I’m exhausted by illness . . . Every morning I buy a new day of life, but there comes a time when each new day is nothing but torment, and when you say to God: “Enough.” And yet you keep on living and you keep on fighting. Why do we cling to life so doggedly? You see this mark on my forehead? It’s from being beaten up. I spent twenty-one years and four days in prison, and I’m still carrying that time here, on my back.
My name is Neim Pasha, and I was nineteen years old when they arrested me . . . What did I know? I didn’t realize the world is so badly covered in mud and that it sticks to everything. When you’re young, you want to explore everything, try everything, but you know and understand nothing. At school I recited black-and-white poems about love for the fatherland and enemies of the nation. When I ended up in prison myself as the worst kind of enemy, and the first time I was tortured, I still didn’t understand what politics was, what the authorities were, or the Party. I had no idea about anything. It was only in prison that I came to hate the system.
It was only in prison that I learned: Cursed be the first man to have stuck a stick in the ground, drawn a circle around it, and said: “This is mine.” Cursed be the man who says: “I’ll kill anyone who enters my circle.”
I matured in prison, thanks to books and people who knew more than I did. Extreme conditions sharpen the senses; a person only has to appear before you and you instantly know who he is. My prison friends gave me great solace and support—it was their kindness that kept me alive. We survived thanks to each other. It’s a good thing you’ve come to see me. Writers are guides—by showing us the paths that others have taken, they help us to understand ourselves.
*
I was thirteen when my mother died. She left a great void, not just because a mother is irreplaceable; death changes everything, it rips a hole in a child’s heart. Throughout my adult life I’ve been sure that losing my mother was the root cause of the misfortunes I suffered.
My father was a stern man who spent all his time working, so I transferred my vast reserves of affection to my uncle, my mother’s brother. When my uncle was a teenager, Hysni Kapo, who was then one of the partisan leaders and later the third most important man in the country after Enver and Mehmet Shehu, had marched his brigade through the village. My uncle had leaped forward and called out: “Take me with you!” but the soldiers had shooed him away, saying: “Get lost, kid, you’re barely knee-high!” But my uncle was determined, and he followed them until they accepted him. After the war he was a division commander in Shkodër, and there he fell into a trap: He was accused of collaborating with the Yugoslav secret service and sentenced to death. If his comrades hadn’t spoken up for him, he’d have got a bullet in the chest. He was given a life sentence.
I didn’t know that my affection for my uncle could put me in danger. I didn’t know that in Albania convicts suffered not just during their years in prison, but for their entire life, because the regime followed their every move, and tried to scent out any weakness. I didn’t know that under this system, the evil turned wider and wider circles until it affected everyone.
I never once stopped to wonder if life in Albania was good or bad. In the 1950s, the Party gave each of us a monthly sack of corn, which enabled us to survive. We’d take it to the mill and be given seven or sometimes eight pounds of flour. Then we’d bake bread with it. We all rejoiced as we bit into the warm bread.
To begin with, the Party used to say: “Soon you’ll be eating with golden spoons,” and we believed it.
Later Hoxha was shouting to the crowd: “We’ll eat grass before we bow to pressure from foreign powers,” and so we ate grass. Children would go into the woods to pick wild herbs, then their mothers would mix them with corn flour and bake flatbreads. We drank watery soup with wooden spoons and ate flatbreads made with grass . . . I was a simple village boy; I never thought of fleeing the country and I never asked questions. I was given a job at a coal mine in Memaliaj, so that’s where I worked. Just like everyone around me, I was used to living without hope and without dreams.
*
How would my life have turned out if I hadn’t gone to my grandfather’s house that day? Seven of us met there: three of my mother’s brothers, two of her brothers-in-law, my younger cousin, and me. My uncles said they wanted to escape over the border to Greece, and they set the date: May 15. We went back to our homes, each bearing the secret like a stone hung around our necks.
On the appointed day, a workmate came up to me and whispered: “The police are asking for you.”
They took me to the police station. There I stood before a man whom I knew to be omnipotent.
“Your uncles have been arrested,” he said. “Tell us what the plan was.”
