The Google Doodle showing Mohamed Helmy was created by Berlin-based artist Noa Snir
Egyptian-German doctor Mohamed Helmy, who sheltered and supported a Jewish family during World War Two, has been honoured with a Google Doodle.
Google commissioned the work by Berlin-based artist Noa Snir on what would have been Dr Helmy’s 122nd birthday.
It depicts the doctor with his arms wide open, showing his “open-hearted nature”.
Dr Helmy was born Sudan in 1901 to an Egyptian father and a German mother and later moved to study medicine in Germany, where he rose to become head of a urology department at a hospital in Berlin.
Persecution of Jews intensified when Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933.
Non-Aryan citizens also faced discrimination and Dr Helmy lost his position, was barred from marrying his German fiancée and was arrested twice by the Nazis in 1939 and 1940.
Nonetheless Dr Helmy decided to help out the family of one of his Jewish patients – in particular a teenage girl called Anna Boros who at one stage he disguised in a Muslim headscarf and passed off as his niece.
“I think Helmy’s case is an especially interesting one as he himself suffered persecution due to his background and ethnicity, and that still didn’t stop him from helping as many people as he could. It’s unfathomable to me, this type of courage and integrity,” Snir told Google.
After the end of the war, Anna and Dr Helmy stayed in touch until his death in Berlin in 1982.
The doctor was posthumously honoured with the Righteous Among the Nations award in 2013 by Israel’s Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial site in Jerusalem.