By Ervina Toptani
An Albanian tragedy, that the Americans knew well…!
Memorie.al / For over two and a half years, the investigator in the Tirana prison (where Police Station 3 is today, on “Mine Peza” street). Tied hands and feet with chains, often a chain around the throat, which was pulled until he fainted from asphyxiation. Barbaric beatings with strong tools, up to iron bars, binding from the shoulders and pulling the legs, to tear the inside of the body, burning the genitals and armpits, with lighters, removing the nails of the toes and hands with pliers , leaving in a barrel of cold water for 12 hours, at temperatures of -10 degrees, and others and others, for two and a half years in a row.
These are some of the tortures he has shown during the period of the investigation. He was a family member of mine, whose name I do not want to publish, at the request of his children, since he himself is no longer alive today. He has never endured mercy or pity. “Men die on their feet” – he said, and that’s how that man actually left this world.
They accused him of being a collaborator of the Americans and he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, which he did in Spaç, Qafë Bari, Tirana. But he never thought that he would be able to survive the investigation where he had seen dozens of sons of unfortunate mothers, giving their lives hanging on the chains and ropes of the dungeons where the investigation was conducted.
He got out of prison alive, because he was only 26 years old when he was sentenced. A few years after the opening of the borders, he went to America because he had always promised that if he got out of prison alive, for a few months he would like to go and walk on the land for which he paid all his youth, without ever stepping on it. When he returned from America, he came disappointed, spiritually killed, more than before.
“They were all there,” he said. At least 3 of those who regularly tortured me during the investigation, together with their families, even had a special status. They were freer and richer there than they had been in Albania. America rewarded them as “winners” against Nazism and as killers of patriotic Albanians!
“And I saw them and cried like a child! I couldn’t say a word to him as I stood in front of one of them, who didn’t even recognize me. I was and have remained the eternal prisoner of the absurd outside, of sick minds. But why should I get out alive? To see this thing? My friends, who close their eyes inside their cells, have been happier!
He never returned to America, and even to some countries in Europe, he was afraid to go because he was sure that a good part of the executioners would see them with empty offices there as well. But at least he closed his eyes, knowing and understanding the truth. Every time we talked about the West, he laughed and told us: “Do you really think that you will see more of it than we did”?!Memorie.al
