By Uran Kalakulla
Part Eleven
Nazism and communism
Memorie.al / Nazism lasted 12 years, while Stalinism lasted twice as long. In addition to many common characteristics, there are many differences between them. The hypocrisy and demagogy of Stalinism was of a more subtle nature, which was not based on a program that was openly barbaric, like Hitler’s, but on a socialist, progressive, scientific and popular ideology, in the eyes of the workers; an ideology that was like a convenient and comfortable curtain to lie to the working class, to lull the sharpness of intellectuals and rivals in the struggle for power.
One of the consequences of this peculiarity of Stalinism is that the entire Soviet people, its best, most capable, hardworking and honest representatives, suffered the most terrible blow. At least 10-15 million Soviets lost their lives in the torture chambers of the KGB, martyred or executed, as well as in the camps of the Gulag and others like them, camps where it was forbidden to correspond (in fact, they were prototypes of the Nazi death camps); in the mines in the ice of Norilsk and Vorkuta, where people died from cold, from hunger, from crushing work in countless construction sites, in the exploitation of forests, in the opening of canals and during transportation in leaded wagons, or in the flooded barns of the death ships.
Continued from the previous issue
Are you letting yourself go now? You will lose the respect of all who know you; you will lose, even, the respect of your life partner; you will gain only pity, mercy, these feelings that you have despised for yourself, since you were very young. Thus I spoke to myself and then I clenched my fists tightly (as if I wanted to clench myself with them), and I felt that I began to calm down immediately, as if by a miracle. Then, I realized how much power the will has in a human being, which is nourished and stimulated by a strong sense of dignity.
And, from that day, after those moments of crisis, I no longer felt weakness and perversion, although I went through, both in dungeons and in all the camps and prisons, for twenty-one consecutive years, much more severe suffering and torture and gripping scenes of various kinds. In fact, I think that my exit from prison safe and sound, although physically weakened (of course), I am convinced that for the most part, it belongs to my will and, perhaps, also to the strength of character and, especially, to my invincible sense of dignity. Here, these were the levers that kept me alive in prison, brought me out of it alive and with my mind clear.
The New Year’s Eve Break
After the meeting with the “Black General”, I was not called to the investigator’s office again for almost three months. What was the point of this job? Was it a special tactic, to rot in the dungeon, to become a pig’s soul and then to knock on the door, to persistently look for the investigator, to completely empty my stomach, without finding out where to go, except to go through the trial and then to prison or a camp, where, at least, I could see my family and stay with my friends?
Of course, I did not do such a stupid thing. I did not want to dig a hole for myself, with my own hands. I had already made up my mind: I would endure until the end, without going anywhere I wanted. Especially since I was already used to the life of the dungeon, with all its deprivations. The first provocateur had already been removed from me. After a few days, they took me out of the dungeon 28 and they took me to the dungeon next to Tanushi’s. I noticed his presence immediately, after I heard his voice reciting to himself, some well-known verses by Naimi and Noli.
Tanushi had literary inclinations and, apparently, there he was trying to unleash his poetic spirit. In the dungeon, I found a young man. He was a boy about my age, but, while I should have turned white from lack of sun, he looked like a mulatto. He told me, when I asked him, that he had only been arrested a few days ago, when he had wanted to swim to one of the large ships of the Durrës fleet and escape to the West. But, the captain of the ship (a damned Czech), had betrayed him, and had handed him over to the Internal Affairs Department of the city. Oh, what a curse he was making on him!
He even told me that those old clothes he had, some brown dock clothes that had come out The police had given him the information that he had buried his clothes in the sand and that when they arrested him he was only wearing his swimming trunks. This is a very plausible story, because this had really happened to many young men from Durrës who had tried to escape in the same way. This guy was called Arshi Taullari. He told me that he had been a third-year student at the Faculty of Law at the University of Tirana, that he was from the village of Armen in Vlora, that he had distant cousins with Aranit Çela (then the Prosecutor General), and that he had high hopes for his help in getting a lighter sentence and getting out of prison quickly.
