Articles
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2008, pages 53-54
Waging Peace
Muslims Who Saved Jews in WWII
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THE WASHINGTON, DC Jewish Community Center hosted an opening reception on Sept. 2 for an unusual exhibit featuring photos of Albanian Muslims who saved their Jewish fellow countrymen and others during World War II. Beside each remarkable black-and-white portrait was a vignette describing the stories of Jews fleeing the European Holocaust, and their Albanian rescuers.
Visitors filed into the community center’s Theater J to hear New York photographer Norman H. Gershman talk about his five-year “project of love.” At the beginning of World War II, he explained, Hitler’s army swept into southeast Europe and wiped out most of the Jewish populations in the Balkan states. But in the predominantly Muslim country of Albania—as well as in the Serbian province of Kosovo—Muslims took Jews into their homes, gave them Muslim names and papers, and disguised them as members of their families. Albanian Christians also took in Jews. If homes could not be found for them, Albanians placed Jews in hospitals behind doors marked “typhoid fever, quarantined.”
Gershman, who heard this little known story soon after the 9/11 attacks, saw in these Muslims’ selfless acts a testament to the “goodness of people” and resolved to tell their story. He hopes his exhibit counteracts the growing paranoia with regard to Muslims. “Not a single Albanian Jew—nor any of the thousands of other Jews who sought refuge in Albania—was given up to the Nazis by Albania’s Muslims during World War II,” Gershman said.
He traveled to Albania numerous times and interviewed some 70 families to discover their views on religion, faith and war. He learned about besa, a code of honor that Albanians take very seriously and which is treated as an Islamic duty. It demands that one take responsibility for the lives of others in their times of need. These are good people who felt obligated to help, Gershman said, even though if they were caught the Nazis would kill their whole family. “I defy anyone to say these people are terrorists or terrorism sympathizers. There are good people in the world, righteous people,” he insisted.
Jason Williams is producing a documentary film narrated by Gershman, with a summer 2009 release date, which records the oral histories of those who sheltered the Jews, as well as the people they saved. Williams showed a trailer to “God’s House: Muslims Who Saved Jews During WWII” before opening a question-and-answer period with Gershman and Joanna Newman, a survivor who, ironically, lives in Silver Spring, MD, one subway stop from Williams’ office in Takoma Park, MD.
When asked why his photos concentrate on Albania only, and also what happened to Jews in Kosovo, Gershman answered that some were arrested and taken to camps but others were saved. “It was a mixed bag,” he said.
There has been a Jewish presence in Albania since 1492, when Muslims and Jews alike were driven from Spain. After the Nazi invasion some 2,000 Jews, including 1,800 refugees from other European countries, were sheltered in Albania. “Albania is the only European country that saw an increase in its Jewish population during the war,” Gershman said. “My portraits of these people, and their stories, are meant to reflect their humanity, their dignity, their religious and moral convictions, and their quiet courage.”
This fall Gershman is publishing a book, Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II. The Jewish Community Center exhibit runs through Nov. 30. For more information about Gershman and the Eye Contact Foundation he founded to support this project, visit <www.eyecontactfoundation.org/>.
—Delinda C. Hanley
