In Tirana, German students honor Albania’s 'besa' that shielded Jews in WWII

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, students from a Berlin high school named for an Albanian rescuer joined teenagers in Tirana to honor the code of honor that helped save Jews during World War II — and to call for vigilance against antisemitism today.

A delegation from the Refik Veseli Schule in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district traveled to Albania’s capital on January 27 to meet peers from Gjimnazi Sami Frashëri. Together, they addressed around 150 attendees at a half-day event organized by Albania’s Ministry of European and Foreign Affairs, stressing the urgency of combating hatred.

The students also planted an olive tree outside the ministry as a symbol of solidarity. “I think this bridge we’re building between our two schools illustrates the concept of besa very well,” said 16-year-old Melisa Malo, a 10th-grader in Tirana.

“We’re promising to be united and stand up against hatred and discrimination.” Albania, an isolated Balkan nation with no more than 300 native Jews before the war, became a refuge for nearly 2,000 foreign Jewish refugees under Nazi occupation. Many Albanians — Muslims and Christians alike — sheltered Jews in defiance of the occupiers, guided by besa, a traditional precept obligating protection of strangers fleeing persecution.

Among them was Refik Veseli, a young photographer’s apprentice who hid a Jewish family at his parents’ home in Krujë from 1942 to 1944. In 1987, Yad Vashem honored Veseli and his parents as Righteous Gentiles, the first of 75 Albanians and Kosovars later recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.

Twelve years ago, students at a German high school in Kreuzberg voted to rename their school for him. “Besa is a core value that still matters in everyday life here,” said 17-year-old Amelia Miftari, an 11th-grader in Tirana.

“During the Holocaust, when Albanians risked their own lives to help the Jews, it wasn’t only a custom but a moral choice — a promise to act with humanity and courage.” None of the students in either group are Jewish, but several said their personal histories compelled them to engage.

Berlin senior Ruben Ebert, 18, said he participates in remembrance activities partly out of guilt. His great-grandmother, her husband and her brother “were all Nazis,” he said. He did not know if they were party members, but said they were convinced of the ideology.

“They’re part of my family, so I have a connection to them. But they were also perpetrators of horrible crimes.” The Berlin school draws heavily from immigrant families. Ebert is one of the few students who are not the children of immigrants, while classmate Hadiseh Alizadah, 15, who wears a black hijab, arrived in Germany from Afghanistan as a refugee a decade ago.

Of her 22 classmates, she said, only one is ethnic German; the rest are mostly Afghani, Syrian, Palestinian, Turkish or Lebanese. “We are all people,” Alizadah said when asked about marking the Holocaust as an Afghani Muslim in Albania.

She described mixed experiences in Germany, recalling three months in Brandenburg where, in her view, “they hate immigrants,” but added that in Berlin “there are many girls with hijabs like me, so it’s not a problem.” After the ceremony, students walked through central Tirana, visiting the Ethem Bey Mosque on Skanderbeg Square in a country of 2.4 million inhabitants, roughly 45% of whom are Sunni or Bektashi Muslims.

They also toured an outdoor display of 15 large black-and-white Holocaust-related photographs sponsored by the Municipality of Tirana under the banner “Never Again.” For the teenagers, the day’s message was as much about the present as the past: remembering the lives saved by besa — and promising, together, to confront intolerance wherever they encounter it.