To be honest, I ate them all up. They had been made up very beautifully and accurately. Sometime later, when I discovered the truth, among other things, his name “Arshi” also came to mind and I said to myself, maybe this name was also made up by the investigator, in order to bring that monkey closer to me very much, because he had the same name as my fugitive brother-in-law, Arshi Pipa, whom I loved and respected very much. But, my belated hypothesis was not true. The name had been real and was a complete coincidence, nothing more.
However, I did not trust him much, on any matter related to my work in the investigator, because I had no consideration for that man, without knowing at all, that he was there specifically to “unravel” me. First of all, and if he had really been a law student, he knew nothing about that discipline, and was even completely ignorant, as in all other areas of culture. He was just a sexual maniac, so much so that he masturbated even in my presence, only turning his back on me, which, of course, disgusted me, just like his erotic manias.
When I went to the labor camps and asked if they knew a devil like him, they told me that his name was Arshi had indeed just come to the dungeon where they took me, not from arrest, but from labor camp no. 303, where he was a brigadier, a known spy and who had been beaten by the prisoners, I don’t know how many times. This maniac-sexual spy really couldn’t buy anything from me, but he hurt me when I tried to talk to Tanushi, to find out how things were going with the investigation. He hurt me because, despite all my caution, Captain Karafili caught me talking to Tanushi and things went to hell.
After a few days they took me away and put me in one of the dungeons opposite the front. These had no windows at all. They had a kind of chimney in the ceiling, just enough to get a little air. Even in the middle of the day, it was so dark there that you couldn’t see your hands or feet at all. Moreover, although you had a kind of wooden floor under you, there was water under them, especially when it rained and the moisture got not only into your clothes, but also into your body clothes and into your flesh. I remember that when I had cigarettes, they turned brown on the outside, like the tobacco itself. The lighters could barely light and the cloth bag of sugar got so wet that the sugar itself shriveled up and became like a gelatinous mass.
I don’t know how I escaped without getting a bad case of gout in that dungeon, the door number of which I didn’t even see. The fourth and last dungeon in that place of misery was the one opposite this one of extreme humidity. It was true that there was not much humidity there, but day and night you felt the “pleasure” of the “good smell” of the common cesspool, of all the dungeons, where not only we prisoners, but, sometimes, even the policemen themselves, emptied their bowels.
In my last dungeon, I met a young man again, in military uniform. I don’t remember his name. I only remember that he was from Saranda and that he had been put there, supposedly for an undisciplined act in the unit where he was serving. So, he was there as an orderly. It was this last word of his that saved me without telling him anything about my troubles and, again, not because he was a spy put in for me, that is, the third of my dungeons, at my “disposal”. This one was also as ignorant as the previous one and, apart from ordinary conversations, I did not “have the honor” to discuss any kind of valuable topic with him.
But, at that time, my family had come and brought me a lot of food, which, when I saw that the Moor was very hungry and the dungeon langur’s swill was not enough for him, I shared almost all the food with him, even a cigarette. This thing seemed to affect the “soldier” and, finally, a few days before they took him out of the dungeon, he told me bluntly that he had been brought there specifically “to break me down”. Oh, how wrong they had made their calculations, the investigators! They had rated me so low, how low they put me in the dungeons?!
I had already been in the dungeon for seven months. I had been there since the beginning of June. Then came December 31 of that unfortunate year, New Year’s Eve! In my mind, I was completely surrounded by my family: my wife, my son, my mother, my younger sister, my brother. Had they gathered together, like the rest of the world, to celebrate the arrival of the New Year? Did they have the heart for such a thing? But what could the coming New Year bring me? No, for me, there was no New Year. I knew that it would be even worse, even blacker than the one that was ending.
I knew that punishment, trial, awaited me. But what punishment would they give me? As things had gotten worse, I risked the death penalty or, at least, 25 years in prison, which was the same as being sentenced to life imprisonment. It was, therefore, a separation for life, as the people say, from my family, from my dearest people. A great gloom took possession of my soul. I had huddled together, at the foot of the dungeon, like a shadow in that semi-darkness.
