A statue bearing the names of 23 Kosovo Albanians who rescued Jews from the Holocaust during World War II was inaugurated Wednesday in the capital, Pristina.
The “Wall of Honor” statue was placed in a park in Pristina in the presence of some of the rescuers' descendants, political leaders, and the U.S. and German ambassadors.
Some 500 Jews lived in Kosovo, then part of former Yugoslavia, at the beginning of the war. Many were arrested and deported to nearby prisons or Nazi-managed camps, and almost half of them died.
Local Albanians helped scores of Jews to escape, usually taking them to neighboring Albania.
The statue showed that “the remembrance of those who risked their lives to save their fellow human beings is a tradition that commemorates a rare, bright light in one of the darkest periods of human history,” according to Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti.
Israel is the most recent country to have recognized Kosovo after Pristina's Parliament declared independence from Serbia in 2008, nine years after NATO conducted a 78-day airstrike campaign against Serbia to stop a bloody crackdown against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
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