In the Circles of Hell: Stories from Victims of Communist Dictatorship

By Lek Pervizi

Lek Pervizi, already known as a painter, poet and writer, with this new work completes the trilogy of three books, which include the entire period of condemnations and sufferings under the communist dictatorship in Albania. By now we know that that dictatorship, although in a small country, like Albania, was the most ferocious and criminal of the other Communist countries, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Such fields and prisons in miserable conditions do not exist in these countries. Finally, the work of Lek Pervizi also appears as a precious document to be taken into consideration by scholars and historians, in order to know in depth how bad and horrendous communism was.

Certainly including all the terrible totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century. The reader of the free and civilized world, no doubt, will be shocked and surprised that such misdeeds occurred in a small country like Albania in peacetime. To underline the simple style, characteristic of the writer, to make reading easy and pleasant. We can hope that his work is valued and to be rewarded by high cultural institutions.

Knowing evil and its disastrous consequences, means knowing how to rightly evaluate and build in the future well-being.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665585590

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.

Book preview

© 2021 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  02/05/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-8558-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-8557-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-8559-0 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

Dead and alive

Bread’s ballad

The weight of the name

The last farewell to life

Requescat in pace

Fight with monster

The story of Martha

A vile sacrifice

Deportations

A tragic-comic farce

Man proposes and god disposes

Dedicated all those,

innoccent viktims

who sacrificed their lives,

who sacrificed everything,

for the high ideals

of humanity

heroes and martyrs

of freedom of democracy

Freedom I go to seek, which is so precious,that only those who have suffered for it, knows its value ...

DANTE, Hell, song III.

image1.jpg

Self portrait, 1957.

Preface

Lek charged me with the difficult task of writing the preface to his latest work: The Circles of Hell. I was first surprised at the consideration that this great gentleman offered me by asking me this. I have long wondered if the kid that I could be able to introduce the work of a monument like this. I know the work of Solzhenitsyn, Primo Levi then that of my friend, mentor, adopted uncle Lek Pervizi. I thought I wasn’t up to it, that I wasn’t someone important enough to pretend to do it but Lek insisted that I be the one to do it. My friendship with Lek goes back several years. The coffees we drank on Sunday afternoons in the Portuguese bar near the Pervizi family home opened up an unknown world to me. Day after day, discussion after discussion, I realized the heroic value of the story of this eternal freedom fighter. I became aware of the importance of knowing and talking about this contemporary history about which we speak so little. Talk about our heroes in spite of themselves, who for 47 years endured the worst treatment, imprisonment, torture with the only leitmotif: love and hope that one day freedom would be offered to them and their families. We too often speak of the artist without really knowing what it is. When I first met Lek, I wandered around in search of a true definition of the artist. The artist-craftsman, the resistant artist, the artist who gives up his glory for his struggle and for his survival, the artist who creates against all odds? And then I got to know the poet, who, for forty years, wrote his poems in the notebook of his memory so as not to leave traces that could be fatal for him and his family. The artist who, despite the dictatorship, managed to paint in his 12 m2 cell, a canvas of resistance covering the entire wall of his home representing the struggle of a battle from another time but metaphorically he painted day by day and this for 20 years, their daily struggle against the dictatorship. This painting forgot no one, neither the relatives of Lek who died in the hell of these camps, nor his wife Beba, an explosion of energy and life, who with its representation unknowingly became the myth of the hero artist, the muse of a poet prisoner in love and innocent. The woman who did not hesitate to respond to the brigadiers of the regime by singing. Beba the rebellious, Beba the loving, Beba the faithful woman at the risk of her life, dared to raise her head to sing Verdi in the face of the soldiers of the regime to tell them that even if her freedom would be only a song, it would exist and it will steadfastly persist. Lek and his wife were blessed with unique and exceptional strength. The strength of hope for two and the proof that love saves everything as long as faith exists.

At sixteen, Beba had the opportunity to leave the camps with his mother and brother. She refused and tore the face of the security officer to let him pass to freedom. She chose an internship life for the man she loved. For this son of a general condemned to life because of his birth, for this extraordinary artist who by the greatest of miracles managed to remain the child he was when he entered the circles of hell at 15 years old .

