Code of Honor: Muslim Albanians rescued Jews during Holocaust

"BESA: A Code of Honor - Muslim Albanians who rescued Jews during the Holocaust," opened January 27 in Ramle, Israel.

Before World War II, only 200 Jews lived in Albania, but after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, hundreds of Jews crossed into Albania from Yugoslavia, Germany, Greece, Austria and Serbia. When the Nazis occupied the country in 1943, the local population refused to comply with orders to turn over lists of Jews living there. There were more Jews in Albania after the war than before.

This assistance was grounded in Besa, a code of honor, meaning literally “to keep the promise.” One who acts according to Besa is someone who keeps his word, someone to whom one can trust one’s life and the lives of one’s family. There were more Jews in Albania after the war than before.

“Why did my father save a stranger at the risk of his life and the entire village? My father was a devout Muslim. He believed that to save one life is to enter paradise.” - Enver Alia Sheqer, son of Righteous Among the Nations Ali Sheqer Pashkaj, featured in the BESA exhibition.

According to Lime Balla, whose photograph appears in the exhibit (see the BESA link below):

All of us villagers were Muslims. We were sheltering God’s children under our Besa.

I was born in 1910. In 1943, at the time of Ramadan, seventeen people from Tirana came to our village of Shengjergji. They were all escaping from the Germans. At first I didn’t know they were Jews. We divided them amongst the villagers. We took in three brothers by the name of Lazar.

We were poor - we didn’t even have a dining table - but we never allowed them to pay for the food or shelter. I went into the forest to chop wood and haul water. We grew vegetables in our garden so we all had plenty to eat. The Jews were sheltered in our village for fifteen months. We dressed them all as farmers, like us. Even the local police knew that the villagers were sheltering Jews. I remember they spoke many different languages.

In December of 1944 the Jews left for Priština, where a nephew of ours, who was a partisan, helped them. After that we lost all contact with the Lazar brothers. It was not until 1990, forty-five years later, that Sollomon and Mordehaj Lazar made contact with us from Israel.

American photographer Norman Gershman spent four years photographing Muslim Righteous Among the Nations and their families in Albania. The exhibit features 17 of the portraits with explanatory texts. Of the 22,000 people so far recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, 63 are from Albania.

The Hebrew/Arabic exhibit opened at the Ramle (Israel) Museum with the participation of Yad Vashem chair Avner Shalev, Ramle Mayor Yoel Lavie with city Arab-Israeli high school students.

For the next three months, groups of the city's Arab and Jewish students will visit in special programs run by Vad Vashem's International School for Holocaust Studies, in cooperation with Ramle, with the support of the Ministry of Science, Culture and Sport.

Said Shalev:

“It is our hope that this important exhibition will further understanding of the Holocaust, offering a glimpse into the difficult choices that people faced. We are committed to providing accurate and comprehensive information about the Holocaust to as wide an audience as possible. Over the past year, we have launched a website and YouTube channel in Arabic, providing those who wish to know, with the tools and information they need to combat ignorance and denial.”

In 2008, an English/Hebrew version of the exhibit was presented at Yad Vashem and at UN Headquarters in New York.

For more information on BESA, to read some of the stories and see some of the photographs, click here.

For more information about the Righteous Among the Nation program, click here.

Holocaust: Albanian heroes

This week, as the world approaches International Holocaust Remembrance Day on May 1, there will be many stories about what happened during this terrible period of history: stories of people, of tragedy and heartache, but also of heroism. This story focuses on the Jewish experience in Albania and the Muslim people who saved many Jews.

Somebody saved Anna Kohen's family. When Nazis marched into Albania in 1943, a few years before she was born, Kohen's parents fled the coastal city of Vlora for a village in the mountains. Six decades later, Kohen still wonders about the Muslim family that absorbed her own Jewish one.

"I want to go and find the ones that saved my parents," she said recently from her Manhattan dental practice, where a file holds two clues she unearthed last year: the rescuers' first and last names. "I always knew that they saved us. I never forgot."

Obscured in the history of Nazi conquest and European complicity is the story of Albania, a country on the Balkan Peninsula that shielded every Jew within its borders and saved as many as 1,800 others. Many of these rescue stories have been lost to the era's confounding flux of people, to time and to the humility of the samaritans themselves.

This month, the Federation, Jewish Communities of Western Connecticut began a search for those anonymous heroes. Its goal is to find some of these altruistic among Waterbury's large Albanian community, and honor them. Odds are against them.

