By SAMI REPISHTI
Part thirty-four
Sami Repishti: – In Albania, the communist crime of the past has not been documented and punished; there has been no “spiritual cleansing”, conscious confession and denunciation of ordinary communist criminals! –
‘In the Shadow of Rozafa’
Memorie.al / During the 1930s and 1940s of the last century, with the unstoppable downpour of fascist and communist storms over Europe, sooner or later over the whole world, “fate” also seized the Albanian nation by the throat. Like all young people, I too found myself at a crossroads where a stance had to be taken, even at the risk of life. Then I said “no” to dictatorship, I took the path that had no end, a sailor in the wide sea without shores. The rebellious act that almost killed me simultaneously liberated me. I am an eyewitness to life in the fascist and communist hell in Albania, not as a “politician”, a “personality” of Albanian macro-politics, but as a student, as a young man who became aware of my role, at that time and in that place, out of love for homeland and desire for freedom; simply, as a young man with a pronounced sensitivity, loyal to myself, to a life with dignity.
Continued from the previous issue
EPILOGUE
An act as fundamental as illegal escape, in the face of death, despite careful planning, seemed to me to have been undertaken in an irrational atmosphere. When I thought of the great risk I had faced, the act took on a spontaneous character, an act driven by the instinct of self-preservation. Not that such an act was not weighed carefully and long before the hour of action; but, the day I decided to leave, I was not mobilized by a reasoning that advised me to throw myself into the deadly adventure, but by an uncontrollable impulse that I could not explain and that became the absolute master of my being.
The escape equipped me with a new identity, that of a political refugee, in a foreign country. My anti-communist stance in the homeland was known, and I was sure that the Yugoslav authorities were aware of it. This thought made me realize that my past definitively rested on my back, as a burden. From now on and for all my life, I would carry on my shoulders an “inheritance”, the value and responsibility of my past actions. For better or worse, I was inseparable from them, perhaps even their hostage! In a communist country like “Tito’s Yugoslavia”, this “inheritance” required me to be vigilant. My past activities, to a large extent, shaped not only my present but also my future.
Now, it was clear that I had a central idea that opposed communism and that I accepted as the axis of my thoughts and actions. It was the spirit of my conviction, democratic! During my prison years in Albania, I constantly tried to link my activity with the movements of the past, in order to create an atmosphere of continuity in time and space, and the possibility of my placement within it. It was the call of tradition! But, in this Yugoslav cell for political refugees, the sphere of my thought was “determined by others” as an anti-communist, and I felt limited. This worried me! Participation in a historical march is justified by the place where it takes place and the time in which one lives; both are the strongest support that can be imagined.
Then, everything seems to fall into place, the fear of the surrounding world disappears for those who think, anxiety evaporates in the warm wave of enthusiasm for participating in this march. The small individual grows, takes on superhuman proportions, ennobled by the grandeur of the cause he serves. To forge your own destiny with your own hands and in solidarity with others, to write the history of your country and your time, are the highest peaks any free being can reach, seeking to justify life on earth, with full consciousness of inevitable death. This, I thought, was the essence of true heroism. The simplicity of my confinement in the mold of “anti-communism” denied me such a privilege.
I fought against inhumanity, regardless of color…! My poor mother recounted that, on a cold and gloomy winter day, the guards of the State Security in Shkodra would not tell her where I was. They answered her pleas with mockery. To the old woman’s insistence to know her son’s fate, the indoctrinated communist guard replied in a mocking tone: – “You want to know where your son is?” – “That’s what I’ve been waiting for for more than two hours,” replied the old woman. – “Alright then. Your son is not here, nor in the other prisons…! You find out for yourself where he is.” – “How can I, poor wretch, find him? My legs have given out from walking…”!
– “He’s not far! You know where the cemetery is? There… with the others…”!
The old woman said she fell to her knees. Her legs no longer held her, and no voice came from her mouth. With eyes fixed on the overcast sky of that winter day, she lost all feeling. Motionless, kneeling on the frozen ground, she looked more like a shapeless tombstone than a living being. Her face, yellow from pain and blackened by the icy wind that froze her, resembled a corpse more than a living person. Her tarred, frozen lips did not move, nor did her eyes, transfixed on the murky clouds that covered the city that day. The place itself and the surroundings had become a grave for the son she had tried to imagine in her mind and to experience in memories, the moment when her son was shot, pushed with feet into the open pit, face covered with earth, forgotten, without name, without trace.
