A HAPPY STORY FOR ALBANIANS, JEWS, AND
THE WORLD
Elizabeth J. Vrato
February 20, 2020 was the 29th anniversary of the removal of the statue of dictator Enver Hoxha from downtown Tirana, the capital of Albania, by Albania’s citizens. The author wrote this essay in Berat, Albania on that day. This reflection was then the basis for the writer’s video testimony, filmed by renowned Albanian film director Kujtim Cashnu a few days later, for use in the creation of Albania’s Holocaust Museum.
Kadri Cakrani’s daughter, with hair bow, and Kadri Cakrani’s son (Hope and Iz).
When my mother was a young girl in the 1950’s in Philadelphia, all she wanted was to fit in as a new American. The tangible expression of fitting in was the hair bows worn by Debbie Reynolds in the movies. She wanted to have those hair bows so she could be more like Debbie Reynolds…. She remembers focusing an inordinate amount of time on Debbie Reynolds and on hair bows….
During this time, she remembers being a bit sassy to her father. When she looked at him, what she saw was an older, Old-World, foreign gentleman—especially when compared to the parents of her elementary school classmates.
Her father was Kadri Cakrani from Albania. He one day held his lower back and told her, “I spent so many nights sleeping on rocks in the mountains, my back will never recover.”
And here came the sass. She said, “Baba, if you did so many important things, why don’t I know what they are, and why don’t my friends know who you are?”
She recalls clearly his response. He said, “Because I didn’t do what I did for your friends... I did it because it was right, and history will know I was right. What was done will be in history books. You’ll see.”
It took my mother until March 2019 to learn what he meant by those words. It was then that we saw an article on-line about a letter discovered in Albanian archives. The letter was written by her father, as he was sheltering Jews from the Nazis.
Kadri Cakrani wrote a letter as Commandant General of the National Front in Berat, Albania in September 1943 during Nazi Occupation. His letter states, in part:
“….We need to urgently transport a big number of people from Berat…. I am talking about the Jews who are in the hundreds here, and if they are found, they will all be put under the bullet…. You never know what might happen to them, and I cannot trust anyone because even if I hide them with… documents amongst our families, I do not know how the word might get out and then I will have put all of Berat under the bullet…. They shouldn’t fall into the hands of the Nazi army that is on its way here, because we know what the Nazis will do to them…. Send someone back immediately with my courier.”
-Commandant Kadri Cakrani
One of the things that jumps out from this letter is that school history has taught that the Allies and people in Europe didn’t fully know what Nazi Germany was doing to Jews until the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945. Yet here in this 1943 letter my grandfather was writing: “They shouldn’t fall into the hands of the Nazi army that is on its way here, because we know what the Nazis will do to them.”