At the first punch I said: “I don’t know,” at the next one I said: “I don’t know.” I was soon choking on my own blood, but I kept repeating: “I don’t know,” until I wasn’t capable of speaking anymore. My mind was racing with the thought: “The system got in between us. Who was the informer?”
I was forbidden to leave the town, but they let me return to the workers’ hostel. One of the men living there had spent many years in prison; he was quiet and intelligent. I plucked up the courage to tell him what had happened.
“I’ll give you some advice,” he said. “Never ask anyone for advice, don’t talk to anyone, never tell anyone anything. Destiny will do its work whatever happens, so hold your tongue and don’t make your situation any worse.”
I was arrested on June 4, 1966. At the same time, I found out that on May 15, two of my uncles had escaped from Albania. The others were still in the country—and so was every other member of the family, all of whom were to bear the consequences.
In love, it’s the heart that does the talking; in wisdom, it’s the mind; and in suffering, it’s the body. Suffering makes the body scream. They tortured me inhumanely, but my answer to every question was still: “I don’t know.” In the courtroom I stood eye to eye with my uncle’s wife, who was a witness for the prosecution. Could I have held that against her? She had a very small child, she’d been left on her own, she had to save herself. It’s easier to break a woman than a man—how was she going to live from then on?
“I left the house to cook outside,” said my aunt, staring straight ahead of her, into the void. “When I opened the window a little to get the salt from the sill, I heard Neim saying: ‘Let’s go, or the police will come and arrest us.’”
It had been raining that day, she hadn’t done any cooking outside, she’d been sitting next to us. Her entire statement had been prepared in advance; none of it was true. My aunt’s face was stony and her eyes were blank—she played her role like a puppet on strings. I had tears in my eyes.
I was sentenced to twelve years in prison. My uncle got six years, one of my mother’s brothers-in-law got three years, and the other was interned. My cousin, the thirteen-year-old, was left in peace.
I’ll never stop wondering who informed on us.
*
They took me into custody straight from the mine, but they wouldn’t let me wash, neither there nor before the trial. When I ended up in prison in Tirana, my heart was set on just one thing: to scrape myself clean of the stink of pain and fear.
The first person I met in prison was from Tepelenë, just like me.
“I hope you’re lucky and won’t have to stay here too long,” he said.
He gave me soap and a towel, so I washed in cold water and laundered my underwear. There were twenty prisoners in the cell, who greeted me with a kind word and a cigarette. I fell asleep immediately, like a stone dropped into a well.
Next morning the prisoners were woken by screams of “Get up! Get up!” but I couldn’t hear anything, or see anything, or feel anything—I’d sunk into a lethargy similar to a coma. The guard stood over me shouting, slapping my face, and shaking me, but I was unable to move, and I couldn’t open my eyes. They took me to the hospital unconscious.
I was given a series of injections. The blood was barely flowing in my veins, but slowly, day by day, my sight, consciousness, and memory returned. Finally I crossed the prison threshold a second time, once again closer to death than life, and once again the first person I met was the man who’d given me the soap. He brought me some yogurt he’d made out of prison milk.
“Fucking Hoxha, to hell with him!” he muttered under his breath when he saw that I hadn’t even the strength to eat. “What’s he doing to us, that damned son of a bitch?”
It was like a wake-up call. So it was possible to say something bad about our leader? I was too young to know the difference between love of the Party and hatred of Hoxha.
Gradually my strength returned, my eyes regained focus, and I began to understand that the people suffering around me were innocent. In our cell there was a war veteran from Kosovo who’d lost both his legs in battle. He’d been withering away in bed for twelve years and could hardly move at all. You might have said he was vegetating, but he was a person, just like us. “I don’t know when it’s summer or when it’s winter,” he’d say, “but every day I wait for a bird to come back and perch on the windowsill. That is my only joy. If the bird is late, I immediately start to worry . . . My heart beats for nothing but that bird.”
