town,” among other tracks. “When I listened to this music,” he says, “I felt like someone was injecting life into my heart.”
Perlman read about Mohammed’s admiration of him and expressed the wish to meet him. Mohammed then wrote Perlman a five-page letter. They have not met yet, but almost surely will. “When I wrote him the letter, I thought, ‘Now I have to make sure I stay alive until I meet him,’” says Mohammed.
Imagine a young man in the Arab world, under occupation by Islamist monsters, listening in secret to music from a Holocaust movie, played by the most famous Jewish violinist in the world.
A final bit from my piece, if you will:
Very recently, [Mohammed] visited the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which has a section called “Memory Void.” On the floor are 10,000 faces, punched out of steel, meant to represent the dead. The murdered. Mohammed could not help thinking of a deep, deep hole in Mosul, where the Islamic State shoved in the people they had just executed — “hundreds of people,” says Mohammed.
Of course, this is the way it was at Babi Yar in Kiev, and in countless other places.
On reading this, Rick Brookhiser wrote me a note, saying, “I was reminded of a passage in Gouverneur Morris’s diary, written in Paris during the French Revolution: The owner of a quarry complained to the authorities that so many corpses had been pitched into his quarry, he could not get his men to work there. The logistics of murder.”
Yes. Again, if you would like to read about Omar Mohammed, go here. And to hear the man himself — in a Q&A podcast with me — go here.