It was cold, a cold that awaited you. The dungeon, from a sack that had been in the open, had now become a refrigerator. Now I had water, a gourd full. What did I want? If I hadn’t wrapped it in rags, somewhere in a corner of the dungeon, it would have frozen. I was already dressed in rags. My trousers were completely torn. They had almost become transparent. My jacket, also made of bad cloth, was covered in rags. In addition to my rowing shoes, which were also torn, I also had a blue dock shirt that, from not being washed, looked like a raincoat. The heels and toes of my socks were gone.
The floorboards (thank goodness they were there too) looked black, not only from dirt, but also from the cold, from being frozen. I didn’t complain about the food, even though I had run out of it for a long time. How long can a bag of food last? It had been a couple of months since my family had brought me anything. Who knows how they were feeling. After all, I hadn’t left any money at home!
I had learned to make do with that langur of the dungeon kettle: a ladles for lunch and one for dinner, with a piece of bread. At least, now in winter, it was hot. And from the usual “menu”, a kind of liquefied rice porridge and pasta or, “masterpiece”, a legume soup, where, in addition to water, there were their skins and in the whole bowl, you would be lucky if ten blessed grains fell out!
The prison’s food was made from the waste of the warehouse market. The rice was black, often with flies, completely unwashed from the soil. The pasta, usually in the shape of a snail, often had worms. They were also unwashed. As for the legume, they were either black, or wrinkled and rotten. But, of the first two, these, at least, had their water with a kind of taste, or rather; the juice of the le gume seemed less disgusting than that of the rice and the snail pasta. So, we in the dungeons enjoyed this juice, because it was the best, the most chosen “dish” of our “royal” table that consisted of a plate, or rather a bowl of legume juice! At lunch I had eaten very little bread and I had saved most of it for this, “rare festive dinner”.
Thus, the breadcrumbs in the juice of the legume, the water returning from the spout of the gourd to the will not build from time to time, constituted everything on my table and I felt as if I were sitting at the festive family table, where the crumb would represent the chosen dish, while the gourd of water, filled from the toilet tap, would represent the bottle of wine, or beer (because champagne was condemned as “capitalist” or, worse yet, as “imperialist”), on ordinary Albanian tables. It could only “infect” the tables of the “Block” of the high communist leadership or, the “Brigade Palace”.
Here, the work was quite okay. After all, the State Security had provided me with food. But I was having a hard time with cigarettes, which I had long since run out of. And I, damn it, had become a hardened smoker! So much so that, if I had a pack of cigarettes, I don’t even mention the brand “Samsun” or “Partizani” but, even from those eight-leke “Vullneti”, I would agree to eat only once, in twenty-four hours! When I had cigarettes, I kept their tails, in a handkerchief. When the cigarettes ran out, I would return to the tails. But, to make a kind of half-cigarette, I had to consume 4-5 tails.
And, so, I continued to keep the tails of the tails, until, finally, the last five tails remained, which gave the last half-cigarette. In this way, in five or six generations of tails, the tobacco had become black as Chinese tea! And so strong, that, when you lit that kind of cigarette and inhaled it, even a little, just enough to get the smoke out, it would hit you right in the back of your head! I can only imagine what my reader might say, when he reads these lines. It means that I wanted to shoot someone without will. I’m not saying no, but only in the tobacco business. Because tobacco in prison, especially in the dungeon, was a kind of necessity for many, a kind of drug, if you like, which I would rather call a kind of “valve”, where you seemed to be discharging your nervous and spiritual tension.
In prison, I have seen people who ate their bread ration once every two days, because they exchanged it for a pack of cigarettes, even for eight leks, or for a five leks tobacco bag, one of those bags that contained the scraps of warehouses, where inside you could find: string, nails and even rat tails! And in the “union” of these bread ration sellers, I have often been a part, when I was very hungry for cigarettes. But let’s go back to my New Year’s Eve, 1961-1962. I had just finished eating my mixture with the juice of I was smoking with pleasure that half-cigarette I had invented, as I said above. I looked at that damn cigarette as something very precious, as something very delicious, and I wanted it not to run out so quickly, just as a child feels sorry when he sees that he is running out of his sugar cane by licking it. When, suddenly, the door of the dungeon opened with a bang and the two guards of the escort, came to the door, communicating the order to me to quickly gather my things and get out.
