Nedred, Beqir, and Luljeta Kazazi, whose grandfather sheltered refugees from the war in Yugoslavia.
Their father was a baker, who gave refuge to a family of four Jews.
authorities, the Albanians answered, “We don’t know any Jews, A similar curiosity started Satloff on his journey. The Oxford
we only know Albanians.” Everybody knew, but nobody told. and Harvard educated Jewish historian was walking down Fifth
The Albanians’ resistance is a hidden period in history, emerg- Avenue in New York on 11th September 2001 when the idea struck
ing now only after the fall of an isolationist communist regime. him. “To my mind,” he writes in his book Among the Righteous,
American photographer Norman H. Gershman has been explor- “the plume of smoke rising over the wounded towers conjured
ing that tale. He is a long-time supporter of Yad Vashem (the to me the chimneys of the [Nazi] death camps, two examples of
Jerusalem-based Holocaust memorial), an organisation that has killers audaciously perfecting murder on an industrial scale... I
honoured more than 22,000 non-Jewish Holocaust-era rescu- decided that the most useful response I could offer to 9/11 was to
ers. Gershman became fascinated by the little-known fact that combat Arab ignorance of the Holocaust... If I could tell the story
Muslims had saved Jews, and decided to document their stories. of a single Arab who saved a single Jew during the Holocaust,
Describing himself as “a secular Jew, but also a Sufi,” then perhaps I could make Arabs see the Holocaust as a source
Gershman has studied Sufism for years. “The Islam I know is of pride, worthy of remembering, not just something to avoid or
the beauty of dance and poetry, of being in the moment. I do deny.” Two months later, he moved to Rabat and started his epic
not understand what I read in the papers at all, about how every research, resulting in the book.
Muslim is a terrorist. I mean, how many terrorists are there in the Stanford Shaw, professor of Turkish History at UCLA, has
world? Compare this to 1.2 billion Muslims. I have always wanted written about the thousands of Jews saved by the Turkish gov-
to focus on the goodness of people. Who are these Muslims sav- ernment. “Turkish diplomats in France spent a good deal of
ing Jews; whoever heard of them? That started my journey.” time organizing ‘train caravans’ to take Turkish Jews back to
www.emel.com | emel magazine 33
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