Before such a vision, enveloped by the shadow of death, her two hands slowly rose towards the sky, the place where for her the Creator resides, and she surrendered to Him, without resistance…! This was the world I fought without reserve! In that madness that was communist Albania, which I left behind, the communist guards were rabid dogs, hypnotized by party propaganda, which destroyed more and more each day their human side. They had internalized the craft of blind obedience, the role assigned to them by the party of the dictatorship of the proletariat in our country. And, if no worthy role was offered to them and only that of the thug who steals and kills citizens remained, the communist guards, with spiritual and mental voids, were ready to accept it, just to be part of the bloody drama played out at the expense of a population subjugated by violence.
The constant claims of party propaganda that they worked for the good of the people were mere charlatanism of “Mother Party”! This was the world I fought without reserve! The minds of communist criminals were sick, they were twisted! I remembered the joyless faces of the “working class” in the country’s construction sites. I saw no sign from the authorities or the Party showing understanding for the problems of ordinary citizens. On the contrary! There was a marked lack of love, mercy and sensitivity for the common people in the country’s communist leadership, a group of wretches walled in by a deceitful and soulless history. The “leadership” itself was a group of conscience-less adventurers, aiming to strengthen power, protects their own privileges, and those of all such – like the communist guards!
Who were inextricably linked to the bloody chariot of tyranny established by “Mother Party”! This was the world I fought without reserve! Wherever I turned my eyes, I saw only one tendency: the use of violence. Everything brought with it a common sound: the noise of the use of violence. The common denominator for all who called themselves communists was violence. In violence they recognized each other, in violence they united as in communion, before the new faith of “Mother Party”, which created them, fed them, raised them and corrupted them. Violence, the muscular arm of the mercenary, stripped of any moral principle. It allowed brutal force to oppress, to tear apart, to annihilate! This was the world I fought without reserve! Hatred and its cult were seen everywhere, in the conversations they had, in the speeches they gave, in school textbooks, in the daily press, in literature, in art and music, when they sang songs to the red Nero.
Hatred represented the desire to strike with the sword, it raised the aggressive quality of the heartless soldier, it incited confrontation with the “enemy”, real or imaginary, and who was none other than a fellow countryman: a brother who despised the dictatorship, a comrade who did not accept betrayal, a citizen who insisted on living free. The unbridled movement of violence and hatred rolled inevitably downwards, into the abyss of the militarization of everyday life. “In one hand the rifle, in the other the pickaxe”! Preached by “Mother Party”! Was none other than forced labor under the fear of the rifle, labor in service of the “order” established by the rifle, slave labor of the murderous rifle, two fundamental values of the new communist order in Albania! This was the world I fought without reserve!
The entire thousand-year history of my country, in those moments of despair, seemed meaningless to me, as if it had been left in the hands of blind fate and its uncontrollable, deceitful and oppressive march. Everything was rigid, like the rules of prison and the forced labor camp that I had experienced. The promising tomorrows were only yesterday’s full of suffering. Where were the hopes for a better life? Could it be expected that the insane leaders would abandon their path, their persistence in a cause that had lost its meaning?
But we had to accept that the country’s tragedy was inevitable, because even possible change was beyond the control of those who held power by force, beyond the control of “Mother Party”! If so, then what was the meaning of our anti-communist resistance, of our sufferings for democracy? A brave, noble, but suicidal act? Tortured Albania seemed to me transformed into a great altar, raised for the Solemn Mass, where the role of the church choir was played by those who covered their faces with their hands when they wept, those who hymned with tears, wiping, and endless prayers. To the Creator of Liberty, whom they had lost.
This was the world I loved without reserve! The real Albania was underground! There was the suffering nourished by sacrifices, there was honor, there was the seed of victory. The long lines of gaunt, black-clad women were there to testify. Albania was underground, but victorious over the darkness that covered it, for the sake of the sacrifices offered to the insatiable Hades, in that lightless, cold and soulless cave. The real Albania was underground, like a single family! Those who sit fearfully at a table with seats forever empty, and those who do not eat at all, in hopeless cells; those who sleep with frozen hearts and those who rise icy without sleep in underground basements; those who live outside, for a piece of dry bread, and those who, hollow-bellied, work and are torn apart in closed camps; those who are afraid to cry, and those who shed tears of high-mindedness for comrades who endure suffering unshaken, all together, bound as brother to brother, magnificently gave the resistance against inhumanity its permanent moral justification.
