I hope there are Ameicans today who are aiding and protecting migrants and immigrants like the Albanians reported in World War II

 Albania protected Jews from Nazis. Can America protect its migrants❓

Albania is in Southeastern Europe on the Balkan Peninsula. It sits along the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. Italy is just to the west across the sea. Its capital city is Tirana

Albania’s ancient code of honor contains lessons about humanity.
Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Linda Matchan, a former Globe reporter and editor, is a Canadian born freelance writer and documentary filmmaker.

I don’t regularly vacation in isolated European countries where tens of thousands of enraged protesters are marching the streets in an effort to topple their own government. It is a remarkable show of sustained determination from protesters, day after day, in this mountainous Balkan country that rarely generates international headlines.

I had no way of knowing, when I planned my June trip to Albania, that my visit would coincide with the so-called Flamingo Revolution, a furious wave of Albanian public anger triggered by a Jared Kushner-led proposal to install a luxury tourist development on the small country’s southern coast. Locals say the proposal would damage a delicate ecosystem and its wildlife, including flamingos.

Yet, it was a different Albanian story that drew me there, a largely unknown one that took place decades ago but seems particularly relevant to what’s happening in America today. 

And, as I watched Albanians take to the streets in protest of US overreach, I wished that American citizens would put up a similar fight against today’s injustices, a willingness we’ve shown at other key moments in our history.

My trip was billed as a Jewish heritage tour, which seemed strange, at first, because there are hardly any Jews in Albania. (Technically, there are maybe 43 to 45 who were born and raised there, out of a population of well over 2 million. I learned this from Edvin Shvarc, a longtime civil servant and translator, who also happens to be one of them.)

Yet Albania played an outsized role in Jewish history during World War ll, taking the rare position that it was an act of national honor, and an obligation, to shelter Jews.

After Hitler’s rise to power, Albania, then predominantly Muslim, became a place of safety and refuge for Jewish people who poured in from Germany, Poland, Austria, Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Different sources estimate that close to 2,000 Jewish refugees entered Albania.

They were sheltered from Nazi forces by ordinary Albanians who risked their lives by giving Jews false identification papers and Muslim aliases, disguising them in traditional local clothing, and moving them from town to town and home to home.

Albania is perhaps the only European country that had more Jews at the end of the war than at the beginning, according to Michael Berenbaum, former project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Other countries rescued Jews, of course, including Denmark where fishermen covertly used fishing boats to transport 7,200 Jews to safety in neutral Sweden. Bulgarian members of Parliament and church leaders resisted orders to deport its Jewish citizens, and 48,000 Jews survived. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg led an extensive rescue operation in Hungary, distributing certificates of protection to Jews, saving thousands.

But Albanians’ rescue efforts were on an unparalleled national scale for the country’s small size, and grounded in a traditional Albanian code of honor known as besa, which means “to keep a promise.” It can also refer to an oath, or a pledge, or an unbreakable trust. It’s a deep commitment to the protection of others, including visitors, who are regarded as guests, and a fundamental part of the Kanun, a set of Albanian traditional laws that govern conduct within families, villages, clans, and with strangers.

“Besa implies inherently and spiritually not to stay indifferent to someone in need or under persecution,” writes Saimir A. Lolja, a former faculty member at the University of Tirana in Albania, who lectures at Toronto Metropolitan University. “Jews knew that Albanians had besa, which meant an open door to anyone in need.”

For 45 years these rescue stories went untold due to the strict isolation imposed on Balkan countries by the repressive Soviet Union. Letters of gratitude sent by rescued Jews to their former hosts were intercepted by authorities. Many Albanian rescuers and the Jews they saved grew old and died, and their stories died with them. This persisted until the Soviet regime finally collapsed in the early 1990s.

Now, stories are being uncovered, memoirs are being written, and the children and grandchildren of rescued Jews are connecting with the descendants of the Albanians who rescued them.

Our tour group met Rexhep Hoxha and his son Ermal, the son and grandson of the Albanian Muslim couple Rifat and Fejzije Hoxha who sheltered a Jewish Bulgarian family of refugees. As German patrols went from house to house seeking Jews, the Hoxhas arranged shelter for the parents in outlying villages and pretended the Bulgarians’ 10-year-old son was their own.

Rifat safeguarded the family’s holy prayer books, and promised to return them, though he eventually needed to pass the responsibility on to his son Rexhep. The documentary “Besa: The Promise” is the story of how Rexhep and his own son Ermal were able to fulfill that promise, traveling to Israel in 2009 to return the books to the Bulgarian family’s descendants.

I spoke with Benjy Neumann, director of NASA’S Human Spaceflight Capabilities Division for Space Operations. His mother Johanna was born in Germany and escaped to Albania in 1939, where the Pilku family hid them in plain sight, introducing them to German officers as relatives, dodging many close calls. After the war, Johanna and her parents went to a Displaced Person’s camp in Italy before coming to America, eventually marrying, raising four children in Brookline, and telling her story in a memoir, “Escape to Albania.”

It’s not lost on Neumann that he and his siblings would not be here were it not for the Pilkus. “The Albanians were living just fine but they saw something and said ‘This is what we do. This could be us.’ I feel like this is a moral lesson for society.”

Are you listening, society❓ Here in America, migrants and refugees are anything but guests. Some could be facing certain death if they return home. But the words deployed recently to cover the whole spectrum of them are hardly protective and welcoming: “thugs,” “animals,” “insurrectionists,” “gang members,” and “drug lords” who eat dogs, don’t care about crime, and take away jobs from Americans. They’re being detained in inhumane conditions. A few have even been shot on our streets (in broad daylight 😟😢).

Surely we could use a good dose of besa here ourselves. At the very least, Americans should fight to establish the humane and welcoming norms it’s displayed, at times, in the past.