Albanian Family Honored for Helping Jews
By MARCUS FRANKLIN
The Associated Press
Thursday, January 18, 2007; 2:16 PM
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.
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"Everyone in the village knew they were Jews, but no one betrayed them,"
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Kohen recalled Wednesday as the Anti-Defamation League 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.
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"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."
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011800969.html