*
Each of us needed a thought to keep him alive, but in those days I wasn’t yet aware of that. I spent my twentieth birthday in prison in Laç, where I was pals with three guys of my own age. The first was Naum Kondakçi, brother of the famous singer Liljana; he’d been a student in the USSR until it turned out the Russkies weren’t communist enough for Albania. The authorities had ordered him to come back, but he knew he’d suffocate here. Someone had reported that the young Kondakçi was looking to the West. Off to jail. The second was Murad Martha from Librazhd, a good mate and a real live wire—he had fire in his heart. And the third was Sazan Haderi from Gjirokastër, nephew of the high-ranking official Shefqet Peçi—he was the one I knew best.
On December 6, 1966, we didn’t go to work because it was pouring with rain. I was sitting in the corridor with Sazan, who kept going outside the building and staring at the clouds. He’d crane his neck, stand like that for a moment, and come back.
“The bloody rain won’t stop.”
“Does it bother you?”
“My wife and daughter are due to visit. When they arrested me, Alma was only six months old.”
His eyes filled with tears. I felt sorry for him.
“Don’t worry, the guards will call you when your girls get here.”
“I know . . . I’d just like the weather to be nice.”
And then we heard a strange rumble. Sazan leaped to his feet. I ran after him, with no idea what was going on, but suddenly he turned around and pushed me as hard as he could into the three-foot-deep ditch that extended the length of the prison building. Once I’d managed to clamber out, I saw Sazan jumping into the back of a truck, falling flat, and disappearing from view, and then the truck drove off with a screech, smashed the prison gate, and they were gone. I was speechless. Volleys of rifle shots tore through the air; the camp thundered with shouts and gunfire. They immediately held a roll call: Naum, Sazan, and Murad were missing. I stood there in the downpour, the rain washing away my tears, as I longed for them to succeed.
They were full of courage but short on luck. A mile or two away from the prison, on the main road from Tirana to Shkodër, a bus driver heard the roar of the rifles and blocked the road ahead of the speeding truck. My three friends jumped out of the vehicle and ran off into the forest. Inside the prison the rain continued to drum against the windows, while outside it cooled their brows and washed away their footprints.
At midnight they dragged Murad and Sazan back to the camp, tied up with barbed wire. They woke us, stood us in line, and threw their bleeding quarry at our feet.
“Look at them!” shouted the prison governor. “That’s what traitors to the fatherland look like! There they are, lying before you! Never forget this sight.”
Next morning, before the usual wake-up call, my bunkmate went out to the bathroom, and when he returned, he had a strange look on his face.
“They’ve brought back a body.”
In the corridor, where the food trolleys usually stood, lay Naum—dead.
They’d thrown his body there for us to see. So that we’d always think of it whenever we stood in line to wait for our food. And so that we’d always have that image before us as we ate.
It was the first time I’d ever seen the corpse of someone who’d been murdered. The dead face of a person I cared about.
When I saw his mutilated feet, I took the towel I had thrown over my shoulder and carefully wrapped them in it. But then my gaze fell on his stomach, torn open by bullets. I took the towel from his feet, gathered up his ripped-out innards, put them back inside, and covered them. An hour later, the prison governor summoned me.
“Who was Naum to you?”
“A cellmate.”
“A cousin?”
“No.”
“So why did you do it?”
“I felt sorry for him.”
The governor stared hard at me.
“Take him away.”
They took me to the isolation cell, threw me to the ground, and seized some blocks of wood. At that point I didn’t yet know I’d be beaten so often I’d end up losing count of how many times it happened.
At the time, locked in a concrete cage measuring six-and-a-half by four feet, I realized that life in prison wasn’t just isolation—it was also endless suffering, the torture and death of those closest to you, and a sense of helplessness worse than death.
I went through prisons in Tirana, Laç, Elbasan, and Reps, but the greatest suffering lay ahead of me, in Spaç. It was there that I acquired a conscience, and it was there that my second sentence crushed me. I got it for taking part in the revolt—another sixteen years.
*
The Spaç revolt was something that had never happened in Albania before, something unthinkable. People were sent to jail for saying they didn’t like the bread, and suddenly several hundred prisoners had dared take a stand against the authorities. A rebellion within the context of the most dreadful terror imaginable. The authorities had to understand how it was possible for someone to slip out of their viselike grip.
