By Denada Jushi
The Villa with Three Gates is not just a story about the internment of the family of a general who was on the side of communism, until one day, communism interned the family and imprisoned him himself for eight years, without the right to meet with his family.
It is also the story of a girl who is 14 years old at the beginning of the book. She lives in a villa in the middle of the block, grows up, gets an education, starts working at the institute as a physicist, gets married, becomes a mother... and suddenly one day...
She is told that she must leave her job, the city, separate from her husband, pack her clothes and, together with her several-month-old son, be exiled to Berat. Because, now, she is the daughter of an "enemy of the people."
Vera, who used to hang out with Ismail and Helena Kadarena, Spartak Ngjela and others during dinner conversations, now works in the villages of Kutalli and Vodëz, in the lost cooperatives of the internment. Where she has to face and recognize the side that others suffered at her expense for 45 years...!
It is a story that no one escapes evil, not even those whom evil initially puts into service.
I don't want to say more about the book, because I want this article to be an invitation to read it for yourself, and to see another side of the coin: the sons of the prosecutor and the general who believed in the utopia of communism.
The questions the daughter asks her mother about that system are important:
Did you ever doubt it, mother? Or only when you experienced it yourself?
How does a mother who served as a prosecutor feel as she watches her four children go through hell?
For the answers, you have to read the book...
But what remained in my throat, along with the tears, was the "gateway" to freedom.
The years 1990–1992… the hopes, dreams, desires that hundreds, thousands of Albanians had, who were impatiently waiting for the end of that road to come…
That the sun would rise again, even for them.
Freedom came.
But with its dramas.
The reception was not what was expected.
The challenges were great, but with freedom came disappointment...
Even today, after more than three decades, that period has been "suppressed", as if it had never existed.
The power was stronger than the pain of each of those who experienced dehumanization.
No one said a "sorry."
The gate of freedom came at a high price.
Many of them found freedom not in their own country, but far, far away, as if to say that healing does not come to the place of suffering.
Over the years, I have met quite a few survivors.
Which, surprisingly, seems to be more burdened by the disappointment they felt after opening the door to freedom, than the inhumane suffering they went through in exile and imprisonment.
Because, as a friend told me one day, quoting a perfectly true saying:
"A man accepts to be humiliated equally, but never to be respected equally..."
The dictatorship for 45 years humiliated everyone in this country.
But in freedom, we didn't know how to respect... the pain, the suffering, the drama of everyone.
On the contrary, we competed: who suffered the most?
In a world and time that resembled a typhoon, taking what it encountered and leaving behind only destruction...
To this day, we don't talk about what happened, but instead mend our still bleeding hearts with lies and hypocrisy. (A2 Televizion)
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MUND TE LEXONI GJITHASHTU
