The Consul on the Cattle Train

Necdet Kent was born in 1911 in Istanbul, educated at the elite Lycée de Galatasaray, and later crossed the Atlantic to study public law at New York University. At some point he was also a professional footballer for Hull FC, though the sources give no clear timeline for when that stint occurred relative to his studies. In 1937 he joined Turkey's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and after a posting as vice-consul in Athens, he arrived in Marseille in 1941 as assistant consul at the Turkish consulate general — a city swollen with refugees and a major port of departure during the Second World War.

It was in Marseille, according to an account first published decades later, that Kent said he intervened to save Turkish Jews from deportation. He recalled that one evening in 1943 an assistant told him that eighty Turkish Jews had been loaded into cattle cars at the Saint Charles train station, destined for German camps. Kent remembered the words stenciled on the wagon: 'This wagon may be loaded with 20 heads of cattle and 500 kilograms of grass.'

He said he went to the station and confronted the Gestapo commander, insisting the people inside were Turkish citizens and that Turkey, as a neutral country, would not accept such treatment of its nationals. The German officer refused, telling him they were 'nothing but Jews.' Rather than back down, Kent said he boarded the train himself along with his assistant, ignoring a soldier who tried to stop him.

At the next station, German officers reportedly boarded the train and apologized, explaining they had not meant to prevent him from leaving at Marseille — a car was waiting to drive him back to his office. But Kent refused to leave without the eighty passengers, arguing that a mistake had been made in loading Turkish citizens onto the train at all. Startled by his refusal to compromise, the Germans, in his telling, released everyone.

Kent also said he issued Turkish identity papers to Jewish residents of southern France who lacked proper documents, and that he once confronted Gestapo officers at their headquarters after German soldiers stripped men in the street to check for circumcision as proof of Jewish identity. He rebuked the commander, pointing out that Muslims, too, were circumcised, and later recalled that when he saw blankness in the officer's eyes, he offered to let the men be examined by German doctors instead.