This was the world I loved without reserve! The real Albania was underground! Because that is how the Albanians who did not want the death of Albania willed it. In these nameless graves, which the red criminals demolished for fear that their resurrection would turn them into temples of worship, there was the only temple worthy of that name, whose name was the prison and the square camp, surrounded by barbed wire and the mouth of the murderous partisan rifle. This was the world I honored without reserve!
The glory of the three-thousand-year-old lands was the nobility of the supreme sacrifice, offered at the altar of Liberty by thousands of killed and shot, and by tens of thousands of prisoners who filled the prisons and concentration camps.
The high-mindedness of the country was the indomitable spirit of anti-dictatorial resistance that represented democracy; it was the dignified refusal of the best sons and daughters to accept inhumanity. This generation was the country’s best hope, and it was this new generation, raised under communism, that had rejected the demand to muster enthusiasm in service of a cause that did not attract, to accept an ideology that did not inspire, and to support a regime that represented only its own privileges. This was the world I adored without reserve!
And, for those who accepted this supreme sacrifice without complaint, for those who embraced with mystical fervor the incredible suffering that also demanded their blood, to ease even the guilt of the executioners, thus taking upon themselves the resurrection of everyone’s faith in the honor and dignity of the human being, for those who bravely threw themselves into the fire lit by the bands of satans of “Mother Party”! a liberating and purifying act, of the guilt that blinded the eyes of their brothers and sisters, sunk in the pool of eternal loss, for them, O my brother and sister, words are superfluous and our grateful gesture does not properly show the grandeur of their superhuman act.
Perhaps, the great, full, deep, mysterious silence of the vast masses of believers, who do not know how to express pain with words, except through prayer, may be the only, divine veil, that envelops their immortal memory and the decorated crown, a halo of sainthood, on their victorious foreheads! This was the world I loved without reserve!
***
O unfortunate sons and daughters of martyred Albania! You, with the bones of your knees broken with a hammer before execution, so that you would not attempt to escape from prison;
– you wretches, from whose mouths teeth were pulled and fingernails torn out, and whose tongues were cut with scissors, so that you could not tell the truth you witnessed in the Security cells;
– you, beaten savagely with rough-hewn wood to death, with destroyed genitals, so that you would not give birth to “reactionary children”;
– you, with eyes burned with cigarettes, bodies cut with knives and wounds filled with salt;
– you who were hanged by rope for days and weeks on tree branches, cell windows and ceilings of isolation centers;
– you who threw yourselves from high-floor windows to escape unbearable torture;
– you who died from hunger and sleeplessness, from pain, despair and loneliness, in dark cells;
– you, young male and female citizens, who suffered for long decades in mountain villages, without light and without heat, winter and summer, in hard manual labor, only because you courageously despised the degeneration demanded of you by the red pashas of communist waste;
– you, young men and women, highlanders and peasants, who were forced to bend your backs on insane projects of the merciless regime;
– you clergy, peaceful and martyrs, who before death kept the promise given to the Creator you worship;
– you mothers, still in black mourning for your killed and disappeared sons without a trace, widowed wives, with husbands alive in prisons and extermination camps;
– you daughters, sisters and brothers of persecuted families, who were beaten, unmasked, despised, crushed in the hardest labor camps, in order to make you bow under the pressure of the red tyranny of “Mother Party”! Which demanded your moral humiliation and physical destruction?
– you Albanian citizens throughout the country, who were exploited worse than the slaves of the pyramids, in forced labor camps, in “voluntary labor” sites, in unsafe mines and malarial swamps, without mercy and without protection;
– you, all of you, O noble creatures, from Vermosh to Konispol, who were persecuted with persistence and ferocity for decades on end, only because you wanted a free life,
– and you, O freedom fighters, who gave your lives with weapons in hand for the liberation of an oppressed people and the independence of a betrayed homeland:
– accept me today as a brother of your great family, the dignified community of undeserved suffering;
– accept me today as a living witness of your liberating message, embroidered with your own hands, that still tremble from boundless suffering, suffering that turned dignity in our common homeland, promising the immortal hope of democracy and full freedom for the entire human family… one and indivisible!
And all together, let us pass on our liberating message as an inheritance to the new generations:
May our collective tragedy be an inspiration for a crusade against torture, in every country and at every time? Never again, never again…! Memorie.al
