Memorie.al / Kolonjë. It was April 11, 1985. In Erseka hospital, something unusual was happening. First, a cry was heard that permeated the entire premises, and then the crying, mourning and wailing began. Doors opened and closed in complete chaos. Nurses and doctors were distracted in all their movements. It gave you the impression that you were in a lunatic asylum. Between the cries and screams, one nurse cried more than the other. A woman lay in the middle of the hospital corridor. Those who were near her said that she had fainted and asked to bring water. A little further on, a young doctor was pulling out her hair, and was even ready to end her life at that moment. The water requested for the woman lying in the middle of the corridor was still not coming. Someone said another patient who had just had kidney surgery had also fainted.
Something really unusual was happening, but I still couldn’t figure out why. No one asked. Everyone just cried. They did everything they could, but without helping each other. Everyone was just trying to show their pain. The woman who had been forgotten lying in the middle of the hospital corridor, raised her head for a moment and said: “What was this big mistake that found us”?!
After this voice, as if in an epidemic, they all began to repeat the same thing. “What was this big mistake that found us”?! “What was this mistake that didn’t take us all with it”?! Apparently, everyone knew what had happened.”
This is how 74-year-old Gazi Qerimi, from Butkë village of Kolonje district, told this story 35 years ago.
What had happened?!
“Those who still didn’t know anything were just the three of us,” he continued, “Gazi, me, my friend Etemija and the village teacher, Leka Mydini.”
The three of us had come down that day from Butka, to Erseka’s hospital to visit.
‘What happened’, I asked my friend and the village teacher, but they didn’t have any answer, except for the surprise that was plastered on their faces. To find out, Leka Mydini approached a doctor and asked what had happened. I noticed that instead of giving an answer, the doctor began to cry more. To precede the state of fainting, he fell into the arms of another doctor and remained silent as if he could no longer breathe.
There was a patient, who whispered something in the ear of the teacher of our village, about what had happened. After that, Leka Mydini came towards us and in a low voice said: ‘Gazi, Enver Hoxha is dead'”… “It’s a big deal that he died…”!
“To be honest, until that moment I thought that some young man would have died in the operating room, or something bad might have happened to some family, where all its members might have died, because of some serious illness and that it was their relatives who couldn’t help themselves from the pain, but it never occurred to me that Enver Hoxha had died”, Gazi said afterwards.
“Without thinking for a long time, I even answered at once, ‘I thought who knows what happened?! It’s a big deal that Enveri died. We will all die one day’. Unfortunately, the tone of my voice is high, and that day it came out even higher”, said Gazi.
“My words were heard throughout the hospital corridor. I noticed that the village teacher was horrified and kept saying to me, ‘keep your voice down, Gazi, keep your voice down, Gazi, because you’re at our throats’. “I returned the low points, but why my, Enveri died and the world was destroyed?!”.
In fact, from the end of the hospital corridor, a voice could be heard screaming, ‘O all-powerful nature, wake Enver Hoxha from death, because we communists cannot take Enver out of our hands,'” Gazi recalls.
Escape from the hospital
“To tell the truth, – continued Gazi, – until that moment it seemed to me that I had not said anything wrong, but when I noticed that the village teacher was pulling me out of the hospital, I realized that I had done something stupid . Teacher Leka, she understood things better than me. My wife was just as scared as the teacher.
“What did you do to us like this, Gazi”, they both said. We left the hospital and stopped at the vehicle agency of the city of Erseka to find a car. “Gazi took my neck,” said the village teacher, Leka Mydini, again. My wife, trembling with terror, turned to me almost disfigured.
‘I told you, she said, that there is nowhere to go with you’. ‘Don’t tear my head off,’ I told my wife, but I was actually starting to worry. The village teacher was right…”, Gazi continued in his confession.
State Security
“It didn’t take long when we saw that two cars of the Department of Internal Affairs started looking for us. They found us like that. Some civilians got out of the car and came towards us. ‘Who was it that said; it’s a big deal that Enveri died’, the Security people asked. It was clear that I was going to be arrested. My friend, Etemija, started to cry. I didn’t know what to say to them.
I heard the voice of the teacher, who addressed my wife, saying: ‘Don’t cry Etemije, Enver Hoxha will live in our hearts. He is immortal’. Then he turned to the police officers, clarifying their question. ‘No, Gazi did not say it was a big deal that Enveri died. He didn’t say that. It must have been heard wrong’, she said. I was surprised by the teacher, because she was speaking with a surprising calmness.
Gaziu said, it would be a big deal if all the others had died, but Enveri should live, he belongs to everyone. Look at his wife who can’t hold back from the pain’, the teacher intervened again. At that moment, my wife almost fainted from fear that we would be arrested. The village teacher spoke again. Collect your mind Etemije, Enver Hoxha is alive. He never dies. The whole world has Enver Hoxha’s teachings in their hearts.
