…I witnessed when the Jews were being taken that night, when they gathered them, because I was at home. A paternal uncle of mine came every Monday for Tuesday’s market day, on Wednesday morning he would leave for Gjakova. Also, the paternal uncle was there that night when suddenly the door, we had a door with a hammer knocker, they came and knocked hard, dd, dd, dd {onomatopoetic} to this day I can’t forget it. Then, yes, bim… bom, bom bom {onomatopoetic} they knocked the door down and they entered.

When they entered the corridor, my paternal uncle went outside, they told him, “Go inside!” In fact, they were Albanian SS, the [Skanderbeg] regiment… They took all the Jews, the house was left empty, they were in their pajamas and this is how they took them. We were speechless, it was horrifying.

My family is a mixed family. My dad died Muslim and because he fasted during Ramadan he was unlisted from the party. Whilst my mom is an Albanian Jew. In our family we were brought up with all traditional religions. Most of us, kids, are baptized. So we are an interesting mix, I would say, of different cultures. Because in the end religion is something you do just for yourself and not for others. […] To grow up in an environment where your cousins have different religious belonging, and you have the possibility to make a different choice that is… It wasn’t well received at the time. […] I remember when we had different holidays, especially Eid Mubarak, the entire neighborhood made baklava, my mom also made baklava. Other holidays came, my mom prepared a more special food, but she was subtle, so it was interesting. What I remember are September’s feasts, the feast of baking bread and cooking wheat and grape and all that. That’s when it started getting interesting, ‘Ah the grandparents are coming…’ and it was interesting. It was later that we understood it was a different tradition.

Because Fadil [Hoxha] said, ‘We also have to give something. When the sofra is set, we have to place something on the table. Whose is this? It will receive justice. We in Kosovo are few in the world, but an egg, that egg will receive justice. […] We are fighting together, Serbs, Albanians, to remove fascism and the occupier. When the war is over we will be, everyone will receive what they deserve. We will be with Tirana, Tirana will work with whom they wish. We fought for this, we knew this, Kosovo Communists knew that we will work with Tirana, not with Belgrade.’ […] ‘When the war is over everyone will be rewarded. We, Kosovo, an egg, that egg will receive justice. Someone offers a goat, someone a sheep, someone a bull.’ ‘But we are few, bre.’ ‘That indeed will receive justice.’ But we never received it, from ‘48 on.

The guy from Gllabar wanted to drink water there. Then the officer, the stražar, hit him with the dimgjik [butt] of the gun, and he turns the gun to him, he turns the gun to him and shoots the stražar to death. Then his friends caught the guy from Gllabar and took the gun from him […] The officer was just cleaning his sweats when he said, ‘Deset za njega [Ten for him], ten for him, there will be a shot for the one who killed him, he was a partisan from ‘41.’ As the four of them were coming in a line, he said ‘Još deset [Ten more], ten more,’ he said, ‘more.’ He caught him and they left, they left, they became ten people, 19 people, he caught me as well, but thank God this crossed my mind, one of my friends had his rucksack, he was just two meters far from us, and to me it sounded like he wanted me as well, and I stood up, I took my rucksack and turned around, I joined them and sat down. 19 went. They took 19 of them.

However, I went to my neighbor’s, my neighbor’s son was four or five years older than I was. ‘Come,’ he says, ‘let’s go and hide.’ Where should we hide? They owned horses. Because of the horses, they had grass sheds, what do they call it, hay, so he says, ‘Come, let’s climb on the hay shed, and crawl inside.’ ‘Okay!’  [I said], being younger than he was.  My mother didn’t know, nobody knew. We got up and climbed into the hay. He went to a corner of that room, removed some grass and entered the hole, just like that, he hid on his feet, he put the grass on his head. […]  I couldn’t do what he did since I was younger. I gathered some hay and spread it, I lied down, covered my head with hay, and my feet were outside. When they entered to search for someone, they didn’t find anyone in the hay shed. They found me, and drag me by my feet. They took me, got me out of there and took me to the yard, … not the yard, the street. They shot a lot of people by the stream. There were seven or eight old people from my neighborhood tied up, I knew them because they were from my neighborhood. They tied me with those old people, to shoot me. Three people were guarding us with some kind of Russian automatics… machine guns that can stand on the ground on three legs. And they were armed up to their teeth. […] They killed what they could, so it was our turn to be killed. However, behind our tied up backs, Shaban Haxhia’s partisans were approaching  the bridge on that stream. They were armed. ‘Don’t move, don’t’ move, don’t move!’ They yelled. They raised their hands. ‘Don’t move, don’t move!’ They raised their hands. We turned to see [them] and they had the five-pointed star, how could we trust them. But anyway, because they spoke Albanian, we had some hope. When they came closer, ‘Who are these?’ ‘Enemies,’ they called them, ‘neprijatelj, enemies, enemies.’ […] He hit me on my arm and got me up, since in my condition I was weaker. He got me up a bit and said, ‘Is this child  an enemy too?’ He had a gun in his hand, he killed the three of them without a word, those who were waiting for us.