Letter from Commandant Kadri Cakrani in September 1943, excerpted and translated in this article.
He’s not alive for us to ask him if he was referring to concentration camps or what he knew about the Holocaust and the persecution of Jewish people throughout Europe at that time. But there is a previous sentence that can simply be taken at face value: “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.” “Under the bullet” could be a literal reference to mass shootings of Jews and others by Nazis that happened in Europe. We do know that he knows the stakes for the Jews in this moment are life and death. We do know that he knows that the Nazis will seek to collect Jews and kill them. We understand that he has been helping them stay sheltered. And he has decided to continue to try to save their lives, despite the peril to his own life and to the community he serves as a leader.
The courageous actions of the people of Albania who sheltered Jews from the Nazis during World War II constitute some of the Finest Hours in Albanian and European history. The facts about this story that have been uncovered recently are now being disseminated and processed with increasing momentum around the world. History as we know it is being rewritten. Albania has the best record for sheltering Jewish people during the Holocaust in all of Europe. Before WWII, there were approximately 200 Jewish people in Albania. After WWII, there were over 2,000 Jewish people in Albania. And the people of the medium-sized Albanian city of Berat alone kept over 600 Jewish people sheltered.
In February, I spent a few days in Berat, which has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. I walked where my grandfather Kadri Cakrani once lived, worked, and walked. I asked to be referred from museum director to archivist to tour guide to anyone with knowledge about WWII in Berat. If you, likewise, were to make coffee appointments and lunch appointments with the Albanians of Berat, you would learn as I did:
(1) The people of Berat have a strong oral history about their sheltering of Jewish people during WWII. They know what they did and who did what.
(2) The people of Berat did not speak publicly about the sheltering of Jews during their Communist Reign of Terror (i.e., 1945-1991, behind the Iron Curtain under dictator Enver Hoxha). Hoxha did not have diplomatic relations with the West, with the U.S., or with Israel; Albania was isolated from the outside world. Albanians knew they would endanger family and friends if they talked openly about having saved Jews from the Nazis. Families destroyed documents that proved their assistance to Jews sheltered in Berat, in case their homes were searched. Under Hoxha’s ideology, listening to Beatles music or chewing gum could get you arrested and religion was outlawed, so the people of Berat chose the sensible and cautious course of staying quiet about this story at that time.
(3) With the recent discovery and disclosure of the correspondence of Kadri Cakrani, the Berat story is spreading world-wide.
(4) After the fall of Communism in Albania in 1991, History’s Helper appeared: Professor Simon Vrusho. A life-long teacher and intellectual based in Berat, Professor Vrusho collected testimony and documents from the people of Berat including its Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. He conducted over 150 interviews over 20 years and collected supporting names, documents, letters, and photos. He opened a private museum in 2018 with his own money in order to share the story. If that’s not God’s work, then I don’t know what is. Professor Vrusho passed away in 2019, and the Solomon Museum in Berat is now run by his wife Angjelina, with funding from the Toska Foundation. The museum has had visitors from over 40 countries thus far. Kadri Cakrani’s portrait hangs on the wall, and his story is told publicly for the first time.
Plakat wyborczy z 1932 roku promujący kandydaturę Adolfa Hitlera w wyborach Reichsprasident. Przedstawiając Hitlera jako silnego lidera odwołuje się on do dzielonego przez naród niemiecki strachu przed biedą i nędzą. Zbiory Biblioteki Wiener Holocaust Library.