Mejreme Shema

Pristina | Date: July 18, 2023 | Duration: 163 minutes

A stroke of luck in misfortune, some of my brother’s classmates from the Normale school came with a flag from the city. They said, ‘Sahit, they have arrested Femi Pushkolli, they have arrested this professor, this one, and this one too,’ and he asked, ‘What happened? How?’ They said, ‘They said they were arrested, we need to go and free them.’ ‘Let’s go.’ Now, we who were at the end, now we came out first. ‘Where are we going?’ ‘We’re going to free them.’ We left the faculty and set off.

We arrived at the Grand [Hotel] there, so, deeper at the plateau. […] We stopped there because the army and the police had formed a cordon. If you tried to go, you’d be walking into fire. ‘Stop,’ we stood still, they stood still, we stood still. They started shooting from the tall buildings that were there. So we reached a fire station store, which is no longer there, but it was there at the time. Beyond that, you couldn’t go any further. ‘Don’t even think about it because they will shoot for sure.’ There’s no way they would let you go to jail.

We stopped there. They started throwing flowerpots and everything from above, even shooting with guns. While I was holding the flag and talking to my brother, I suddenly felt a kind of heat here {gestures to the back of her head} and thought, something is making me feel hot, you know. To keep from falling, I leaned the flagpole on the ground. […] Someone asked, ‘Do you want to go to the hospital?’ I worked in a hospital, I said, ‘No, I’m not going tonight because I don’t know what they might do to me.’


Anita Susuri (Interviewer), Latra Demaçi (Interviewer), Ana Morina (Camera)

Mejreme Shema was born in 1945 in Leletiq, Municipality of Lipjan. She graduated from the Faculty of English Language in 1969 and also studied at the Department of Albanian Language and Literature from 1970 to 1972. She began working as a teacher in 1979. She is now retired and lives with her family in Pristina.