Odyssey of Innocence: Lived Novel

By Lek Pervizi

“...And after 47 years of suffering and tribulations, the new Ulysses of the twentieth century, comes to hug his dear Penelope ...”
This is the unlikely and incredible story of Valentine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781665582896

Lek Pervizi

Lek Pervizi, wa born 1929 in Albania, in a noble family. He followed his studies in Italy, Rome, until 1944, when he and his family suffered under the communist dictatorship for 46 years. Painter, poet and writer, forbidden to any free creativity. In prisons and deportation camps of the dictatorship together with his older brother Valentine. Regained his freedom in Belgium, he devoted himself to literature and wrote several works. Then he writes the inconceivable story of Valetine. True hero and true Ulysses of the twentieth century. Lek is also known as the painter of the death camps, for his drawings made in prison. Drawings that made known the tragic situation of the extermination laggers of the dictatorship. Even today, at the age of 91, he continues write his memories of a life broken by the ferocity of a totalitarian system.

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Copyright © 2020 Lek Pervizi. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/26/2020

ISBN: 978-1-6655-8288-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-8287-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-8289-6 (e)

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CONTENTS

Preface

Birthplace

Early years

Schools and other events

Rome Military School on April 7, 1939

Modena Military Academy

Battle of Tivoli September 8-15 1943.

Aerial bombardments

Travel without return

Arrival at Homeland

Arrest and imprisonment

A brave man

Serious events

Tragic facts

Prek Cali Hero of Great Moutains

The Beautiful and the Beast

A mysterious anonymous man

Heroism in prison

From one prison to another

A cunning old man

The old prison

A really special trial

Llesh Marashi Hero e Martyr

A painful separation from Gory

A light of hope

Finally in court

Internment in Berat

A retrospective look

Brothers and other elaborations

Sudden release

Broken hopes

From the pan to the fire

The camp of Tepelena

Camp of Kuç of Vlora

Endless waiting

Serious disease and political changes

Ulysses arrives in Ithaca

After 47 years in the Free World

To my brother Valentine,

true Hero and Martyr of

freedom and democracies

Ulysses of 20th Century.

"…Libertà vo‘ cercando, ch’è si‘ cara,

che solo sa chi per lei vita sofferse…."

Dante

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Valentine With his wife, Gorizia Manini

in Bologna, 1942

PREFACE

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It is not so easy to write about a family member, because you think that the story can be conditioned by deep feelings of love and be called one-sided, presenting only the good sides, the degree of praise and exaltation of the person we are talking about. This is how readers can judge, and I cannot take that thought out of their minds, as long as the person to whom I have dedicated this book is my brother.