The surprise shocked me. What was this all about, so quickly? What had happened? Release?! Bah! Transfer?! Yes, where?! In some other dungeon, right there?! Why?! Again in someone’s unwanted company? Couldn’t they have waited, at least, until the next day or, at least, until I had finished smoking that cigarette that was so precious to me? Don’t be surprised when I say this, that the human mind, in such an isolated and narrow place, in which I had been for so many months, starts to deal with things that are normally very small and insignificant, even ridiculous. Thus, a finger sticking out of a torn sock annoys you greatly, when it starts to sting you harder than the others or, when a wasp enters the dungeon that doesn’t really sting you, but hovers above your head from time to time, with its persistent buzzing. And so on, such trifles.
The police took me out into the outer corridor and, from there, to the main door of that police station, the region or sub-branch. There, the new investigator, Major Llambi Titani, who I will talk about below, was waiting for me. And straight to the “Gaz” of the Sigurimi, with all the clothes, which they placed, on one side of its back seat, between me and in the other corner, near the door, an officer. Of course, I was handcuffed. In front with the driver was the major. And towards the square of Durrës.
The city was in celebration. Especially the square, full of lights and people walking or coming and going, apparently to finish the last dishes for the New Year’s Eve table. And I was all eyes, like that indigenous person who has been taken from the depths and darkness of the jungle and taken to a European or American metropolis. That world that I had left only seven months ago, that had made no impression on me, and often even aroused disgust in me, seemed like a miracle, a paradise. Had I not come out of “hell”, had I not come out of the world of darkness, into the light? Then I truly understood how much I had lost! Not to mention my family and its warmth, the sweet voice of my beloved wife and the bird-like chirping of my son, whom I adored to the point of madness.
“Gaz” 59, walked slowly through the main square of the city and I kept my eyes peeled, lest I should catch sight of my wife and son, lest she had gone to Durrës to see her sister, to spend New Year’s Eve together. But my gaze did not catch sight of anything and, then, a shadow of sadness began to overwhelm my soul. A prisoner has a special psychology. He sees the world in two. The first world is his, where he is, the prison, the life in it. According to him, this was supposed to be the real world, with its norms, its secrets, its people, its harshness, its suffering and misery. But also with its war, its efforts, its heroism and its honesty.
And what is outside the prison bars, or outside the barbed wire of the prison camp, is a false world, which lives with hypocrisy, petty meanness, the meanness of servility, its cowardice, its dead end, a world where no trace of heroism is felt at all. To put it differently, the prison world seems to the convict, this forced inhabitant of it, perhaps truly a jungle, where life is in danger, at every step of it. But, it is real, because such is the great truth under the regime of dictatorship, especially the communist one. And the so-called “free life” is just an illusion, like that of a feature film, where people are just actors, nothing more; where they believe they are free, that they work for themselves, that they live and have a future.
They do not know at all (and it does not even occur to them) that they are nothing but reserve material to fill the dungeons and prison vats, whenever the dictator, this true god of this false “free world”, pleases. Moreover, these “free people and citizens”, not have even the slightest and correct idea about prison, are like those cattle that graze and fatten in favor of the butcher, the meat merchant and the table of the dictator and his closest and most loyal retinue. No one has a secure life in “this free world” and people here are almost like children who think that with songs, dances and games, their whole life will pass, who do not know evil at all, and who do not know death at all.
And prison, indeed, is a dramatic, even tragic reality, but it resembles, at least, a kind of front trench where there is a life-or-death struggle between the honest, the true, the just, the heroic, the magnificent and the evil, the perverse, the petty, the criminal. At least, in prison you live with your eyes open and, unlike outside of it, with the dream in your eyes, that you are living with dignity, when you are nothing but a cog, a screw in the great gear that grinds the flesh and drains the blood of an entire people, reduced to slavery!
Here, such thoughts were running through my brain, while the “Gaz” 59 was running through the streets of the city, heading towards Tirana. So, they were returning me to Tirana. This, for me, meant that the “gravitational center” was now “Our Group” of Tirana and, certainly or fatally, at its head, as the main defendant, I would be! Memorie.al
