The madness of thousands of arrests and executions found partial justification in those who dared to openly defy the regime, but the consequences for children, grandchildren, and the entire kin cannot be explained except as the act of a sick mind. The case of Alma Liço represents just a fragment of thousands of similar internment stories.
Të lidhura
None found
She was one of those little ones who could not understand why they were suddenly uprooted from city life and forced to sleep in huts infested with parasites. Even if we consider that there were more tragic fates, the memories of that childhood, including the most ordinary days, remain indelible despite the subsequent years in a normal life. They build a new reality that makes you behave differently with everyone.
Alma herself wrote the fragments of this story. Initially, she started for her own sake, then for her close family circle, and finally decided to make the book public for all readers. She also shared part of her account in the recent documentary “Children of the Dictatorship,” produced by IDMC, where four stories returned to the scenes of events to tell their truth.
She was born in Tirana in 1958. Her father was the son of a merchant from Korça, whom the communist regime sentenced to execution by firing squad. The nightmare for her family began in 1968 and, by a cruel irony of fate, coincided with the day Alma was celebrating her tenth birthday. In her childish imagination, that day was supposed to be completely different, but reality brought a black vehicle that set off on an endless road, full of dust and potholes. A crowd of villagers surrounded the car, some astonished, some with malevolent happiness.
Her mother could not cope and burst into tears. Her father, deeply despairing, told the driver that return was impossible, because imprisonment awaited him. The first night in the internment place was a true nightmare. The villagers had turned that space into a latrine, so much so that the stench of urine was unbearable. Without any alternative, the three children stretched out on straw filled with insects that constantly fell onto their bodies. The feeling of terror was extraordinary. Her father called her close and, for the first time in her life, felt it necessary to explain what was happening.
He told her about the history of her grandfather, an intellectual educated at Harvard. He spoke of his execution and the way the party-state persecuted all opponents of the communist regime. The local villagers treated them like enemies of the people, even when they bought bread, they encountered hostile looks. It seemed as if even that thing did not belong to them. With these attitudes, she faced and grew up in school, not mixing with the other children.
One day, a teacher looked at her with deep hatred and threatened: “Study as much as you want, because a pickaxe awaits you!” And the years that followed seemed to be proving that prophecy true. After two years of living there, Alma decided to return to her grandmother for schooling reasons. The elderly woman confessed to her that just two days after the family’s internment, the neighborhood council had brought a mentally disordered man to her house to shelter. Two years had passed living with him, while new bolts had been added to the doors.
She resumed her lessons at the same school, but her classmates had progressed normally, while she no longer felt like them. She avoided any activity that prompted conversation. She formed a strong friendship with a girl, whose family became the permanent supporters of Alma and her relatives. In the eighth grade, her grandmother passed away, and she was left completely alone, but it was precisely that family that took her into their care. She managed to start high school with great difficulty, but she only completed the first year, because she was expelled. The teacher’s prophecy was following her step by step. She was assigned to work in a tomato greenhouse.
Beyond the hardships of the work, she also encountered the cynicism of colleagues. After some tomatoes spoiled, she called the farm technician, who directly accused her of sabotage – a word that at that time was tantamount to a death sentence. But luckily for her, an expert arrived who assessed that the cause was simply excess water. Furthermore, on her first voting day, after an armed person passed nearby, they signaled to her that they would give her a written paper, which she had to fold and put in the box without reading it.
EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK
Situated on the outskirts of the village, at first glance it looked like any other hillock. It was June, and green grass covered every corner. That uniform miracle was broken only by the stone slabs visible from afar. Below that hillock lay the village cemetery. Without a doubt, those silent stones gave the landscape a mournful look. Silence reigned all around.
No bleating was heard, no dog barking or joyful child’s call. An icy silence that followed the eternal farewells in that place. Lives cut short by natural causes or by cruelty, just as life flows with its mysteries and unexpected surprises. Nevertheless, that day was special for that place of partings without return. The person being escorted to his final resting place was a child just eleven years old. His small body rested in a white coffin, which had arrived that morning at Rinas airport from far away.
