DECADES OF TERROR

She was called an agent, a collaborator with the Anglo-Americans, and for this, she was sent to prison.

Why so?

Sometimes it’s nobody’s fault, just the wrong TIME and the wrong PLACE.

ALBANIA DURING COMMUNISM.

And where have a MORE WRONG TIME and PLACE been seen?!

My name is Doris. I am 16 years old and I decided to write this piece of my forebears’ story: the story of my father’s uncle and his wife.

Everything started like this:

Rome. How beautiful it is to meet the person with whom you will spend your life in a place like this. I can’t tell you with certainty the year they met, but I can tell you the year of their marriage: Adem Balliçi (or, as my father calls him, uncle Demi), the head of monopolies at the Ministry of Finance, and Blanka de Korvin, born in Istanbul on 21 October 1900, the daughter of an Austrian diplomat and a Russian, married in 1942.

Blanka de Korvin had a very good upbringing. She knew a number of foreign languages (including Albanian), and was passionate about art, painting, and music.

Blanka was also a very generous, kind, and tireless woman. Every act of hers displayed virtue. I can give you one example: one day, her brother-in-law’s daughter complimented the scarf that Blanka wore around her neck, and without thinking twice, she removed it and gave it to the girl. This gesture made me search for the qualities that lay hidden behind the act. And I found a rich heart, full of warmth.

Blanka and Adem had built their house in Tirana and lived happily until...

It was the year 1946 when Blanka was called a spy of Harry Fultz’s and was accused of obstructing the work of drying the wetlands of Maliq. Their house was seized, Blanka was imprisoned, and Adem was sent to internment in Sukth. Blanka remained in prison until 1954. During this period, she came to know how terrible communism was. Why do I say this?

You know how beautiful winter is... You know the feeling when you get a taste of the icy beauty? Do you think this is a miracle? Yes, it truly is, but not for everyone. Somewhere, someone is pleading to the sun for a little warmth.

Do you remember that I told you that Blanka had a very warm heart? That heart kept her alive through one of the communist dictatorship’s torture sessions: being submerged in a barrel of water in the middle of December. Anyone would find it hard to face such a trying and torturous punishment. One who suffered through it together with Blanka, a priest, lost the battle and didn’t manage to successfully regain his life-giving warmth after they took him out of the barrel of icy water.

Cold... As though it was only the cold! Have you ever heard teeth being smashed with a hammer? No? How about fingernails being yanked out with pliers? Being burned with cigarettes or staying hanged upside-down for 48 hours (this last one was another punishment “full of imagination” of the communist dictatorship that gave you the opportunity to see the world from a variety of different perspectives)? Again no? Then you haven’t heard anything about the communist dictatorship.

Blanka, tired, exhausted, full of wounds on her body and her soul, after paying with six years of prison under such debilitating tortures and many others like them, she begged the dictator: “If I am released, I can go to my husband in Sukth, where I can pick myself up.” No answer.

But Blanka believed in God, and this was the strength that kept her alive. She was thankful for every moment she was alive, in spite of everything.

She was released, after finishing her sentence, in 1954. She was free, even though the imprints of shackles engraved a decade of pain and suffering on her hands. Blanka still came through. Even when things became impossible. And when living became harder than being wiped out.

Communism disfigured anybody. It left deep imprints on Blanka as well, on her body and her mind, but communism could not alienate Blanka’s soul. After leaving behind the dictatorship’s shackles in a dark room, she restarted her life, as much as it could be called a “life.” Another memory: one day, Blanka had left to go shopping and when she was looking for money to pay, she didn’t find any in her pocket. Someone had stolen it from her. When she told this story, softly and quietly, she said: “Since he stole it, that person must have needed it more than I did.”

How can a person muster so much goodness and sympathy, even after all of that suffering?!

Kjo letër është siguruar nga studiuesi Kastriot Dervishi

The pain returned on 25 December 1962, when Blanka’s husband, Adem, passed away. Besides the pain of her husband’s passing, Blanka also was faced with accusations from the communists: her husband’s murder. Blanka was arrested again. But fortunately, after Adem’s relatives testified to her innocence, Blanka was released.

A year later, in 1963, Blanka managed to return to Italy. She swore not to tell anything about what she lived through in Albania, because she didn’t want to endanger the lives of Adem’s

relatives (she remembered them with love, with some present or birthday card).

Blanka’s only hope and desire was to find her mother. She didn’t know whether she was alive and whether she expected her to return. It seems that faith in God is rewarded in different ways. Blanka managed to reunite with her mother. She lived another few years. She passed away in Zagreb on 6 October 1985, in an automobile accident.

This is the short story of my relatives during communism. Since I could not live through this period, I did not think of it as so frightening. But from the story that I have told here, I have come to understand the importance of the time in which we live today, of individual freedom and freedom of speech. The nearly five decades that darkened Albania must not be left to oblivion. They must be a memory that imparts to the present the importance and value it deserves.