When Muslims Saved Jews

Issue 64 January 2010

It is written in the Qur’an, “Whoever saves one life, saves the entire world.” It is written in the Talmud, “If you save one life, it is as if you have saved the world.” And there was a time not so long ago when, once again – the Spanish 
Inquisition being another – Muslims came to the aid of Jews during their 
darkest hour. Somaiya Khan-Piachaud recounts this incredible story.

January marks the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. January also marks the Holocaust Memorial Day. The horrors of the Holocaust stole the lives of millions of innocent people. The historian Robert Satloff has written that, “the Germans employed the most scientifically advanced means of the day in the most culturally advanced society in the world to kill the greatest number of people as quickly and efficiently as possible.” Yet there were notable exceptions – the German Schindler being one. Less notable were the Muslims in Europe and North Africa that saved the lives of Jews in the Second World War. 

Agim Sinani’s parents hid a Jewish family in their home. They sheltered Fritz and Katherine, and their daughter Gertrude during a time of intense conflict. When German patrols came too close to their hideout, Agim’s parents would move the family back and forth between various houses. Miraculously, the 
family survived the Nazi occupation and came to England, after which all contact was lost.

During that time of systematic persecution, it is nearly impossible to accept that there was one country in Europe that saw its Jewish population grow. But that is exactly what happened in Albania and Kosovo - Jews were safe there. Muslims ignored the grave risks to themselves and sheltered not only their Jewish neighbours, but also thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi terror. “During the Nazi occupation of Albania,” states Johanna Neumann of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, “there is not one confirmed instance of a Jew being handed over to the Nazis by a Muslim Albanian.” By contrast, in Macedonia, just 170 miles from the Albanian capital, the oldest Jewish community in mainland Europe was exterminated.

The Albanian government actively defied Nazi rule. In 1938 King Zog, the first and only Muslim King of Europe, issued four hundred passports to refugee Jews, granting them safe entry into Albania. After learning of the Nazi campaign elsewhere in Europe, the Mayor of Tirane issued documents to Jewish families, protecting them by stating they were Muslims. When the Germans occupied Albania and demanded lists of Jews from the authorities, the Albanians answered, “We don’t know any Jews, we only know Albanians.” Everybody knew, but nobody told.

The Albanians’ resistance is a hidden period in history, emerging now only after the fall of an isolationist communist regime. American photographer Norman H. Gershman has been exploring that tale. He is a long-time supporter of Yad Vashem (the Jerusalem-based Holocaust memorial), an organisation that has honoured more than 22,000 non-Jewish Holocaust-era rescuers. Gershman became fascinated by the little-known fact that Muslims had saved Jews, and decided to document their stories.

Describing himself as “a secular Jew, but also a Sufi,” Gershman has studied Sufism for years. “The Islam I know is the beauty of dance and poetry, of being in the moment. I do not understand what I read in the papers at all, about how every Muslim is a terrorist. I mean, how many terrorists are there in the world? Compare this to 1.2 billion Muslims. I have always wanted to focus on the goodness of people. Who are these Muslims saving Jews; whoever heard of them? That started my journey.”

A similar curiosity started Satloff on his journey. The Oxford and Harvard educated Jewish historian was walking down Fifth Avenue in New York on 11th September 2001 when the idea struck him. “To my mind,” he writes in his book Among the Righteous, “the plume of smoke rising over the wounded towers conjured to me the chimneys of the [Nazi] death camps, two examples of killers audaciously perfecting murder on an industrial scale... I decided that the most useful response I could offer to 9/11 was to combat Arab ignorance of the Holocaust... If I could tell the story of a single Arab who saved a single Jew during the Holocaust, then perhaps I could make Arabs see the Holocaust as a source of pride, worthy of remembering, not just something to avoid or deny.” Two months later, he moved to Rabat and started his epic research, resulting in the book. 

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