Fate had it that I was present at that sorrowful and tragic procession. As I watched hundreds of grieving people, I understood that all life experiences have their own languages, but the pain for the loss of a child always speaks in the language of tears. Those crystalline drops flow over faces shattered by despair, or try to be swallowed between sobs that nearly drown in their own pool.
Among the crowd of relatives and villagers, the two parents of the late boy stood out. They stood like frozen statues, hunched over the coffin. They were sunk into an icy reality, which had paralyzed every cell of their beings. What had happened? How had the life of that unfortunate little boy been cut short so quickly?
As I watched them destroyed by suffering, I tried to understand the weight of guilty conscience in that devastating experience. In a way, that child had been abandoned by them. Poverty and insecurity about the future had pushed those parents towards that desperately painful act. The phenomenon of minors leaving the family bosom was spreading like an exterminating epidemic. In search of a more dignified life, education, and a more secure future, hundreds of parents wandered through the streets of Europe after Social Care Centers for children, abandoning them near their walls.
Thus, after an arduous journey, that desperate father, unable to feed his four children, left him alone, like a timid bird, at the entrance of such a Center. The boy was the family’s firstborn. Seeing that hundreds of fellow citizens had “successfully” followed the same path, why shouldn’t he try it too? Hadn’t the healthcare institutions slammed the door in his face when he sought help for his sick wife?
The social structures of these Centers immediately took the lonely children into protection, fulfilling every immediate need. Poor little boy, his parents had forced him to recite by heart that, while searching for a family friend in that city, he had accidentally become separated from his father. So, he had lost his way. Later, in front of the translator, he identified himself and his family with false names. The burden of lies weighed on his eyelids, and he dared not look anyone in the eye.
Thus, the possibility of contacting the family and returning him home was almost impossible. I imagined that child, shy and stifled by abandonment and deceit, terrified in the face of the unknown, surrounded by strangers who, despite the care, remained unknown people. Moreover, they did not speak his language at all. How could they have convinced that child to accept growing up far from parental love and attention? A cruel compromise for the little one, which he did not even understand.
They had simply taught him to obey. After all, they were the ones who decided his future. He was just a child who could not know what was good or bad for himself. As I thought with a broken heart about that tragic abandonment, I remembered a story I had once read. The protagonist was another young boy, who was fortunate enough to experience his father’s love and care only once in his life.
In fact, that had been a bad day for him, as while climbing a tree he had fallen and severely broken his leg. But he enjoyed his father’s dedication so much, that the poor child prayed with all his heart to break another limb again. Ugh! I do not know why this event came to mind, perhaps because of the weight of shattered parental love.
To tell the truth, I did not doubt that the unfortunate lad had received all proper care at the Center, except for that divine and irreplaceable feeling: family love. I could not know how many nights he had dreamed of sleeping next to his mother, while she stroked his hair. I could not imagine how many times he had wanted to run joyfully through the meadows of his village, chased by his younger siblings.
I could not think how many times he had missed the teachers who spoke his language and his school friends. But, unfortunately, what I knew for sure was that a few months after arriving at that Center, a sudden fatal illness had extinguished the miserable boy. Trapped in a hospital bed, among machines, he closed his eyes far from his family and his loved ones. It was not at all simple to determine which family the little boy belonged to. While the lifeless body rested in the morgue, the origin verification procedures lasted about three weeks. Endlessly long twenty days to find his final dwelling.
I detached myself from that painful thought and my gaze fixed again on the white coffin and the parents hunched over it. Meanwhile, the sun’s rays reflected on its shining surface, caressing it gently. That shine resembled a pale farewell, trying to soften the sadness of the loss. Tears, silence, and more tears. Amid wailing and sobbing, a few moments later, the coffin disappeared into the swallowing pit to rest eternally in the green hillock of the native village. A few handfuls of soil from the soft earth, and everything seemed to have ended. But did it really end? Not at all.
