This time we talked with Gjergj Lekaj about one of the characters of our democracy martyrs fallen in the hands of communists; Erefili Bezhani, the first Albanian lawyer, graduated in France. Although already in the land of opportunities and married to a French citizen, she left the life she had built with hard work there to return to her homeland, at the time when the dictatorship of the communists was being installed in Albania.
She was arrested and sentenced because she joined the anti-communist movement as part of the group of deputies, otherwise called “The Trial of the Deputies (1947)”, a wicked fabrication of the communists with the aim of eliminating the intellectual elite, potential political opponents of Hoxha that aspired for an Albania with democratic ideals and a system of party pluralism.
Many were executed and others like Erefili were sentenced to 20 years in the infamous Burrell prison as one of the first girls/women imprisoned and tortured inhumanely by the dictator’s loyal executioners. After many vicissitudes, she was released but never allowed to practice her profession again, forcing her to survive only as a sweeper on the streets of Tirana. She became seriously ill with an ulcer and in the middle of a surgical operation that should have saved her life, she closed her eyes forever.
These lines represent a very limited biographic summary of a political activist who gave her life for the ideal of her cause, a pro-Western Albania. And like everything that starts on the wrong foot, it continues on the wrong foot. Albania adopted the perverted system of communism, where human life was reduced, dehumanized and transformed into an amorphous mass of flesh and limbs, without senses!
The Albanian communists massacred, eliminated, imprisoned and exiled every intelligent and sharp conscience with capability to reflect and thirst for knowledge and freedom. Those who were spared from execution, were “buried” forever in the gulags (political prisons) of the tortures of the perverted minds of the Albanian reds, until they lost their minds from the tortures; many others were left with no physical strength and will to live, from the weight of years, forgotten by life, the universe, God, Karma!
We asked the question “where is the revolt and rebellion for all the enlightened compatriots who gave their lives for a free Albania and a people who are masters of their own fates?” Citizens, especially the youth, should know how to resist and defend the common/mutual in the face of oppression, despotic rule, theft of the public, camouflage advertisements and above all apathy and indifference!
Join us for a valuable conversation in our sessions of remembering the great Albanians who fell from the atrocities of communism! Let’s get things moving, starting with raising awareness about our miswritten history in an important segment of it.