I confessed to taking part in the rebellion because I couldn’t endure the beating. They tortured me deliberately, strategically; torture isn’t very tiring for the torturer, and when he gets tired, he can rest. The victim never gets a moment’s respite from the pain. The authorities watched my suffering closely and drew conclusions from it. Many times during the interrogations I thought I was dying. But I didn’t die.
Communism was a beautiful edifice full of dark, decaying rooms. That’s what the prisoners used to say, old and new, because more people were constantly brought in, especially members of the nomenklatura sentenced as a result of Hoxha’s rising paranoia. They understood very well what communism was and why they’d become victims. In Tepelenë, two hundred and sixty people were sent to prison, seventy of whom were former war heroes, partisans, the pride of Albania. They thought that, as they’d risked their lives for their country, they had the right to criticize the Party, because they’d fought for paradise on earth but were forced to live in hell.
But in a totalitarian system, no one has the right to speak the truth. No past service to your nation can protect you. That system fed on the blood of the Albanians—it was a bloodthirsty monster, so it was constantly on the hunt for human flesh. But as it became weaker from year to year, it needed more and more of that blood, and it sucked it from ever-younger people. The older ones who stood up to the regime at the very start were immediately shot or simply disappeared.
What harm could I do to the system, a nineteen-year-old who’d heard that his relatives wanted to escape? The system wanted blood in order to survive; it needed our terror.
When they dragged me to the interrogation room after the events at Spaç, through the window I saw some soldiers playing volleyball; I saw their healthy, lithe bodies in brightly colored shirts, and I heard their happy voices. The guards noticed that I was looking out and slammed the shutters closed. I got a punch in the face.
It took the investigators a few days to realize that I had been in the group responsible for raising the flag, and that’s when their fury exploded. Every time I fainted, they revived me with water, but then the pain returned and I’d faint again. That’s why I can’t remember much about it. I didn’t have a watch—in the torture room there was no such thing as time. I only realized later that, on the first day, they tortured me for eight hours. By midnight I was unable to walk or talk. Two policemen dragged my body back to the cell.
There were four interrogators: They’d come in, beat me, shout at me, and then go into the next room to torture someone else. The screams could be heard from all directions; they carried down the corridor and escaped through closed windows. At one point I was left alone in the room with a female secretary and the fourth interrogator, a guy from Tepelenë.
When I looked at him, he came up to me, and without a word he loosened my handcuffs. He probably thought he was bringing me relief, but he didn’t know that when your circulation is cut off and then the blood starts flowing again, the pain is so excruciating it can make you faint.
“We’ll soon find out what you have to say. Start writing,” he said to the secretary. “On May 28, I, Ministry of the Interior investigator Skënder Qerimi . . .”
He stopped. He was sitting on a chair with his head bowed. Suddenly he looked up and our eyes met. I knew I had a cousin who worked for the Ministry of the Interior, but I’d never met him. I only knew his name: Skënder Qerimi.
He asked questions, I answered them, and the typewriter tapped away steadily. “We’re of the same flesh and blood,” I kept thinking. They took me back to the cell.
A few days later Skënder sent for me.
“Don’t you feel sorry for yourself?”
“You’re the one who made me into an enemy,” I said.
He offered me some food but I shook my head.
“Do you hate me, too?” he snapped.
We sat in silence. We both hung our heads. Me and my cousin, the enemy of the people and the people’s darling.
“If I manage to save you,” he said, “that’s your good luck, but if I fail, it won’t be my fault.”
*
A few days later I was summoned for another interrogation. The investigator from Gjirokastër sat facing me.
“Get up,” he said. “Come here.”
And he struck my head a mighty blow, so hard that I fell to the floor and began pouring with blood.
“And now,” he said, extremely pleased with himself, “you must thank our dear leader, who has decided to spare all of you, even though you should be shot like dogs.”
A few days later they took me to the interrogation room again. On the table lay a sheet of paper and a pen, and there were men standing all around. When I sat down, each of them shook my hand in turn. I looked at their clean-shaven, smiling faces, as, one by one, they came closer to me and then withdrew.