The landscape of pain and tears was stamped on the faces of everyone present at that funeral ceremony. The toll was chilling. A child abandoned in a foreign land. An unlived life, extinguished in an anonymous hospital room. Without any relatives nearby, without any warm word, without any caress. Two devastated parents, whose wounds will never heal. Poverty, lack of prospects and hope. No serious commitment from the state to fight hunger and guarantee the vital minimum, consequently… Hundreds of desperate people following the same path into the labyrinths of the world… Until when will we allow this situation?
FINAL EMPLOYMENT
As forewarned, a few days later I was definitively registered for work. I would toil in the same brigade as my parents. I had to be grateful and see it as a favor. At least I would not be isolated in an entirely undesirable and completely unwelcoming environment. I found myself facing a truth, which I had gradually accepted, and I awaited its consequences like a sentence without the right to appeal.
Although I tried to sleep earlier than usual, that night sleep would not come. The time when I slept with books and my school bag next to the headboard now belonged to the past. My parents had to wake me very early from the floor mattress that served as a bed, so as not to miss the work start time. Its duration was measured by the sunrise and sunset. Nightmare!… that season had about 14-15 hours of daylight. Oh God!… Would I be able to cope with that full-time slavery?
Since my parents had endured it, why wouldn’t I, who was young and healthy, manage? Ughhh! Indeed, they had endured that exhausting life, but within five years they had aged as much as fifteen. As I watched them exhausted, hunched over, with blackened faces and chapped lips, I sadly observed them being dragged through that painful calvary, and this shattered my soul.
They were entirely transformed. We left the house in the darkness. Each of us carried a cloth bag with a little food and a bottle of water hanging from our arm. To adapt to the working conditions, I had accepted the ridiculous clothing of trousers with a dress over them. But what I could not accept was wrapping my head with gauze. My mother had gotten used to wearing it. She advised me to put it on too, since I should not stand out from the other women, which could cause me trouble.
I refused stubbornly. Even before the work began, I was rebelling. Angrily, I prepared a kind of cotton cloth hat, with a cardboard brim. It was extremely necessary to protect myself somewhat from the scorching sun. On the way, some villagers greeted us, curiously eyeing my hat. Finally, we arrived at what was called the brigade center. It consisted of a tent covered with straw and a sort of room built with reeds. To fill the gaps between them, mud mixed with cow dung was used.
Thus, it could be called plastered. This mini-stable, divided in two, served as the brigade leader’s office and as a warehouse for work tools. Inside it, I could see pickaxes and shovels with crooked handles, thrown about haphazardly. The brigade leader, who had arrived before us, stood waiting at the office door, annoyed by the workers’ lateness.
Nevertheless, he was polite enough to welcome me. I noticed he paid attention to his external appearance; he was dressed in clean and carefully ironed clothes. Apparently, the four years of high school for agronomy had set a different standard for him regarding image and cleanliness; after all, he had lived in the city for a few years. Within a few minutes, all the workers arrived. I watched with compassion those malnourished and shattered faces, thinking that this would now become the image of my life. From this desperate reflection, I was jolted by the loud and nervous voice of the brigade leader.
Apparently, he was conducting an analysis of the previous day’s work, accompanying it with loud shouts, insults, and threats for those who, according to him, had not performed their duty properly. I was horrified by that communication and waited for someone to react, to object, even to do something. But in vain. Everyone had their heads down and waited for him to finish so they could disperse to their tasks. As he screamed, I noticed a short-bodied man around fifty years old approached and took his place obsequiously.
In a low voice, I learned from my mother that he was the brigade technician, and that the entire outburst from the brigade leader was the fruit of his espionage. It was not difficult to read the malevolent joy in his pale eyes as he watched the other villagers being insulted and humiliated. He seemed to me like a disgusting, damp reptile. I immediately identified him with Uriah Heep, the brilliant character of Charles Dickens, whose novel, “David Copperfield,” I had just finished reading. The first people directed to work were my parents and some elderly people.
Since they were past forty, they belonged to the old people’s squads. The work processes entrusted to them were less exhausting than those of the young. Having helped my mother in the afternoons, I had tried some of those tasks myself. I expressed no surprise. The forty-year-olds of that village looked seventy. The life of hardship caused them to age and break down before their time.
