After the liberation of Yugoslavia from Nazi occupation in the fall of 1944, Marshal Tito called for a levée en masse to break the Wehrmacht line on the Syrmian front and conquer the Italian city of Trieste. As thousands of men were forcibly recruited from across the country, Albanians from Kosovo were sent to the front in a tragic march that left behind scores of sick and wounded to die. On March 30, 1945, when the unarmed Albanian recruits arrived in the town of Tivari [Bar] on the Adriatic coast, Montenegrin partisans killed hundreds of them.
This book is a visual history of that massacre, a history which has been deeply buried in archives, suppressed, neglected or manipulated by historians, though never forgotten so much as silenced. We use the voices of Shaban Pajaziti and other recruits from Çubrel (Skenderaj), who survived to tell their stories. Archival and other written sources provide additional important but conflicting documentary evidence, and are a stark reminder that official history is never complete without the testimonies of participants.
Authors: Anna Di Lellio and Dardan Luta
Published by Oral History Initiative, 2019
The book launch is on Tuesday, March 19, 7PM at dit’ e nat’ bookstore in Pristina.