Repeat­ed­ly, the inter­vie­wees men­tion ​“Besa” — a code hon­or that pre­dates but has been incor­po­rat­ed into the Alban­ian prac­tice of Islam. For the most part, they were shel­ter­ing peo­ple whom they did not know — refugees from oth­er parts of Europe who had made their way to Alba­nia hop­ing to escape the Nazis. ​“We Mus­lims — it is our Besa, our duty.” Ger­sh­man cap­tures the essence of these peo­ple, their dif­fi­cult lives, their qui­et dig­ni­ty and unques­tion­ing faith. 

Their faces are lined, their cloth­ing sim­ple, their sur­round­ings non­de­script. Their deeds were hero­ic, but none claim hero­ism. When one reads all their tes­ta­ments, one is dis­tressed that so few have been rec­og­nized as ​“right­eous gen­tiles,” though they meet the cri­te­ria, and more dis­tress­ing is how few were con­tact­ed by those they and their fam­i­lies saved— even though some had been shel­tered for more than a year. Per­haps that can be attrib­uted to the long years that these peo­ple had suf­fered under the repres­sive com­mu­nist regime when Alba­nia was vir­tu­al­ly closed to the out­side world. Most of the res­cuers had lost their land and their liveli­hoods and only recent­ly have begun to rebuild their lives. With the pub­li­ca­tion of this book let’s hope they will get the recog­ni­tion they deserve.