I think Lek’s work is inseparable from Beba’s love. Everything Lek builds even in the darkest and most Dantesque periods of its history exudes the invincibility of his faith in love. At the same time as Lek, the innocent con man, was building his unique and incredible work, he was going through hell. The Charon he could meet in his wildest dreams could only lead him to hell and yet Lek only wrote and painted the hope of a humanity washed of its sins. Throughout his life and his journey, Lek has built his work as redemption of humanity. From the dark camps of Tepelenë and the middle-aged prisons of Porto Palermo, arguably the worst of the Stalinist regime, Lek has produced a luminous, militant and confusing work. A work of peace and humility. A work without any desire for revenge but only for justice. A universal work that goes beyond the artist’s codes, a work that has become a peaceful weapon and nourishment for the survivor, a modest work of light in total darkness. A work that gives us, future generations, emerging future, the rarest and most improbable symbol that only the spirit exceeds everything, that only love supports everything, that only hope wins over the worst cruelty . During these years, I was preparing a film with a former robber, guilty of murder that spent fifteen years in prison, guilty. When I introduced Lek to him, he was like a child. His knowledge of the prison grounds and the story he heard made him waver. So there are men like that, he told me, taken aback and admiringly. One day, while I was at Lek’s and Beba prepared me a good Albanian coffee accompanied by the traditional glass of raki, Lek took me out of his cupboard a small statuette. A statuette made from the roots of a wood used for making pipes. A wood collected from forced labour camps that Lek transformed into a sculpture. It represents a man fighting a dragon, a man fighting the dictatorship. If humans could give an artistic identity card I think this work would be Lek’s universal passport. Like a passport, it fits in a pocket. Like a passport, it contains the fingerprints of the owner and more than a piece of paper, it contains the history of the man. Lek decided to take me under his wing. Until today, I do not know the reason. Why me? Why did you agree for the first time to redo the road to all its prisons in Albania with me? Why at 83, at the risk of his life, he insisted so much on climbing the mountains of his native region on mules in search of the fortress of his ancestors built to defend the region against barbarian assailants? Why has he fought so hard to deliver me the testimony of his life as a timeless testament of an 83-year-old kid who feels the end is approaching and who must quickly leave all he has lived. Why was I chosen to receive his ultimate urgency: that of witnessing, that of building history and rebuilding the future? Through the desire that I could perceive from Lek, his greatest desire is not so much to describe hell even if this work is called the circles of hell, in my opinion his strongest intention is to scream this cry of love which was his and transmit to the following generations the importance and the need to know. Not in a romantic theory of artist Beba but in a frantic struggle against death, ignorance, ease, in a struggle which gives the most beautiful definition of the role of the artist. In the circles of hell is a sober work of a humble hero who wishes to express himself in French as a thank you for the language of the country which gave him exile. The story is tragic as the reality was. It crosses people’s minds like the diary of a man who agreed to be naked despite his kingly attire. After addressing each of you, I would like to speak to my friend and ask him to live another 83 years. Perhaps more for us than for him, but because we need a testimony like this to know and learn about life, the real one. The one that will build our collective history tomorrow.

- I am speaking to a resistance fighter for life, a poetic fighter for freedom.

- I am speaking to a painter who shows us his vision of the world without ever eclipsing that of the other

- I am addressing the poet who will have tried, sometimes to understand the ballad of the rose, sometimes to imagine where a petal could be, pushed by the wind, sometimes to speak of those circles of hell that so few of us know.

- I am addressing rose petals; orphans and lonely, who, bruised by the cruelty of the wind, finds himself taken to unknown horizons. To those, moreover, I ask them how was this meeting with the Poet who spoke so well of them;

- I am speaking to man, the one who guides me by his testimony life, the one who teaches me to be aware and to appreciate what I have. The one who, after more than eighty springs, smiles like a child discovering the beauty of this world. This man is inscribed for me in the legendary book of the history of mankind: that of men who after having lived through hell gives us such a message of love and hope.

- I’m talking to a friend, maybe it may seem strange to you that the old kid that I am befriended this young monument of our history. too bad!

- I turn to the witness of a century to ask him if our world is so bad that we tell us. And to thank him for his life struggle

- Finally, I address myself to my friend’s dear wife to thank her for having been the Beba who accompanied and supported the husband, the father, the friend, the poet, the resistance fighter. To quote Lek, I wish that our souls would never be extinguished again in the dark arms of sidereal nights where there are no roses to pick From now on, just like my friend who spent more than forty years, deprived of all expression, in camps or prisons, I will try to look at the sun as love, light as affection and heat as tenderness (from the poem "Ballade of the Rose.

So the next time I come to Lek and Beba’s family home; on the road I could pick up beautiful roses with their frail stems and all their petals ... magnificent rose petals and in my bag, there will be an insulated pocket where I would keep preciously the circles of hell as for never forget. I would think of the roses of hope and love but I will not stop fighting to leave an eternal place for those who have gone through hell, who have come out of it and who have decided to tell it as if to remind us of all that nothing is ever acquired and that living in freedom is the most beautiful thing.

Today, when I see Lek, I realize the grace that some heroes can achieve. I