TIRANA, Albania (JTA) — Sixteen-year-old Melisa Malo, a 10th-grader at Tirana’s Gjimnazi Sami Frashëri, first learned about the Holocaust four years ago when she attended an Albanian-language stage performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

That evening, her parents told her how ordinary Muslims and Christians in Albania — an isolated Balkan nation with no more than 300 native Jews — risked their lives during World War II to hide nearly 2,000 foreign Jewish refugees from the country’s Nazi occupiers. They did so thanks to “besa,” a tribal code of honor that requires Albanians to protect strangers fleeing persecution.

One such Albanian was Refik Veseli, a young photographer’s apprentice who from 1942 to 1944 hid a Jewish family at his own family’s house in Krujë, a village near Tirana. In 1987, Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem honored Veseli and his parents as Righteous Gentiles, the first of 75 citizens of Albania — as well as those of neighboring Kosovo — to eventually be so honored.

Twelve years ago, students at a German high school in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, which is home to many immigrants to Germany, voted to rename their school in his memory.

On January 27, a delegation from the Refik Veseli Schule visited Tirana for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Among other things, they and their teenage counterparts from the local Gjimnazi Sami Frashëri spoke to around 150 people about the urgency of fighting antisemitism.

“I think this bridge we’re building between our two schools illustrates the concept of besa very well,” Malo said. “We’re promising to be united and stand up against hatred and discrimination.”

Malo and others then symbolically planted an olive tree outside Albania’s Ministry of European and Foreign Affairs, which arranged the half-day event attended by diplomats, lawmakers, local journalists and other dignitaries.

“Besa is a core value that still matters in everyday life here,” said 11th-grader Amelia Miftari, 17. “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 at either school are Jews. In fact, Ruben Ebert, an 18-year-old senior from Berlin, said he participates in Shoah remembrance activities partly out of guilt.

“I feel obligated to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive because of my family history,” he said. “My great-grandmother and her husband, and her brother, were all Nazis. I don’t know if they were party members, but they were convinced of their ideology. Obviously, they’re part of my family, so I have a connection to them. But they were also perpetrators of horrible crimes.”

Ebert is one of the few students at Refik Veseli Schule who are not the children of immigrants.

Hadiseh Alizadah, 15, wears a black hijab and came to Germany from Afghanistan as a refugee 10 years ago with her parents. She said that out of her 22 classmates, only one is ethnic German. The rest are mostly Afghani, Syrian, Palestinian, Turkish or Lebanese.

“We are all people,” Alizadah told JTA when asked if she sees any irony in the fact that she — an Afghani Muslim — came to Albania to commemorate Jews killed by Nazis during World War II.

“Sometimes it’s difficult for me because people know nothing about me or my........

© The Times of Israel