After the Second World War, we lived in a secular state, even now it is a secular state, but the majority of people were atheists then. What do I know about religion? I know it from my mother at home. Mother would tell us when there were Jewish holidays, she cooked what needed cooking that day, but [this stayed] within the family. Let’s say, when we had Passover, whenever my mother cooked rice and chicken she gave me the thigh, but on Passover she only gave me the wing because according to the Jewish tradition children should be taught how to fly. I would complain, ‘Bre mama this and that… can’t I have [the thigh]?’

In this interview, Adem Pajaziti talks about his father Shaban’s experience of one of the most obscure episodes of partisan violence at the end of March 1945, long after Kosovo had been liberated from the German occupation. This is the story of the forcible recruitment of thousands of Albanians from Kosovo; of their desperate march across the mountains to the Montenegrin coast; of the torture to which they were subjected during the march; and the mass killing once they arrived in Bar. Before his death in 2007, Shaban gave an interview to his son Adem, which we also propose here. […] It’s interesting that the war connects people very much. In our village there were ten, they all survived. And some migrated, they moved elsewhere, I think to other cities in Kosovo. But those who stayed there befriended each other and held each other close, and they always called each other war comrade, they did not call their names, but war comrade, ‘This war comrade, war comrade.’ But they never got together, and even if we took the initiative, or tried to get them to talk about it, they never wanted to explain. Individually, they would explain, they would tell how it happened; when they were together, they didn’t want to and they would say, ‘Did you get us here to judge us, or what do you want? We won’t explain it, we won’t tell it!’

That it would come to that, that I would make a one hundred and eighty degree turn, to confront Yugoslavia, was due to the story that this Jovo Bajat [told me] of how they killed Albanians. Until May 9th, when Germany capitulated, they killed and massacred without trial. […] One night he tells me, he says, ‘We made them lie on their back {he opens his arms, showing how they lay down}, we would nail him down like Christ and with a baton we would hit the chest, and blood splashed to the ceiling, we would get excited, get into a trance from the pleasure of killing Albanians.’ […] I covered my head with a blanket, and cried like a child. This is when I took an oath that I would work against Yugoslavia, be it with god or the devil.[…] I returned to Ferizaj. From Ferizaj then, I did what I could, took a sick leave from OZNA. I pretended to be sick with tuberculosis. But I did not have anything. They transferred me. […] I returned to Kaçanik. There I became head of the Sector for Internal Affairs, in Kaçanik. And a few friends, without my knowledge, were connected to the Central Committee of the NDSH, the Movement, in Skopje. And one day Hajrush Orllani came. ‘Rexhep…’ he said, ‘Today we will meet to establish the Kaçanik Committee of the NDSH.’ I looked forward to it. And so we met, seven people. We talked, we wrote the program, we formed the District Committee of the NDSH in Kaçanik.

The village as a village, now, it has more soldiers, but had you asked me, if I was a factor… the whole Albanian nation was in the war, everyone is a war veteran, I’m speaking for myself now. To differentiate them like this, I don’t like it. Because even the mother who gave away her bread, and the one who sheltered children, and even the man who was never separated from his family, and the one who knew he’d be killed, they never gave up. And because the Albanian nation was very small and many became soldiers, it would have been better had we done like in France, make them all soldiers, war veterans I mean, veterans. The Yugoslav system was very bad, but if a woman cleaned somebody’s shoes or a pair of socks, they wrote down that she helped the army. Our Albanians worked for the struggle, from the academic to the farmer.

It is sad that we have not managed to describe the hell of the chauvinistic prison. But it is truly indescribable! I spent about four – five months in a state of isolation, which they called, ‘detention in a special place.’ One would not even know here one was at times, you didn’t know what day it was. Because one had nothing! One had no possibility of contact. It was complete separation. And only the investigators changed, but the tricks, the mastey they had perfected for decades … After about five, six months, I had the first contact with the investigating judge, the lawyer ex-officio, but one did not know whether it was a real judge lawyer, or what?! Bottom line, it seemed it wasn’t important at all! No contact with the family, or with anyone else. […] It was a difficult period also for our families. It was not just an individual punishment, but the whole family was virtually punished. Once, during my imprisonment, I was convinced that my whole family was in prison. Thus I was told, and thus in different forms I came to believe the paperwork, the other things that they threw at me. Sometimes they improvised or staged the voices of my children, and other things, and I was convinced that the whole family is … held in prison. There were also cases when the families are imprisoned. They have imprisoned also my family members, I found out later on. […]  As they say, in every war, the first to die is the truth. The truth is killed both in a political conflict and in an armed conflict! After the ‘81 events, the first one that was killed was the truth about what had happened in ‘81. And later I found, I read, that there were renowned Serbian intellectuals, such as Srdja Popović, who since then, ‘81, had raised his voice against what was happening in Kosovo. And they had the courage and vision to say that nonetheless, what the Albanians were asking for was right. And with its policy towards Kosovo, Serbia damaged not only Kosovo, but also harmed Serbia and others. It’s a pity that this voice did not have more power. And is not by chance! Occupiers also oppress their people. That is why they are afraid of the truth and of the oppressed, because the truth about them can raise even the oppressed in their own country, their people. Therefore, they have done everything possible to prevent this truth to get there. I am convinced that even today and every day, we have not been able to tell our truth to … to the Serbian people. When we managed to tell it, the effect was surprising and positive.