"Our Conscience Is Clean"

Albanian Elites and the Memory of the Holocaust in Postsocialist Albania

Compared to the contentious postsocialist debates over the Holocaust that have occurred in the other countries of Eastern Europe, the wartime history of prewar Albania's 156 native Jews has generated scant public attention and scholarly research both in Albania and abroad. Nearly all Albania's Jews and hundreds of nonnative refugees survived the Second World War in Albania. A small group of government officials, historians, and journalists based in the country's capital, Tirana, formulated Albania's first published perceptions of the Holocaust after the fall of Albanian communism in 1992. Albanian elites have since addressed the subject within the context of issues that tend to arouse broader Albanian public interest and controversy than does the Holocaust itself, such as the present-day rehabilitation of prominent Albanian leaders persecuted by the country's communist dictatorship, and Kosovo's independence movement. Elite Albanian perceptions of the Holocaust also reflect the spirit and biases behind contemporary government-scholarly initiatives to rewrite twentieth-century national history and debunk the tenets of Albania's socialist historical scholarship. In official, scholarly, and media representations, the Final Solution resembles the Albanian communist persecution of Albanians in 1945–91 and the Serbian military and political oppression of Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s. Further, the Holocaust symbolizes Albanians' sense of humanity, which drove the nation to rescue Jews from being deported by occupation forces to extermination camps in Axis-occupied Europe. Drawing primarily on Albanian historical literature, newspapers, and interviews, this chapter analyzes the work and research motivations of Albanian elites who have writtenthe country's nascent Holocaust narrative since the collapse of communism in Albania.

Albanians and Jews during the Second World War

Italy invaded Albania on 7 April 1939 and then annexed the country of approximately one million people. Following the German invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Italian counterpart, Count Galeazzo Ciano, agreed to transfer portions of Kosovo, western Macedonia, and southern Montenegro — all with Albanian majorities — to Italian-occupied Albania. Germany took over the Albanian territories incorporated by Italy after Rome's formal surrender in September 1943. German military offensives against communist-led Albanian partisan forces began in the winter of 1943–44 but failed to prevent the resistance movement's takeover of most of Albania's southern territories by October 1944. Following the German retreat from Albania in November 1944, Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav partisans suppressed a local Albanian rebellion in Kosovo in February 1945 and then reinstated Yugoslav jurisdiction over the region.

The shortage of research into Albanian wartime history as a whole and the dearth of primary sources specifically related to Albanian Jews make it difficult to reconstruct even a basic narrative of the Holocaust in Albania. The scant literature permits only tentative answers to questions concerning Axis policy toward Jews in Albania, the level of policy implementation, and local–Axis collaboration in the execution of policy. After invading Albania, fascist Italian authorities, under the direction of viceroy general Francesco Jacomoni, introduced Italian legislation that prohibited Jewish emigration to Albania and mandated the deportation of foreign Jews. The Albanian interior ministry forwarded Jacomoni's instructions to the local prefectures, but the level of compliance of Italian subordinates and local Albanian officials is unclear. To deter Jewish emigration, Jacomoni ordered the house arrest of foreign Jews or their confinement in concentration camps that Italian authorities had set up in the Albanian interior in 1940. The nonnative Jewish population in Albania, however, continued to increase, reaching one thousand in June 1943, according to Italian estimates.

Explaining the difference in the fates of Jews in the annexed territories of Kosovo and those in the Albanian interior presents a particularly difficult challenge for Albanian historians. Five hundred to six hundred Sephardim inhabited the territories of Kosovo prior to the Second World War. Prishtina was Kosovo's economic center and home to the region's largest Jewish community, around four hundred out of a population of sixteen thousand. During the Italian and German occupations of Albania, an unknown number of native and nonnative Jews were transferred from Kosovo to the Reich and the Albanian interior, while, according to testimonies in the Yad Vashem files of the Righteous among the Nations, only two Jewish families were deported...