Family Of Ali Ohri

I am chamberlain and head of the Office of the Royal Court of Albania. My family and I have always been royalists, loyal to King Zog and now to his son, King Leka I, who recently returned to Albania from his long exile.

In 1941 many of my cousins were involved in sheltering Dr. David Baruch, his sister and five cousins. We gave him the Muslim name of Daut Baruch. Though he was originally from Czechoslovakia, Dr. Baruch was the chairman of the largest hospital in Skopie, Macedonia. I was young at the time and I went to school with several of Dr. Baruch's younger cousins. When Tirana became too dangerous for the Baruch family under the Nazi occupation, we moved them to the small village of Kruja where members of my extended family sheltered them.

Dr. Baruch was originally a member of a royalist resistance that fled from Skopie to Pristina, Kosovo, to avoid the Nazis in 1941. Then they came to Albania and continued the resistance, now against the communists and the Italian fascists. When the Italians capitulated to the Allies in 1943, Dr. Baruch was still active as a royalist and fought the communist partisans until 1944. It was easy for my family to give shelter to a fellow royalist. It was human-to-human relations, and true to our Muslim faith.Since the end of 1944, when Dr. Baruch and his family returned to Skopie, we have lost all contact.