Memorie.al / “…When his name came out for transfer from Burrel Prison to another prison, one less difficult than this one, Havzi Nela was extremely worried. He stayed with me the entire airing time, discussing to find the reason why they were removing him from the notorious prison of the world’s wildest dictatorship…?! He was tormented by the conscience of leaving his knowledgeable friends and anti-communists of Albania, especially the suspicion that I and others might take his departure from this cursed place as a reward for ‘broken morals’…
I had been living in a room with him for several years, like two true friends. Both for political convictions and for artistic passions. He wrote poetry, I wrote prose. Although without many pretensions in art, we insisted on confessing to each other in a literary way, whether about our national and anti-communist convictions or about our spiritual sufferings.
I, for what was cut short as soon as it blossomed, and he, for what he had managed to build with sacrifices and pure feelings, especially for his wife, Lavdije, who was suffering in the Lushnjë (Kosova) prison.
The one about whom he said he would always write verses, not only for the sake of memories and a faithfully conjugal life, but also for what he loved and valued in her. It was a great worry for him that Lavdije suffered in prison, while he himself felt satisfied, as he repeated, because he was suffering together with the true patriots of the Albanian nation in the same prison.
As a close friend, I found in him not only a sincere friend, an honest and determined fellow sufferer, but above all, a passionate teacher who never stopped talking about the wonderful male and female students of the school where he had taught.
He remembered them crying with tears in his eyes because he, as a courageous person, in his capacity as a village teacher, openly opposed the representatives of the communist government of Tirana, who insisted on forcibly establishing agricultural cooperatives even in the heroic mountains of the Great Highlands, as everywhere in Central and Southern Albania.
It was precisely this first, direct “clash” with the dictatorship’s power that frightened his students about the consequences awaiting their beloved teacher. And indeed, that’s what happened. He quickly felt the daily persecutions of the State Security and, together with his beloved wife, facing these vindictive threats from the people of the dictatorship, decided to escape from their dear homeland.
– “Before crossing the border,” he said bitterly, “Lavdije and I stood for a while, looking with tears in our eyes at the lights of our house; we kissed the ground and embraced each other. Then I wrote the letter which said: We are leaving with a bursting heart for you, Homeland! Havzi and Lavdije. And while she pressed her red lips on the white letter, crying, I then stuck the letter on the barbed wire of the clan’s fence.
– But I would never have believed it without experiencing it myself,” he continued nervously, having taken two or three puffs of my cigarette, even though he didn’t smoke, “that the Slavs have been and are our eternal enemies…”! He had memorized the “Lahuta e Malësisë” and specifically quoted the verses where Fishta said about us and the Serbs that: “We were born in each other’s hatred” …
– “The wretched ones interrogated us and treacherously handed us over, husband and wife, to the Albanian border guards. They did this only because we were sincere, honest, and patriots. We refused to insult our homeland and our people, as they wanted, and we even refused to cooperate with them against Albania.
Out of spite, they told us they would send us back, and they even told us the number of years in prison we would receive from the Albanian court… They even mentioned the names of the prisons where we would serve our heavy sentences.
“I tell you man to man,” Havzi continued, “believe it or not, not a comma moved from what the Yugoslavs said and decided for us. We were sentenced to exactly the number of years in prison they said, and we ended up in the very prisons they mentioned to us…!
Now I am fully convinced that here, in our communist Albania, the Serbs rule, even though they pretend to be ‘at odds’ with Yugoslavia. This is the greatest misfortune of our people: they still believe that Albania is led by the Party of Labor of Albania…!
If you look closely at the prisoners’ files in our prisons, over sixty percent of them are suffering because Yugoslavia turned them back. Hundreds are highlanders who escaped because of the agricultural cooperatives that were forcibly established in Northern Albania. Why?!…
If the Yugoslavs were against our regime, they would fight it and wouldn’t return any opponent who had escaped from this regime, knowing that here; the Albanians either imprison or shoot them…! The same thing happens with Kosovars who flee Tito’s regime and come for protection to their motherland…”!
Havzi was sincere, gentle, and warm in conversation; he always kept a smile on his lips. He never raised his voice. He loved people with all his heart. Only sincerity and kindness were reflected in his sky-blue eyes…!
One day, he received a postcard, perhaps the most precious one for him, which passed the strict censorship of Burrel Prison. He slept for several nights with the postcard, keeping it under his pillow. He showed me this postcard after those days he slept with his head over it, dreaming.
It had been sent by one of his former students, who expressed his longing and respect in verses, pretending to speak to his uncle, and told him that he kept indelible impressions of him, when he taught them such valuable things for life…!
“Some of your lessons,” the former student said, “turned out just as you taught us, dear uncle, before they took you for military service…! There is no greater happiness than living in our agricultural cooperative….”
I was delighted when I saw Havzi Nela laughing heartily at the words of his former student…! He laughed hard, naturally, and with tears in his eyes.
– “I am glad,” he clarified to me, “that my students understood correctly my opposition, back then, in 1966, to the creation of agricultural cooperatives in our Great Highlands… and they are supporting me…”!
His death was a great pain for us, the political prisoners in Burrel Prison. None of us, his fellow sufferers, could believe that Havzi Nela had been hanged. No one could imagine the rope tightening Havzi’s neck, precisely in those years when the communist dictatorship was collapsing all over the world, to forever silence the poet’s voice and his beautiful, so human eyes. Because he was not a criminal, a person who dishonored, stole, or cheated!
…The only fault he could have made was, surely, that he did not accept the dictatorship and the inhumane injustices in Albania, that he opposed the agricultural cooperatives – the invention of collective poverty – and that he openly expressed his love for life and the homeland, as his ancestors had entrusted him. Were these reasons to hang a man?
I felt Havzi’s death deeply. Because on the day he was to leave Burrel prison, he insisted, right during the airing time, that I accept his blanket as a souvenir. This was an act according to the unwritten tradition in Burrel prison where anyone who was released or transferred from that prison should not take either a blanket or books with them. Both were considered strategic means for the survival of those who would remain in that cursed place…!
I slept under Havzi Nela’s blanket for several years. Even after I received the telegram of his release from Spaç prison, which made me extremely happy. And, upon Havzi’s release, the other prisoners in Burrel prison also applauded joyfully as soon as I conveyed the news to them…!
And when he died, I wrapped his blanket in a white sheet and left it in the clothing warehouse. But I regretted that I didn’t find it there after I was returned to Burrel prison for the second time, because… Havzi Nela’s blanket had been divided into pieces by the fellow sufferers, so that each one could have a memory of him…! / Memorie.al