“You’re so young . . . your family’s looking forward to seeing you . . . they were never enemies of the fatherland . . . a family of true patriots . . . we know all about you . . . your grandfather died at Ioannina . . .”
“Where is Comrade Ylli?” someone asked.
“In the next room. He’ll be here soon,” replied another voice.
And in came Comrade Ylli—which means “star” in Albanian—the investigating officer for the Spaç revolt, as handsome as if he’d stepped off a propaganda poster. Everybody stood up and saluted. Ylli smiled faintly. He was thirty years old, with smooth skin, and he smelled of cologne. A communist star in a dark-red suit and a white shirt.
“You’re Neim?” he asked me. “We’ve heard you’re a good boy. We’re going to give you a chance, and you’re going to tell us who’s an enemy of the people.”
My body hadn’t forgotten any of the torture. I was so exhausted. I was desperate for some peace. So after a pause I asked: “Do you want me to spy at Spaç or outside?”
“At Spaç,” Ylli said.
I’d spent seven years there. Seven years, during which I’d reached adulthood. I knew all the prisoners, and they knew me.
“You turned my family into enemies of the people,” I said, “and now you want me to become a rat?”
I knew this was how they wanted to punish not just me but all the prisoners, because they’d have demonstrated that the authorities could break anyone.
The court session took place on June 20. In the declaration presented to the judge, my words weren’t quoted. That was as much as Skënder could do for me.
But my statement began with the sentence: “I took part in the Spaç revolt, which I regret.” That was as much as I could do for myself. I was twenty-seven years old.
*
After serving their time, many people were sent back to prison again. It only took two or three months. We’d ask them: “How did you end up in here again?” They’d reply: “My family rejected me.” I shuddered whenever I heard those words, because what I feared more than anything else was going back to life under the watchful eye of the Sigurimi, and returning to my relatives, who would resent me for all those years, for all the pain they’d suffered because of me. I’d left my father and three brothers on the other side. Every day, each of them had to cope with the suffering I had caused.
I was afraid of going back to prison, and I was afraid of coming out of it. I was frightened of the world outside. I was nineteen when I was sent to prison and forty when I left—I didn’t know real life and I didn’t know what lay in store for me. I knew that soon after being released some prisoners committed suicide. They drowned or hanged themselves at the first opportunity. If they had no one and nothing to go back to, in the communist reality, their life had no meaning.
In its benevolence, the Party took a few years off my sentence, and so on June 8, 1987, I stood outside the prison gates—a free man. I looked at the world and I couldn’t believe it. There was so much space around me, endless space . . . I had so much pain inside me, I’d been broken in so many ways, but the outside world had gone on existing; the trees had continued to bear fruit, while the flowers went on blooming and the hillsides turned green. So much suffering occurred amid all this beauty.
About fifty yards from the gate there was a stream. I dipped my hand into the water and felt its cool chill on my fingers. But when I stood up and stepped onto the bridge, I saw the prison governor. I had the gate behind me and the rest of my life ahead of me, and there he was, standing in the middle of the road. He looked at me and held out his hand. “What a civilized gesture,” I thought, “I’m a human being again,” and held out my hand, too, but instead of shaking it, he grabbed me by the arms and forced me to turn and face the prison. “Look!” he hissed. “Take a really good look.”
It crossed my mind that the man wanted to arrest me again. So many people went back to prison!
“Never forget this sight. If you ever come back, I promise we’ll torture you to death. We’ll make sure you suffer more than Taras Agolli.”
We all knew what had happened to Taras Agolli: targeted torture. When he came back to prison, the guards tortured him for three months under the supervision of an experienced doctor. Whenever Taras was on the brink of death, the torture stopped. He was taken to the hospital and given treatment, while they waited patiently for him to recover his strength. Once he was back on his feet, the torture would start again. And so it continued, without end.
The governor left me alone on the bridge. That was the image I took away with me from prison.
When I crossed the threshold of my family home, my brothers and father just hugged me, as if I were still the boy who’d left the house to go to work twenty-one years ago. From the moment I returned, without saying much, without any declarations, they created a protective shield around me so that nothing else could happen to me. I didn’t have to say anything or do any complaining—they knew everything. Never in any way did they make me feel that they resented me.