But no one else could write about Valentine, because he did not save alive any of the friends and acquaintances who have known him since school and throughout the course of his life. No one can present him in the true light of his life and activity, as free or as condemned by that great oppressive force, which transcended the limits of reason and crossed into those of absurdity, denial and cruelty, anti-human and anti-Albanian scale, such as the communist dictatorship in Albania. For a social, ideological or political system to be called anti-human, it undoubtedly contains the exercise of violence where terror reigns with murder, torture, imprisonment, extermination camps, internment and savage persecution, worthy of being defined as acts which can be committed only by those who became criminals and executioners of the peoples. Specifically, in Albania, starting from November 1944 until 1990, with the fall of the dictatorship, a bloody regime was established, one of the most horrible. Man managed to be valued less than an animal or work tool, almost like a thread of grass, which could be trampled or mowed without any remorse. This dictatorship, created, nurtured and packed with Marxist-Leninist ideology (while it was completely Stalinist) was implemented with great zeal by the Albanian Communist Party and its leadership. Throughout the rule of that dictatorship, serious crimes were committed against the people themselves and against the Albanian brothers and sisters themselves. That is why it is called anti-Albanian because it gave indisputable evidence in this regard, and it is called and is nhuman, because it violated the most basic human rights and freedoms, which the civilized world had raised to the highest level of respect and protection, sanctioned by the proclamation of Universal Human Rights. The communist dictatorship in Albania, on the other hand, became more savage, bloodthirsty and executioner, connected with the Slavic communist ideology, foreign and hostile, an ideology that spread from the two main centres of communism in Europe, such as the Soviet Union with Moscow and Yugoslavia with Belgrade, ruled by Stalin, this monster of crime, and Tito, this anti-Albanian, conspired respectively. These unscrupulous dictators had drawn up plans for the extermination of the Albanian race, as a people and as a nation, after finding such weak and characterless people, without morals and without feelings of patriotism, as the Albanian communists, who agreed to implement the directives of to the Russo-Yugoslavs, to annihilate their people, state and nation only to gain and preserve their cults and privileges. For this reason, a general terror was carried out, savage and bloody, to eliminate the entire patriotic and intellectual layer that had been dedicated to the creation of the first Albanian legal state in our history. To lead it towards the development of progress alongside other civilized peoples of European countries and America. This orientation did not suit Stalin’s evil plans, which, under the banner of communism, sought to create the great Pan-Slavic Empire, from Siberia to the Atlantic. Initially, he extended this empire to Berlin and the Balkans, engulfing Eastern Europe, which included the entire Balkans, including Albania, except Greece, which escaped the intervention of the wise Englishman, Churchill. That of Stalin, was a monstrous idea, which contained in itself the commission of the most heinous crimes, a monstrous genocide of oppressed peoples that had never been experienced in the history of mankind, because millions and millions of innocent human beings disappeared, as if they were grass to be mowed and not creatures that God had obtained in His image. The facts now give us reasons, because they counted over 100 million victims of communism, including those thousands of Albania, which the communist dictatorship wiped out for the sake of of Stalinist internationalism. Crimes such as those of Nazism, but also bigger. Was said many times «Vae victis! »(Woe to the able). Germany lost the war and all the crimes and atrocities were blamed on it, even those carried out by Stalin’s communist hordes together with his friends and sons. Convincing evidence of the Katyn massacres, which were blamed on the Germans and which turned out to have been committed by the Soviets on Stalin’s orders. Not to mention the massacres in Ukraine and the Baltic states carried out by the retreating Russians and when they returned there, which they had also blamed on the Germans. This preface took this inevitable direction, because the tongue goes where it hurts. No matter how we behave and twist in the treatment of our problems, personal, family and social, they always connected with the Albanian issue. All the more so when these problems were accompanied by a series of negative manifestations that transcend the human reason and worldview of the Albanians for life, patriotism, politics, freedom, democracy, state, unity of the nation and the future towards the progress of civilization. But the solution to these problems could not be carried out by a regime and a system that denied and suppressed all human rights and freedoms, with the insane claim of creating a new world and a new man, overthrow the old world together with the people who belonged to it, which meant the discourse of total crime and terror. Valentine was born and raised in a patriotic environment, where in every inch of the earth, in every stone and in every oak, the glorious history of the nation spoke, as well as we were educated and formed in the best European schools, where he graduated from the Military Academy., was already ready to serve the homeland with dignity. After 15 years of schooling, and an officer with combat experience, he decided to return to his native lands, and in October 1944 he was in Albania, Shkoder, with his Italian wife. In December of the same year, you were arrested, imprisoned and interned forever, without time to commit a crime, but only for the name, as the son of Prenk Pervizi. This was the expectation that the communist state gave to the sons of Albania, because Valentine was not the only one. There were others, who, for the sake of the homeland and to serve it, went down to their native land, and instead of being welcomed and grateful, they found handcuffs and prisons, and many left their lives under the volleys of the firing squads. Today their graves were not found. This is where it comes out, along with the anti-human action and attitude and the anti-Albanian behavior of the communist dictatorship. You usually write and talk about figures who have achieved great success, but also about those who have committed horrific criminal acts against humanity. Not to mention those who, on the superficial aspect, have not committed sensational acts, whether good or bad. With this writing, not as a brother but as an experience and follower of his whole life, I can say that we are dealing with a man with rare qualities, who gave him the opportunity to overcome the invincible and proud, all the humiliations, tortures, the punishments and torments that the communist dictatorship inflicted on him to humiliate him. He faced this anti-human and anti-Albanian treatment with a great spiritual endurance, reinforced by the strong foundations of the best Albanian culture and traditions, which in him were raised in virtues, such as manliness, faith, bravery, the spirit of sacrifice., other determination. These virtues clothed him with the traits of a hero in the eyes of his accomplices, especially the young, who took him as an example to follow, in those extremely difficult and sad conditions, where it took great strength of character to face them. Without being harmed and without surrendering. I myself know such young people who were trained in those impossible conditions to have a «teacher» and a symbol of Valentine. I myself took the example of him to overcome many difficulties, where in addition to personal endurance, the experience of people like him was needed to get on the horse and have the ability to become invincible in every circumstance and situation in the conditions of exercise. of criminal violence by a murderous and cruel power, such as the Albanian communist power of the Stalinist model.

