[The Trepça technical school] started the school year ‘94–‘95 in a private house in the Bajr neighborhood, and that’s when the police intervened…It was the 15th of December. It was a cold day, a day with thick fog, very thick fog. While coming to school, the students noticed the police circling around. That house had a yard surrounded by a wall, we came out and closed the gate… But they climbed the wall, entered the yard, and went straight into the classrooms… I remember that they mistreated me in front of the students…Whatever they found on the desks, they threw into the stove, those were iron stoves, and they burned it. They made the students write their symbols on the board. And then, at some point, they let them go. I was savagely mistreated in the hallway… They destroyed the classrooms, they even knocked over the stoves, stoves that were still lit. Before they let me go, they made me grab the lit stoves, I am telling the truth, until my hands were burned.

At that time, the information office was in the premises of the mosque in Kruma, within the headquarters of the KLA. All those individuals who had either experienced rape by Serbian soldiers and police, or those family members who wanted to reunite with their families, came and presented themselves there, and we, as members of the KLA, helped the population to reunite. One case of particular interest in this regard was when Sadije Morina from Raushiq of Peja, whose child had died, didn’t want to leave it, even dead, to the police. On the other hand, she didn’t want her own family to find out that the child had died, and she kept the dead child for 24 hours, before reaching Durrës, giving him the bottle, and the bottle froze in his mouth, because when a person dies, they stiffen, and the bottle froze…When she crossed the border, the bottle, with the milk inside, was in the closed mouth of the dead child, and another woman approached [Sadije] at Qafa e Prushit, where the Albanian military forces, who were helping those crossing through the mountains, were located, and she said, “Is it possible for you to give me that milk so I can give it to my baby?” She replied, “No, it’s not possible because my child has died and I cannot take out the bottle.” I wrote the novella The Milk of Death based on this interviewed.

It’s interesting, to be honest, when both teachers and students were mistreated and [the police] would actually leave, we used to think that the next day, not a single student would show up. But, strangely enough, by the grace of God, everyone was there, no absences. The teachers, the students… of course, I can speak for myself, but also for others, it was enough just to know they were there. And they were close to us, meaning they were by our side. Then we’d calm down and continue the lessons.

 

[…] I mean, all the students were at school. The bell rang, it was time. Strangely, at the exact minute the bell rang, within three minutes, the entire school was surrounded. Luckily, we tried to stay calm and watched from the windows how they were acting and what was awaiting us, obviously. First, they took us to the third floor, or the second, I’m not sure, but the main thing is they formed two police cordons. Fortunately, the students weren’t mistreated. And among the 30 or 40 of us teachers, it was Professor Muharrem Peci who suffered the worst, he had very serious injuries.

We had a front-line house in Lower Klina because we couldn’t use the high school in Skenderaj, since it was the main center here. I later went around schools as an advisor, since those were established a bit later. We held competitions, we organized quizzes, and we even won first place in the region. So, normal activities, even though at the end of such events, they would take us to the station, sometimes beat us, mistreat us, but they couldn’t stop us entirely.

On March 27, 1999, at eight in the morning, two Yugoslav military planes struck the neighborhood where we were sheltering with eight cluster bombs, resulting in the martyrdom of a 16-year-old boy and injuries to eight others. On the same day, at 12:00 PM, Serbian media reported the destruction of the Radio Kosova e Lirë broadcasting base, while we aired our program at 4:00 PM, the scheduled time for broadcasting throughout the war. At that time, the Serbian war criminal [Vojislav] Šešelj and several Yugoslav army commanders stated in the media that they would soon have their morning coffee in Berisha, where they also planned to build a football stadium.

In order to survive under conditions of continuous attack, at the beginning of April 1999, we built a well-fortified bunker on a mountain peak, and from the bunker, we broadcasted the daily program, up to 1 hour and 30 minutes per day, during the last three months of the war. The area near the bunker was hit numerous times by enemy fire but was not destroyed.

I was beaten in the Niš Prison, they crushed me, they trampled on me. It wasn’t just that they beat me, there were three supervisors. I was sentenced by [Aleksandar] Ranković because I didn’t stay quiet, even in prison, do you understand? Three of them trampled on me, and I spent months recovering, do you understand? In isolation for 14 months with 200 grams of bread. From 72 kilos, I dropped to 32 kilos. What more can I tell you? A greater punishment… there was no cell light, nothing, no window, no threshold. I could never sleep because in Niš the wind blows, and the Niš Prison is in a place where the wind hits from all sides.

 

[…] My father came to see me. My father was elderly, as I told you, 89 years old. He came to see me. When he saw me at 30 kilos, he almost walked into the path of an oncoming bus. But I had a cousin who was the conductor, and he recognized him and stopped the bus.

There were these tokens, they called them iron tokens, to go get food. With one token, you could get one plate of food. Because of the conditions and the situation in our family, with one token both my sister and I would eat one plate. We waited in line for hours. The line… because there were over 30,000 students at the University of Prishtina.

 

[…] When we got close to getting the food, I overheard some male voices behind me, among them were Bajram Kosumi, Kadri Kryeziu, Jonuz Jonuzi from Drenas, and Ramadan Dobra, who was called that at the time, but now it’s Gashi, he was the chairman. They were saying, ‘Today we have to start the protest.’ I overheard what they were saying, and I was surprised they said that. The second I got close to taking the plate of food, I threw it, there was a Serbian woman and an Albanian woman serving the food. I don’t know, I just left the line, and that group of theirs, Bajram Kosumi, Jonuz, and Kadri, they had already been waiting. We started to flip over all the tables in the cafeteria.

 

I remember Kadri, and I remember Bajram telling me, ‘Run, go to the dorm.’ All the girls were scared and ran, running out the door and down, because we were eating on the second floor. I was the only one left flipping the last table that was there. Even the men and the women were surprised at how I had the courage, why I did it. In some way, it’s really strange that I didn’t feel any fear. Literature had a big influence on me acting that way, as did, of course, the advice of my parents and Xheva’s [Krasniqi Lladrovci] father.