Sixteen-year-old Melisa Malo, a 10th-grader at the Gjimnazi Sami Frashëri here, 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 predominantly immigrant district of Kreuzberg voted to rename their school in his memory.
On Jan. 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.
Besa - standing up against hatred and discrimination
“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 is Jewish. 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.
'We are all people'
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 my family or me,” she said. “I spent three months in Brandenburg [a state in northeastern Germany], and there, they hate immigrants. But in Berlin, there are many girls with hijabs like me, so it’s not a problem.”
Following the official program, Alizadah joined a dozen other students in a walking tour of Tirana that included the famous Ethem Bey Mosque fronting Skanderbeg Square, a landmark in this country of 2.4 million inhabitants, roughly 45% of whom today 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.”
Refik Veseli Schule’s head teacher, Simon Groscurth, said choosing this particular name for the school was a conscious decision.
“In a city like Berlin, where the history of the Holocaust is written directly into our cobblestones, we searched for a symbol of courage that would resonate with our diverse student body,” explained Groscurth. He said his school found that symbol in Refik, whose bravery and quick thinking saved the lives of Yugoslav photographer Moshe Mandil, his wife Gabriela, his daughter Irena, and his son Gavra.
During an April 1941 visit to their grandmother’s house in Belgrade, German troops invaded Yugoslavia and immediately began deporting Jews to concentration camps. Herded onto trains, the Mandil family of Novi Sad, carrying counterfeit documents, was detained by German officers on suspicion of being Jewish.
But just at the last moment, defying expectations, Moshe showed the officers a small photograph of his children laughing under a Christmas tree. The tree had merely been a prop in his photo store, but the ruse worked—and the family was allowed to continue on its way.
Arriving in Prishtinë, capital of present-day Kosovo, they spent a year in a guarded refugee camp but, under Italian occupation, were allowed to travel by truck to Albania. They arrived in Tirana and moved into a small apartment together with a friend who owned a photo studio in downtown Tirana. At that store, 17-year-old Refik Veseli worked.
“One day, German troops came into the photo store looking for Jews. Refik told Moshe to hide under a black cloth,” said Israeli-born author and lecturer Maya Klinger Cohen, who has written a children’s book on the subject. “Refik spoke with the German soldiers until they left. That’s when Moshe understood that Tirana was not safe anymore, but he had nowhere else to go.”
Determined to help the Mandils, Refik traveled north to Krujë and asked his parents, Vesel and Fatima, to hide the Jews. Without hesitation, his father agreed and came with donkeys to transport them. But they could only travel under the cover of darkness, sleeping during daylight hours in the forests.
The journey was long and difficult, even though all the Jews carried fake Albanian identity cards and wore traditional Muslim clothing. At one particularly frightening Nazi checkpoint, German officers interrogated Gabriela, whom they suspected of being a Jew because of her light-colored eyes, but she pretended to understand only Albanian.
Eventually, the Germans let the family pass, and as Cohen said, “she saved all of them by playing the role of her life.”
At the end of World War II, Gavra Mandil and his family found their way to Israel. He eventually became a famous photographer and set up his own studio in Tel Aviv.
And one year ago, Fatmir Veseli was the guest of honor at the school named after his late father.
“When he stood among our students, the story we usually teach from books suddenly became real,” Groscurth said. “He told us about his father’s humility, how Refik didn’t see himself as a hero, but simply as a man who kept his word and opened doors.”
Karl Bergner, Germany’s ambassador to Albania, urged students from that school and Gjimnazi Sami Frashëri ls to fight for democracy, and to “stand up against injustice wherever you find it.”
“In 2026, more than 80 years after the end of World War II, it is still crucial to keep the lessons of the Holocaust alive,” Bergner said. “What can we do to prevent such atrocities in the future? The answer lies in education, confronting the past, and promoting tolerance.”
Lisa Shekel is a German language teacher at the Refik Veseli Schule whose husband is Israeli. As such, she helps organize encounters between her students and Jewish kids from Israel.
But increasing antisemitism in Germany and throughout Europe concerns her, especially the rising popularity of the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland party, which currently controls 151 seats in the country’s 630-member Bundestag.
“Of course, I’m worried that soon we won’t live in a democracy anymore,” Shekel said. “Our fear is that after the next elections, AfD will be the strongest party in Germany.”
However, as Ebert, the great-grandson of Nazis, said about his own background, “a lot of Germans are not honest about their family history. If they were, they wouldn’t vote for AfD.”
In recent months, Tirana has been rocked by nightly demonstrations, some of them violent, as supporters of opposition leader and former prime minister Sali Berisha protest alleged corruption at the hands of Berisha’s longtime nemesis, current Prime Minister Edi Rama.
In fact, Galit Peleg, Israel’s ambassador to Albania, didn’t attend the Jan. 27 Holocaust event in Tirana because she had to accompany Rama to Jerusalem, where he addressed the Knesset, a rare honor offered only to five other heads of state: Egypt’s Anwar el-Sadat and U.S. Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
During his Knesset speech, Rama affirmed his full support for Israel in the current Gaza war and lashed out at Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism. In September 2022, Albania broke ties with Tehran after Iranian-backed hackers launched a massive cyberattack against the government.
“If there’s one issue those two [Rama and Berisha] agree on, it’s Israel. We get wall-to-wall support from Albania,” said Peleg, who has served here for the past three and a half years.
“The first week I arrived, I went to Krujë and entered a silver shop in the market. On the wall was a certificate from Yad Vashem,” the ambassador told JTA. “I asked the shopkeeper what it was, and he said that his grandfather had saved Jews during the war and that he wanted everyone to know. Today, you’d say it’s a gimmick, but this was before the current wave of Israeli tourists, and I found it very genuine, and in line with what I hear from ordinary people.”
According to Albania’s National Institute of Statistics, 72,110 Israeli citizens visited the country in 2025, up 586% from the year before, thanks to the March 2025 launch of nonstop flights between Tel Aviv and Tirana by El Al subsidiary Sundor. It’s now common to hear Hebrew in the streets, not only in the capital but also at resorts like Saranda, Durres, and Himara.
Besides its proximity to Israel, Albania is also a low-cost destination with friendly people, a Mediterranean cuisine, and no antisemitism toward the country’s 60 or so Jews.
Such tourism also has a strong cultural component; in addition to Tirana’s existing lakeside Holocaust Memorial featuring granite information panels in Hebrew, English and Albanian, two Jewish-related attractions are now under construction: the Jewish Museum of Albania in Vlorë and Tirana’s Besa Museum, a 26,000-foot shrine to the country’s ancient code of honor which, among other things, saved so many Jews during the Holocaust.
“In a world where we are witnessing a rise in antisemitism and hate speech, Besa can be our shield,” Groscurth said. “It means ‘I will not be a passive bystander. I will protect you, because you are my fellow human being.’ Because only together, with your support, your ideas, and the Albanian spirit, can we ensure that the horrific crimes of World War II are never repeated.”