As of 2007, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority whose responsibility includes recognition of "Righteous Among the Nations" had honored more than 22,000 of these righteous individuals from 44 countries. Of those, an estimated 1,700 are still alive.

Some have been captured in stirring black-and-white photographs by Norman Gershman, now on exhibit at the Jewish Federation's Southbury facility.

Yad Vashem in Jerusalem continuously searches to honor the Righteous Gentiles, non-Jews who helped Jews during those terrible times. It is still possible as clues still turn up.

In 1998, Yad Vashem found a former school cleaning lady from Lithuania whose family saved hundreds of Jews. Danuta Venclauskas' photo hangs above the desk of the Jewish Federation's executive director. She never shared her story until a year before her death.

"It was a matter of fact," he said. Or, too painful. "Who was Danuta? She used to clean the schools. She lived in this old rundown house. Nobody knew who she was until one of the young boys she hid ... put her in to be recognized."

There were more Jews in Albania at the end of thje war than at the beginning. The reason for this, in a mainly Muslim nation, was termed "besa," a code of honor. It means to keep the promise and combines pride, honor, trust and hospitality.

"Besa means trust. When I trust you, I give you anything because I trust you," Medi Coma explained from a desk at the Albanian Culture Center and mosque in the Overlook section of Waterbury, where the 60-something grandfather serves as president to the 4,000-member organization, one of two in the city.

Many ethnic Albanians live in the Balkans, as borders changed under various occupations. When the Ottoman Empire expanded to Albania, the people converted to Islam, and despite being outlawed for five centuries, their language survived.

In 1943, as Nazis closed in on the heavily Jewish Macedonian town of Manastir, Coma's cousin, Shabedin Aga, led a caravan of 18 donkeys carrying several Jewish families to safety. He brought them to his village near the border-straddling Lake Ohrid, about 50 miles away. It's a story Coma, of Wolcott, grew up hearing, one whose relics sat for years in his cousin's home.

Aga, a supplier, regularly trekked across Albania, from the seaside town of Durres to Manastir, where he delivered salt and other commodities to Jewish shopkeepers. On one trip, the shopkeepers asked Coma's cousin to help them flee their city, which sat precariously on a rail line connecting Germany and Greece. Word was Nazis were pushing south. The desperate Jews offered Aga money for passage to, and shelter in, Albanian villages. He declined the money. Instead, he recruited Coma's father, Vebi Coma, and a cousin to guide about 35 Jews through the mountains on donkeys. Coma's father told him what happened when they returned a second time to pick up more Jews.

They had all been wiped out. Coma relates a story of a Jewish family that left a large stack of money in gratitude. His cousin kept it for the family, and says the money is still somewhere here, even now. His cousin died nearly 50 years ago.

When Norman Gershman began traveling to the Balkans in 2003 to photograph Muslim families who helped Jews, he was continually shown items they left behind and asked if the owners would return to get them. They assured him that the Jewish possessions are still safe.

Gershman's exhibition of black-and-white images came to the town from the United Nations.

For the complete story, click here for the Waterbury (CT) Republican-American.

Yad Vashem: Arabic website to launch

Yad Vashem has announced that its Arabic Website will be launched January 24, in advance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Its Farsi website was launched in 2007.

During 2007, some 7 million people from more than 200 countries visited Yad Vashem, some 56,000 from Muslim countries, including 32,500 from Arab countries.

The event will begin at 11 a.m. with a panel discussion, "The Holocaust and the Arab World," with academics, journalists and others. It will be in Hebrew with simultaneous translation into English and Arabic.

The site:

will include the historical narrative of the Holocaust, concepts from the Holocaust, academic articles, artifacts, maps, photos, archival documents and an online video testimony resource center all translated into Arabic, as well as a special multimedia presentation of the Auschwitz Album, with Arabic narration, stories of Righteous Among the Nations- including Muslims from Turkey and Albania- and the movie We Were There, which documents a joint visit of Arabs and Jews to Auschwitz. The site also contains information on the study of Arabic in Theresienstadt, and the Yad Vashem exhibit, "BESA: A Code of Honor: Muslim Albanians who Rescued Jews during the Holocaust."

Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev said

“The Arabic speaking public is substantial, and providing an easily accessible and comprehensive website about the Holocaust in Arabic is crucial. In light of the Holocaust denial and antisemitism that we are witness to in Arabic countries, we want to offer an alternative source of information to moderates in these countries, to provide them with reliable information about the Shoah.”