This silent hero was invincible, because, although we were handcuffed like Prometheus behind the rock (our eternal hero), by an oppressive and executioner regime, he was one of those who held high the torch of patriotism, culture, traditions and of the best virtues, with courage and inexhaustible hope of the final victory of good over evil, of light over the darkness of the triumph of freedom over an inhuman dictatorship, which in our case was also anti-Albanian. But this man was, as we said, the most prominent figure of innocence, which was suddenly found like a lamb at the spring, when he came before the devouring wolf. Although he escaped death in those horrible circumstances of endless torment and torment, the consequences cut short his life the moment he gained that freedom for which he suffered. His story was a real tragedy, from the fact that he came to Albania together with the Italian woman, from whom he was immediately separated and arrested and imprisoned, in vain, except for the name, as the son of Prenk Pervizi. A violent split that would last 47 years. It can be called a victim, among thousands of others, but for the special circumstances that involve it, without being at all present in the Albanian context in the events and turmoil of that end of 1944, it deserves to be defined as a slaughter of innocence. It was precisely the innocence that was condemned by the communist dictatorship in Albania, and together with it, an army of our innocents, where neither the children in the cradle, the highest symbols of innocence, nor this brother of mine, who came to the country of himself, to serve them with devotion, and they flattened him for 47 years inside a monstrous tomb, from which hardly anyone survived. His story is an Odyssey more than twice the age of Homer’s Ulysses. If King of Ithaca returned after 20 years to his faithful Penelope, it took Valentine 47 years to reunite with his wife, who, as a young Penelope, had longed for him, had waited for him, though he lived in good condition, passed it to her for a long time, had waited for her, though she lived in good conditions, among the goodness. Not by weaving and weaving a fabric of yarn, but an imaginary fabric weaving with the threads of sad thoughts that gripped it. Valentine’s odyssey was not the desolation through the storms of the sea, but through the storms of suffering, the waters of terror and torment, crashed 47 years in a row in prisons and internment camps, from which he barely escaped to reach an Ithaca, not like that of Ulysses but symbolically indeed an Ithaca where he would one day join his Penelope who had waited so long.

BIRTHPLACE

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When it enters Skuraj and crosses the Urdhaza stream, the mountain climb begins on the hill where the Lekbibajs live. Passes in turn the three mills known as Gjin Pjetri, which were built one after the other. He also passes the two-stores tower of Ndrec Pjetri, Gjin’s younger brother, and then encounters a rocky strip on which a complex of three stone buildings rises, the historic towers known as the towers of Gjin Pjetër Pervizi of Skuraj, the leader of the Kurbin uprising . These buildings dominate the entire valley formed by the confluence of the Mat and Fan rivers (branches of Mat), up to Milot. It is almost a fortified fortress that protects the country from the expeditions of the invading foreign armies, which could penetrate from that gorge until they meet the wall of the mountains of Skuraj, where the towers mentioned above were erected. The towers that had always been burnt down by foreign invaders, mainly Turks, were rebuilt. These stone buildings that stood on this rocky hill had recently been burned twice in a row by the Turkish hordes, in 1881 and 1911. This tribe of stubborn Albanians had rebuilt them even better than the first. From the west, therefore, stretched the valley of the river Mat, while from the east, the massif of Skuraj mountains rose, where the Dry Mountain dominated, crowned by the top of Lartish. Further on, the Trodhna e Pëshkashit rose, all the pine forests. From the south stretched the mountain ranges of Skanderbeg, which had its origin in Mount Skuraj. To the north rose the rocky mountain of Dërven, which included Ferrë-Skuraj and Shkopet, where the ruins of an old castle could be seen, that of Pervizi the Great of Skuraj, a brave prince and commander who fought against the Turkish army in those distant times. (The name of the Perviz tribe came from a deep time, associated with ancient events and wars lost in the space of time and remained as a vague memory in the minds of the inhabitants). There, between Shkopet and the hill of Lekbibaj, a narrow canyon was formed that ended in the Gorge of Mat, from where with the momentum of