From Luljeta Progni
Memorie.al / There is a place in the center of Saranda, where an old woman goes every May 6, puts a bunch of flowers, cries and prays. For those who don’t know her, it seems like flowers, tears and prayers go to nobody and nowhere. About 100 meters beyond the building that used to be the Internal Branch of Saranda, there is a bunker, which has been turned into a museum for the crimes of communism. In front of it there is a well, which in Saranda they call: “Well – grave”. There is no plaque or sign that distinguishes that well from other objects found in that territory.
Zoica Nini is 73 years old, she goes there every year because her father’s remains are there. Zoica was only two months old when the communist regime decided to kill and maim her father, Photo Nini. He was the brother of two martyrs of the Anti-Fascist National Liberation War, Kiço and Pavllo Nini. The remains of the two martyred brothers of LANÇ are in the martyrs’ cemetery and their names are on the tombstone of the village of Nivicë-Bubar.
While the remains of their brother Foto Nini are in that well where, unfortunately, the corpses of dozens of those shot as opponents of the regime have been thrown. Zoica never saw her father and never learned why the regime killed him and threw him into that grave pit. Zoica has learned from her grandmother Marta Nini, that Foto Nini’s father was cruelly killed by the communist regime, when Zoica was only two months old.
“Grandma Martë told me”
“Foto came tired from the camp on the mountain, where we were herding a few goats, so that we could keep our breath alive. He kissed you when you were 2 months old and caressed your brother, who was also two months old, who didn’t live long, because he got sick and died before he was a year old”, begins the grandmother’s story that Zoica remembers.
He has heard this story thousands of times, because he was raised by his grandmother Marta. She was an old woman with great sorrow in her heart, because her three sons had been killed. Zoica’s story continues…!
“After kissing us children, the father lay down to rest a little. Suddenly, loud voices were heard calling out:-O Foto Nini, O Foto Nini…! The grandmother had come to the gate and they had asked her about the father if he was at home. The grandmother told them that she was inside and was lying down to relax. They asked him to tell him what he wanted, so that he would go out to the gate.
The father came out and they tell him to follow them. The father smells something and asks them to get dressed, but they tell him to go as he is, that he will be back soon. Grandma didn’t like their voice. There was rancor, grudge, rage, infidelity, they looked like the roars of hyenas and blood-sucking vampires.
The mother’s heart, which feels a lot, had a premonition that something bad was planned for her son, and her heart, which was poisoned by the fact that she had left two sons in the National Liberation War as martyrs, the wound of her soul was not closed, although for the mother it never closes. So he decided to go behind them.
Without even passing two or three meters from the gate, they burst into screams, grabbed the father by the arms, dragged him and kicked him, and even gathered many people from the Egyptian community, who are numerous in Saranda, and beat the father with stones and other objects, with whatever they could and found, no more curses and insults.
The father’s body was covered in blood. The grandmother was shouting from behind what had been done to the boy and what had happened to him. It continued like this all the way, until they put him in the Internal Affairs Branch. There, the grandmother could no longer follow her because they wouldn’t let her in”, Zoica confesses.
The tragic end of the only son
The next morning, Marta would receive the terrible news about her son. Foto Nini, had died in cruel conditions, tied hands and feet and turned upside down hanging on a rope. A cleaner of the Interior Branch had confessed to Marta, some time later. Dudija was the cleaner, that’s what they called her in Saranda. She had asked him thousands of times not to tell you, as this could end up in prison.
“In the morning, Dudia, you saw my clothes in the yard, thrown and covered in blood. The guard K.V. shouted at him to take the dog’s clothes and burn them somewhere in a corner. What happened that black night?! After inhumanely torturing the father and three other detainees, they hung them upside down and guarded the guard K.V. The guard fell asleep and the four arrested hanged upside down, some from the torture and some from the blood circulation, which fell to the brain, they died.
The morning of July 1, 1948, found the father and the other three detainees dead; Ilia Gogoni, Spiro Marangoi from Delvina and Gaqe Muzina. They slaughtered the father’s corpse, breaking his legs and hands, leaving a corpse without limbs. But the hysteria of the merciless bloodsuckers, who pounced like hungry hyenas on the innocent “prey”, did not end there.
The four massacred victims were thrown into the well of the Department of Internal Affairs, a well that the Italians had made to have drinking water, but the communist government filled it with the blood, bones and fate of innocent people”, he confesses. thus the words of the grandmother, Zoica Nini.
“The Red Well”
“Before and after my father, other victims were also thrown into that well, and their number is unknown. Good Duduja told these things, ordering her grandmother and mother not to make a sound. But he shows these later in the years of democracy, due to the interest of his relatives, including the former guard K.V.
This was my father’s last 24 hours, when his life was criminally cut in half and his dead body mysteriously disappeared, by the newly established communist regime of Enver Hoxha.
Zoica says that their life passed under a painful and painful ordeal, amid bad treatment as a reactionary. Until she died, the grandmother used to fill her dinner plate with tears. Her three sons, the two martyrs and the innocent and unburied “enemy” were crying. But they treated them as reactionaries, but never said a word about their father.
Zoica and her cousin Vasillo say they have not stopped looking; first, the reason for the arrest and then the murder and mysterious disappearance of Foto Nini. But no one gives them a correct answer, except: “We have no documents, this is also from the archive of the Ministry of the Interior”. This research odyssey officially starts from 1977 until today, but there is only silence”.
Footo Nini was arrested and killed overnight, without any charge and without any trial, in that building built by the Italians and in the first years of liberation, returned to the Internal Affairs Branch of Saranda. He jumped into that well where he says the bones of many others have been thrown.
And precisely for this, Zoica has a question addressed to the rulers and former rulers of the two times: “Why are you silent about this well-grave, who are the victims and why are their corpses thrown into that well”?!/ Memorie. al
(Zoica Nini’s confession, together with the photographs, are taken in the article titled: “Why is silence about the mass grave of the victims of the former Department of Internal Affairs of Saranda, published in the newspaper Telegraf, authored by Agron Mema).
Taken from Kujto.al