I believe he succeeded, the policemen got into their cars and drove away. We left for the village. I remember the teacher repeating over and over; “Take our necks Gazi, they will come back”…”!
Etemi Qerimi: “We and the village of Butkë, under the fear of surveillance by the Security”
“The village teacher, Leka Mydini, was a wonderful woman,” says Gazi’s wife, Etemija. – We both met every day. My house and school were next to each other. After what happened in Erseka’s hospital, we wanted to find out what could happen. The “Gas” of the Internal Branch had started coming to the village frequently, while the dogs barked all night. The teacher said that they were eavesdropping on us.
Actually, our village had always been eavesdropped, but after Enver’s death, the barking of the dogs became even more frequent, – says Etemija, – they did not rest all night. Footsteps were heard under the windows of the houses. No one left the house. As evening fell, everyone was locked inside. If they found you on the street, it was no wonder they could kill you. The border with Greece was very close and they could easily accuse you of escaping.
However, it was the teacher’s words that saved us from prison. Leka Mydini, even though she suffered from her anxiety, whenever she faced the police, she was calm, even confident, in everything she said. It was a lady. I knew that Leka would never tell. Her family had suffered a lot from Enver Hoxha’s regime.
He was overcome by illness and worry, thinking that he was living in difficult days. One morning her life was extinguished, but the whole village would mourn her in silence, amidst the pain, without calls and screams, like that day in Erseka’s hospital. Even today, it is remembered with the same respect”, concludes Etemija.
“Our persecution, why couldn’t the brother feed the cooperative’s oxen”?!
The teacher’s brother-in-law, Bexhet Mydini, the brother of Shefkiu, her husband, tells this unusual but also scary story. He says that Leka, the teacher, upon returning home, told them what had happened in Erseka’s hospital.
“We all gathered as brothers, in order to know how to behave, if we were asked one day. It was not easy at all for our family. My brother, Shefki, who had worked for many years as a teacher, had been fired and sent to work in the mine, while the other brother, Estrefi, had been sentenced to prison three times in a row, for politics.
The first time they accused him of being a member of the group that threw the bomb at the Soviet Embassy, while the second time, they accused him of being a member of Pajo Mileci’s group, which aimed to overthrow the government. For this charge, along with my brother, Estrefi, they also convicted Ali Feti and Erfan Qerimin.
The third arrest of my brother, Estrefi, was the strangest. He had been plowing with a plow pulled by oxen, – says Bexheti. – It was the time when the cooperative was in a hurry to close the plantings.
The cattle of the cooperative, which had come out of the winter, almost dead from lack of food, were so weak that they could not pull the plow. His oxen, tired from work, could no longer walk and collapsed on the remaining embers in the middle of the field. Estrefi tried to raise them, but the oxen did not obey. They were malnourished.
“Well, what can I do for them, said Estrefi, you want to eat, but what can I give them, the desert, I only have my soul left, but I can’t give them my soul.”
These were the words he had said to the oxen, but that was all it took for the “Gas” of the Internal Branch to come one evening and arrest him. The charge was; why did he say, ‘I can’t give them my soul’.
He did not know that for the good of the homeland, you had to give not only your soul, but everything sacred that you could have. But the evil was not only here, it was the arguments of the witnesses, the evil went even further. He accused the cooperative, that there was no food for the animals…, he accused the people’s power…! And my brother went to prison again, to spend the rest of his life there.
For this reason, we all gathered, because we all had to be of one mind. We knew what could happen if we spoke. We were silent, trying to forget that story, but Leka never forgot it. That woman who had been calm that day, deep down, had never been like that.
It wasn’t just the story of the hospital. That event was just an episode, but the whole life of the Mydini family had passed in terror from the surveillance of the Security people. Every day she saw and felt the worry of her husband, who had been fired from his job as a teacher. The constant surveillance of the Security staff consumed her life. One morning he died quite suddenly. Illness and worries had exhausted him”.
Years have already passed and the history of the hospital is told time and time again, but with just as much respect, the life of that woman who was born in the village of Poceste in Korça and who would spend her whole life among the butkals, who were despised by the regime of that time. She was a teacher and understood more than all the inhabitants of that village, where educated people were very rare. Fear of persecution of her children.
Sudden death from the teacher’s care
The village of Butkë was a village that the regime had openly declared, that it was a village of reactionaries. After the confrontation at Erseka’s agency, teacher Leka Mydini was quite shocked. He was right. Her husband, Shefki Mydini, had been a teacher, but the regime had fired him because of his biography.
His brother, Estref Mydini, was convicted several times for politics. After what had happened in the corridor of Erseka’s hospital, the teacher was afraid that she would be left without a job, and that she might even be arrested for perjury. None of the three would be at ease after this. From that day on, the teacher lived with the anxiety that something unexpected would happen. Illness and the worry that they could destroy her family made her condition extremely difficult. One morning she died completely unexpectedly. His eyes remained open. She probably wanted to know about her children’s future. Memorie.al
