Berat (Albania) (AFP)

A new life was given on Sunday at the only Jewish museum in Albania, a country where most of the community was saved during the Second World War, a few months after the death of its founder, an Orthodox Christian anxious to leave a trace of this national bravery.

The "Salomon Museum" was founded at the beginning of 2018 in a shop in Berat (south) by Simon Vrusho, a retired professor who wanted to tell how Albanians, Muslims and Christians, had sheltered hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust.

He had financed it with donations in a box at the museum's entrance, as well as his meager retirement.

"The memories need to have a house for them," he told AFP a few days before his death at age 75, in February 2019. His death had left the future of his museum unfinished.

A 58-year-old Franco-Albanian businessman, 58-year-old Gazmend Toska, decided to finance the place and move to a new and larger venue, inaugurated on Sunday.

- "Heart stroke" -

"It was a crush on AFP's response to this museum," said Gazmend Toska at a ceremony, referring to a long article by the press agency March 2019.

The new museum, with its 130m2 exhibition, is located in one of the oldest streets of Berat leading to a citadel. A large part of this city is classified as World Heritage by Unesco.

The ambassador of France in Albania, Christina Vasak, for her part hailed "a beautiful story of rebirth" which rewards the dedication of Simon Vrusho.

The man had taken years to collect documents, photos and testimonies to tell the story of a community whose first members, driven out of Spain, had arrived in the 16th century in Berat.

Passed over in silence during the communist era (1944-1991), their singular history in this Balkan country, predominantly Muslim but at the same time a model of confessional tolerance, deserved to be told:

According to Yad Vashem, "almost all the Jews who lived on Albanian territory during the German occupation, whether native or refugee, were saved, except for one family". The International Institute for the Memory of the Holocaust has designated 75 Albanians as "Righteous Among the Nations".

"There were more Jews in Albania at the end of the war than at the beginning," according to Yad Vashem. From a few hundred before the conflict, especially in Berat, Jews were more than 2,000 to the collapse of Nazi Germany.

After being under the tutelage of fascist Italy, Albania came under German control in 1943 but the authorities refused to provide lists of Jews.

- "Unimaginably human" -

In Berat, some 60 families have protected Jews. People "deeply, unimaginably human," said Simon Vrusho. On a list are 600 names of survivors, many of whom came from other Balkan cities, such as Belgrade or Pristina, whose Jewish communities were decimated.

This museum is "a tree of memory watered with the love of all those who contributed to it surviving," said, moved, the widow of Simon Vrusho, Angjlina, 65, who will be director of the museum.

Among dozens of guests, including elected officials and religious dignitaries, many young people participated in the inauguration ceremony of the museum.

"This museum is also a place of reflection for younger generations," said Berat Mayor Ervin Demo.

Today, there are less than 100 Jews in Albania. Most of them emigrated to Israel in 1991, after the fall of the communist regime that had made religions illegal.

In his interview with AFP, Simon Vrusho said he would have liked to have the means to "double the size" of the museum. "It took him a whole life" to set it up, Angjlina Vrusho explained.

For the historian Yzedim Hima, this museum has above all a message to convey: "the love of people for other people, not the atrocities of a war".

© 2019 AFP