But life was still very hard for me. For three months I couldn’t find a job, and in communist Albania, parasites ended up in prison. I repeatedly went back to the mine where I’d worked in the past and asked them to take me on again, but every time I was told: “No.” The punishment would never end.
Finally, when I heard yet another “No,” I realized that the authorities would do anything to destroy me. One of my brothers was with me at the time.
“Give me one last hug, because this is the end of me,” I said.
And something inside me snapped, as if I had nothing to lose, as if I’d lost everything by now. Or perhaps in that moment I simply lost my mind? It was finally clear to me: In prison or outside, I would never be free again. The authorities would always have me in handcuffs. And as if out of spite, in a sort of bizarre act of despair, I started to scream. I
walked straight ahead of me, shouting: “Drop dead, the lot of you! I hate you! To hell with you!”
I screamed out all the pain I’d amassed in the past twenty years.
At first my brother was dumbstruck, but then he raced up to me and covered my mouth. His fingers dug into my lips. He pulled me toward him.
“Shut up,” he whispered.
I was trembling all over.
“If you have no pity for yourself, have some for us!”
I clung to him, shaking, and he held me in his arms without a word until I’d calmed down. Until my body was still again. That was the most awful moment. In all those years, that was the most awful moment.
And yet my life got back on track and kept rolling onward, day after day. I found a job, then I met my future wife, and our three children were born. My parents gave me life, and I gave life, too—I became a father. I’ll never forget how my brother saved me. In an extraordinary surge of humanity, he gave me more at that moment than anyone else in my entire life.
But in the new era, we could barely make ends meet; the children were growing up, there was no work, and a friend told me he had a job for me. I was to become a prison guard, me . . . I thought about my life, I thought about my children, and I felt that, once again, fate was giving me no alternative. The worst moment was when I put on the uniform.
Everything came flooding back.
*
I thought we’d succeeded in replacing the dreadful, flawed system with a new and better one and that, if God couldn’t punish the people who had harmed others, then the state would—the new, democratic Albania.
To heal the wounds, I joined an association of former political prisoners. At first I played a very active role in it, but I soon realized that nobody was particularly concerned about punishing anyone or about compensating us for our suffering. We were given a paltry sum of money and a pat on the back, some vague promises were made, and we were sent home.
But the representatives of the old system were never punished—the men who spilled all that blood were never held responsible for their actions. So many people suffered every single day, so many people died with an empty stomach, so many perished performing hard labor for which they were never paid. They hoped that when the system that had cheated them finally fell, a new and better system would condemn the crimes of the old one, and Albania would finally be democratic.
But that didn’t happen. The system didn’t change, only the form of it. The people in power are the same as before, they just talk in a new language. There’s no real democracy.
The young people need to learn about the crimes of communism, but as no one has been punished, what kind of lesson are they gaining from the past? Sometimes I give talks in schools about what it was like in prison, but the kids just shake their heads and say: “No, that’s impossible.” Nowadays, people only go to prison if they commit a serious crime, so the young people can’t conceive of someone being convicted without being guilty. And rather than condemning the old system, the state is only interested in how to get rich.
Corruption is rife, there are no principles, and without principles, there’s no true freedom. My daughter had brilliant results at high school, but for her to graduate, I still had to pay bribes. The children of rich families study abroad; they pay for university with their fathers’ stolen money. So where is freedom? Where is equality? Where is truth? Where is the dream of democracy?
We’re disappointed and exhausted. We’ve become beggars steeped in suffering. Twenty-six years have gone by since the fall of communism, laws have been passed that promised compensation for the years of prison labor, but we’ve never received a penny. It’ll only turn up when we’re all dead.
In the new Albania, the truth doesn’t count. What use is it to anyone? You can’t sell it or buy it. People have stopped hoping that the truth will bring liberation, that it will cleanse Albania. The world is still covered in mud.
I don’t want to take that mud with me to the grave.
*
Neim Pasha died on March 9, 2018. 
