Anna Kohen | “Flower of Vlora: Growing up Jewish in Communist Albania”
Monday, March 25th, 2024, 6 pm – 8 pm EST
Boylston Hall110- Fong Auditorium, 5 Harvard Yard, Cambridge
RSVP on the Harvard College Calendar Event Page
Dr. Kohen, a Romaniote Jew with roots in Ioannina (Greece), will tell how Muslim Albanians risked their own lives to save her family from Nazis.
Covering 1938 through the present, Flower of Vlora is an eye-opening, passionate account of Anna Kohen’s Romaniote-Jewish family in Albania and how they were saved from Nazis. Her family joined a small, Greek-speaking Romaniote Jewish community of merchants in Vlora just before WWII. During WWII, compassionate Muslim families sheltered them from the Nazis. Her family who remained in Greece were all murdered in death camps. Dr. Kohen’s family maintained Romaniote Jewish traditions in secret because of the Albanian dictatorship’s repression of religion. Rendered stateless since they did not have any documents and would not join the Communist Party, the family plotted a bold scheme to leave Albania for the West, right under the eyes of the secret police.
The story of the Holocaust in the Balkans, particularly in Albania, is still little known, even to scholars. This is an excellent opportunity to hear a powerful personal narrative from Albania. From 1937-1944, thousands of European Jewish refugees traveled to Albania, the poorest country in Europe, finding safety from Nazi persecution and extermination camps. Thanks to the protection provided by Albanian authorities and the local population, Muslim and Christian alike, not one Jewish life in Albania was lost to Nazi genocide.
Sponsored by Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature.