NEW YORK – World War II was over, and Anna Kohen, then a small child, was walking with her mother in Vlora, Albania, when a Muslim woman ran toward them, crying and calling her mother by an unfamiliar name.
The women hugged and cried. Later, her mother explained that the woman was from a village where she, Kohen’s father and other Jews had hidden during the Nazi occupation before Kohen was born. To protect themselves, Kohen’s mother and father had taken Muslim names.
“Everyone in the village knew they were Jews, but no one betrayed them,” Kohen recalled Wednesday as the Anti-Defamation League, www.adl.org, praised Albania as the only occupied country where no Jews died at the hands of the Nazis, thanks to the country’s Christians and Muslims.
Although records from that period are incomplete, Michael Salberg, the league’s director of international affairs, estimated that several thousand Jews fled to Albania from surrounding countries in Eastern Europe.
“All of them were saved,” Salberg said. “Albania is the only country occupied by the Nazis that had more Jews at the end of the war than at the beginning of the war, which is a reflection of Jews having sought refuge in Albania and survived.”
The league posthumously honored a Muslim Albanian man and his son for protecting six Jewish families during the war.
The organization presented its Courage to Care Award to three relatives of the late Mefail Bicaku and his son Njazi. The two led the six families – a total of 26 people – to safety in the mountains of central Albania.
For months, the Bicakus shared their home and food with the families, the league said.
The award was presented to Mefail’s son Muhamet and Njazi’s daughter, Elida Hazbiu, and son, Qemal Bicaku.
With Kohen translating, Muhamet Bicaku thanked the Anti-Defamation League said he was greatly honored to accept the award on his father’s behalf. His father was jailed in 1961 for “collaborating with Jews” and died in 1969, he said.
“I’m very proud of what he has done,” he said.
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