Meet the Muslim family who saved Jewish lives in WWII

Seven-year-old Johanna Gerechter had a wide beaming smile and dark curly hair, just like her mother. Her father was a glove merchant, her family were comfortably middle class, and she loved dogs. All in all, a child like a thousand others in 1930s Hamburg. But her world was about to become shrouded in darkness.

Denied refuge from the Nazi regime by the United States, the Gerechter family endured persecution and feared violence as members of the Jewish community. On 10 November 1938, something would happen that would remain in her memory for the rest of her life.

Johanna would see her home transformed into something unrecognisable. On her way to school, she passed hordes of angry Germans throwing stones at the windows of her synagogue. That night, all across Hamburg, Jewish shops, homes, buildings, businesses and schuls were burnt to the ground, Jewish men, women, and children were dragged out into the street and beaten if they tried to stop the pogrom.

The next morning, the streets were covered with burnt books, thrown out papers and torn clothing. The Gerechter family had to leave. They fled Germany to Albania, far out in the Balkans. There, Johanna met the Pilku family.

The Pilku family were Albanian Muslims, living in the port city of Durres that overlooks the Adriatic Sea. Njazi Pilku, a civil engineer, along with his wife Liza, and their two sons, Edip and Luan, befriended their new neighbours, welcoming them with food and companionship at a time fraught with uncertainty. The two families became close, watching fearfully as the Nazis advanced ever closer.

In 1943, the Nazis invaded Albania, imposing the same round-ups of Jewish people for concentration camps as they had implemented across Europe. The Pilku family decided to act against this happening to their friends at tremendous risk to themselves. They agreed to shelter and hide the identity of little Johanna and her family from the Nazis. It was well known that anyone caught sheltering a Jewish person would be shot. They posed as relatives of Liza Pilku, who had been born in Germany, and the whole family went along with the story. It saved their lives.

“They put their lives on the line to save us,” Johanna, now aged 87, told TIME Magazine last year. “If it had come out that we were Jews, the whole family would have been killed. What these people did, many European nations didn’t do. They all stuck together and were determined to save Jews.”

This story calls to mind a passage of the Qu’ran that I hold dear: “Whoever saves one life saves the entire world (5:32)”. Those who reached out and protected their friends and neighbours in need are to be commended: whatever our faith or creed, humanity and kindness are essential to living a righteous life. The Muslims who behaved with such courage and dedication to the Jewish community of Albania in World War II should never be forgotten, and we should look to them as examples in this time of fear and division.