Video: Besa--Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II

Photographer Norman H. Gershman, who appears in the video above, writes in his book, Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II, about Muslim families in Albania who literally put their lives in jeopardy in order to save Jews from the Nazis.

Gerhsman's photographs are now part of an exhibit. An article describing the exhibit explains that  the sacrifices Albanians made for Jews during WWII all boil down to the concept of "besa":

The Albanians have a word for this: Besa. It translates as 'word of honor,' and is a cultural precept unique to Albania.

"The word Besa in Albanian is kind of protection of when they host a guest, the Albanians, it's a rule, they protect them with their own lives," says Alberto Colonomos, a Jewish man born in 1933 in what was then Yugoslavia. He was 10 years old when his family fled to Albania.

"There were about 7,200 Jews living in that area. They deported them to the concentration camps and they deported them all the way to Treblinka. They killed them all, nobody came back. But about 50 families escaped a week or two weeks before the deportation."

A wealthy man who worked in a tobacco factory took in the Colonomos family. Unlike many Jews in other parts of Europe who survived the war in cellars and attics, Jews in Albania were given Muslim names and treated as honored guests. Colonomos explains that under Besa, Albanians put their guests before their own family.

"They really hid us with their lives. They knew that the Germans - the consequences if they catch them were very, very stiff. So they would be shot. But when they have that Besa, they will not denounce their guests. They were amazing people."

Michael Totten notes that the feelings Albanians had for Jews back then have not changed today:

Albanians are still defenders of Jews and also of Israel even today. I was in Tirana, the capital, a few years ago and heard a speech from prime minister Sali Berisha about the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Israel will accept an independent Palestinian state,” he said. “But Israel cannot accept the fundamentalists amongst Palestinians because their ideology is identical to that of the Nazis.”

Most Albanians are (nominal) Muslims, but they aren’t Jew-haters.

Gershman is not the first to write about Muslims who saved Jews during the Holocaust--Robert Satloff is the author of Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands.

In a 2006 interview with the PBS Newshour, Satloff gives some examples of Arabs who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis:

MARGARET WARNER: And tell us a couple of these stories. First of all, there were heroes even among the rulers, the elites in some of these societies.

ROBERT SATLOFF: Yes, I found these helpers, rescuers of Jews at all levels of society. At the top of society, you had the sultan of Morocco and the ruler of Tunis -- Tunis was also like a monarchy at the time -- giving important moral support to their subjects.

And then, in a place like Algiers, there's a fantastic story of all the mosque preachers at Algiers forbidding any believer from accepting a bribe offer from the Vichy French, asking any Arab to serve as a custodian of confiscated Jewish property.

And, amazingly, not a single Arab accepted the bribe. So it's a remarkable story of comradeship in time of war.

MARGARET WARNER: And quite different from Europe.

ROBERT SATLOFF: And very different, in many respects, from what happened in Europe, yes.

MARGARET WARNER: But the most riveting stories in here concerned ordinary Arabs. What are a couple of your -- I hate to say favorites -- but your nominees for an Arab Oskar Schindler?

ROBERT SATLOFF: Well, I suppose my top nominee is a Tunisian gentleman named Khaled Abdelwahhab, who was in a small seaside town named Mahdia in Tunisia. And he learned one evening that a German officer was going to rape a blonde, beautiful, blue-eyed Jewish woman.

And he knew that family of the Jewish woman, and he got there first. And he knocked on the door where she and her family were seeking refuge. And he said, "You have to come with me."

And he ferried all of them in his car for the rest of the evening back and forth, because there were several families in the same place, ferried them to a farm that he and his family had outside town. And he kept them there for six weeks until the end of the war. And that, to me, is true heroism.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Give us another.

ROBERT SATLOFF: Then, even in the heart of Europe, right under the eyes of the Nazis, in Paris, there's a fantastic story about a man named Si Kaddour Benghabrit, who was the rector of the mosque of Paris, the imam of the largest mosque of Paris.

And there's compelling evidence that he saved up to 100 Jews in a very clever way. He gave them certificates of Muslim identity, birth certificates, marriage certificates, so they could pass as Muslims and thereby avoid arrest and deportation.

Read the entire interview.

Satloff notes that Yad Vashem lists a number of Muslims from Bosnia, Albania and Turkey among its Righteous people who saved Jews--but no Arabs. That was in 2006. Hopefully, by now that has changed.

Technorati Tag: Albania and Holocaust and Besa.