The book "Internment Camps in the Shadow of Tomorr" is promoted/Berisha: Whoever does not know the barbarities of the internment camps will never know the country

2025-01-15 21:01:00, Politikë CNA

The book "Internment Camps in the Shadow of Tomorr" is

The Chairman of the Democratic Party, Sali Berisha, this Wednesday afternoon participated in the promotion ceremony of Simon Mirakaj's book entitled "Internment Camps in the Shadow of Tomorr".

In his speech, the leader of the Democratic Party said that this book is a great contribution to the knowledge of this ordeal and is now ranked alongside other masterpieces in the "Live to Tell" series and shows Albanians the ordeal of internment in concentration camps that aimed to exterminate the people who entered them.

"Enver Hoxha reproduced Nazi concentration camps in Albania. Concentration camps had one main feature, extermination. Those camps were supposed to exterminate the people who were put in them.

Enver Hoxha did not hide this. In the only time he was honest, he called them concentration camps, and the UN, with the direct involvement of the British Secretary of State, has resolutions on concentration camps in Albania.

Camps in which people were buried alive.

Camps in which they spared nothing to subvert their mission of extermination.

These camps were set up from Kamza, Lezha to the south. But Vloçishti and Tepelena were the two most cruel.

As inhumane as the barbarity in these camps is, so magnificent is the resistance of those interned in these camps, of those men and women who did everything to preserve their dignity.

To preserve the dignity of their family.

This book by Simon Miraka, from the series 'Live to Tell', is a great contribution to the knowledge of this past. It now ranks alongside other masterpieces such as Fatbardha Saraçi's trilogy, a true apotheosis dedicated to Albanian women.

There is no other work in literature like it, which celebrates the resistance of Albanian mothers and women in these camps.

Simon has described this ordeal with great truth.

This ordeal is described in other works by a series of personalities who suffered.

But this literature also filled, or erected, a monument that did not exist in our literature.

Therefore, we should all be infinitely grateful to Simon, Pjetër Arbon, Maks Velo, Kasoruho, Fatos Lubonja, Fatbardha Saraçi and many others, who erected this monument.

"If socialist literature was a monument of deception, of falsification, of glorification of evil, this literature is the literature that teaches Albanians about the ordeal they experienced like no other nation in Europe after the war ," Berisha said.

The chief opposition leader said that the Albanian people are not where they should be with their knowledge of the past and that this literature is not on the pedestal it deserves and called for reading works on the subject of internment and the dictatorship period in order to have a better vision for the future.

"Friends, we have a fundamental psychological problem and of course it should be philosophers and historians who should provide answers.

What is this problem? This problem is that the first, this chapter, this story, this literature, is not on the pedestal it deserves even today...

One thing none of us should forget is that everything in '44-'45 started with speech. It started with free speech and then spread to other freedoms.

I hope and wish that these works be read as widely as possible.

Let no one forget that without knowing the literature of the resistance and human dignity of the Albanians, and their barbarity in the concentration camps, they will never know their own country.

And there can never be a clear vision for the future of this country.

Once again, boundless gratitude for this work to you, Simon, and to all those who built a magnificent monument to the truths of Albanian society under the totalitarian regime," Berisha concluded his speech./ CNA