Free The Jew is Not My Enemy by Tarek Fatah

represented heroism and valour in covert military action, other Muslims, like the Albanian family of Destan and Lime Balla, represented silent courage that earned them honourable mention in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem – Israel’s official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust – as “Righteous Among the Nations.” Decades later, Lime Balla would write:
    In 1943, at the time of Ramadan, seventeen people came to our village of Shengjergj from Tirana [capital of Albania]. They were all escaping from the Germans. At first I did not know they were Jews. We divided them among the villagers. My family took in three brothers by the name of Lazar. We were poor – we didn’t even have a dining table – but we never allowed them to pay for the food and shelter. I went into the forest to chop wood and haul water. We grew vegetables in our garden so we all had plenty to eat. The Jews were sheltered in our village for fifteen months. We dressed them all like farmers, like us. Even the local police knew that the villagers were sheltering Jews. I knew they spoke many differentlanguages. In December 1945, the Jews left for Pristina where a nephew of ours, who was a partisan, helped them. After that we lost all contact with the Lazar brothers. It was not until 1990, forty-five years later, that Schlomo and Mordecai Lazar made contact with us from Israel. All of us were Muslims. We were sheltering God’s children under our Besa. 1
    As Nazis hunted Jews across Europe, Muslims were not only saving Jewish lives by offering refuge and protection. One Muslim family saved a Jewish treasure that was centuries old.
    Meet Dervis Korkut of Bosnia, who, in 1942, was the curator of the Sarajevo Museum that housed the renowned “Sarajevo Haggadah.” This superbly illuminated fourteenth-century volume was the best known and most admired of Haggadahs in the world. * (The Haggadah is used as a guide to the Exodus story recounted at the Seder.) When the commanding officer at Sarajevo, Gen. Johann Hans Fortner, came looking for the famous Haggadah to confiscate the historic text, he was told that another, unidentified Nazi officer had already taken it away.
    In fact Dervis Korkut had hidden the 109 bleached calfskin pages elsewhere in the museum. He later entrusted the Haggadah to a Muslim family, who kept it in their farmhouse, deep in the hills of Bosnia, for the duration of the war.
    Rescuing the Haggadah was not Korkut’s only act of solidarity with the Jewish people. In 1941, when the Nazis occupied Yugoslavia, the SS began recruiting Balkan Muslims, hoping to capitalize on their supposed anti-Jewish attitudes. Dervis Korkut submitted a courageously worded position paper to the government titled “Anti-Semitism Is Foreign to the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina.”
    Korkut and his wife, Servet, would also save the life of Mira Papo, a Jewish woman who was part of a communist partisan unit being hunted by the Nazis. As the Nazis closed in on her, Mira was introduced to Korkut, who smuggled her into his home. She was given the name Ameera and dressed in Muslim attire to avoid suspicion. Neighbours were told that Ameera had come from a village to work as a nanny for the Korkuts’ newborn son. Mira “Ameera” Papo lived with her Muslim family for four months, until she was spirited out of Sarajevo by family friends. In 1994, Dervis and Servet Korkut were posthumously honoured by Israel as “Righteous Among the Nations” and their names engraved at the Yad Vashem.
    The story does not end there. During the Kosovo war of 1999, the Korkuts’ daughter Lamija Jaha and her husband became refugees in Macedonia after fleeing the Serbian assault on Pristina. Because of what her parents had done for Mira Papo and the Sarajevo Haggadah, Lamija and her family were accorded residency in Israel, where she now lives among the Jews.
    There were many more Muslims who fought the Nazis. Among them was Palestinian Hazim Khalidi, a graduate of the London