Preface to “Years of My Youth”

— Nexhmije Hoxha —
July 1988

Korça, the beloved city of Comrade Enver Hoxha, in which he spent his youth

The following is the preface to Comrade Enver Hoxha’s book Vite të Rinisë (Years of My Youth) by Comrade Nexhmije Hoxha. It is a book of reminiscences starting from the town of his youth, Korça, to Montpellier where he attended its famous university, Paris where he searched for employment, Brussels where he worked at the Albanian consulate and was involved with the organ of the French Communist Party l’Humanité, and his return to Korça where he became a teacher at the lyceum. In the process of being translated into English for the first time by NEPH, it will relay the youth and coming of age of the Great Marxist-Leninist Comrade Enver Hoxha to the young generations of today.

* * *

“Years of My Youth” follows Comrade Enver Hoxha’s book of memories entitled “Years of My Childhood.” He began to write these notes in 1970, on my request and after many pleadings on my part, because he often talked at length about this phase of his life. On February 8, on my fiftieth birthday, he gave me a part of it, neatly written and accompanied by a letter in which he told me, among other things:

“…You asked me for some memories of my youth. Of course, I couldn’t refuse your request and so I started to scribble down these notes. They are unfinished, but when I have time I will finish them.1 They are only intended for you and our children, …these notes are poorly written, I let my quill run free, without going back to edit or correct…” 

The original letter also included this note:

“All these things that I have written… are of little importance, but you asked for them, so I wrote these events as I remember them, with the impact they had on me then, and with the role they play in my life emphasized. I tried to retrace things as they were, without any exaggeration. It was a difficult task to do. Regardless, if I did exaggerate, these memories would lose all meaning and would not be worthwhile to write down.”

We have chosen to give this second part of his memoirs the title of “Years of My Youth” to follow his previous memoir “Years of My Childhood.” Perhaps Enver would not even have wanted this to be published, for, as he says in the accompanying letter, these notes “are for you only and our children…”

But I have decided to have this book published all the same, remembering that he had also hesitated to publish the first part of his memoirs of his childhood years, but as we now know, their publication gave pleasure to comrades and friends and all those who have read them.

I therefore gathered up the courage to have this published, with authorization from the party as well, finding justification in the passage where he specifies “these are remembrances meant for Nexhmije, my children, and above all, as they are and for what they’re worth, they ultimately belong to my beloved party.”

Above all, I decided to publish these writings because this book is the last in the series of his memoirs. On the commemoration of what would be his eightieth birthday, Enver returns to us young again.

In these recollections, Enver appears to us with changes that unfold from year to year and grow with him. His life became completely different. Instead of the family home and the boarding school he was used to and instead of Gjirokastra, which he knew like the back of his hand, he arrived in Korça, a city beautiful in the summer with its flowers and harsh in its winters under blankets of snow. His pastimes are different, they are no longer children’s games with balls of rags and pebbles, but instead the games and jokes of a young man. No longer do we have the Enver with the patched shoes, with the coarse woolen clothes and trousers that his mother sewed for him, but the pupil Enver, as we called the students of the lyceum2 back home, with shoes and suits made with care by the most appreciated craftsmen of Korça. Now he wore a cap, a scarf, the coat that Korça demanded of him but above all Korça demanded his maturity.

Enver, one must say, cared about his appearance.  The residents of Korça saw this at the time. Later, we were all aware of it. He cared for his belongings. Even when it became possible for him to have a bigger wardrobe, he stuck to the suit that he felt most at ease in and that was the most durable. We imagine his concern and care for his clothing at that time was because he was relatively poor. He himself recalls how difficult it was for him to get even a little money from his father for a coat or a pair of shoes because, as he said, “the poor old man couldn’t afford it.” I found it amusing, hearing him sometimes remark at the sight of a cute sweater worn by one of our sons, remarking, as if with nostalgia, that he would have liked so much to have such a sweater at his age, but that he never had enough money to buy one. In this book he writes: “…some will be able to say: ‘Nobody cares about this! You even talk about buying new rubber-soled shoes!’ And that’s probably true, but today’s young people should know that, for us, buying a pair of new shoes or having a sweater made was an important event in life!”

During these youthful years, he took care of his own personal appearances which did not require expense to the best of his ability: he “ironed” his trousers by putting them under his mattress. In a photo we see that he placed a flower in his buttonhole after a button fell off; when he needed a bow tie he had to borrow one from a friend. “This outfit,” he told me while showing a photo, “was loaned to me by Zihni (a cousin who studied in Vienna). This coat with a high collar which I wore when I was being painted by Vangjush Mio, was a loan from a friend…” He also said “When we had a few pennies to spare we always stopped at the ‘Stamboll’ pastry shop, where we bought slices of cream cake. We went there not because those cakes were good, the triangle pastries of the ‘Koci Bako’ bakery were much better, but because the walls on each side were covered with mirrors, in which we could take a look at our appearances and see if our hair needed to be combed, before continuing to walk around…”

I left these memories as he wrote them, as he wanted to present himself. They are frank, as he was and remained all his life. They are written with transparent truthfulness. Those were the years of his first steps in his life as a revolutionary, when a young man aspires and dreams of a better future for his people and his homeland, but also dreams and lives like any boy of his age: rejoicing in attending such a prestigious school; grieving at being held back from the path in which he believes he can best develop his abilities; laughing and joking with classmates, in class, at school, in the street. A few of his jokes were juvenile, but Enver too was young like everyone else. In his book “Years of my Childhood,” he mentioned certain pranks he and his friends did in class and I managed with great difficulty to get him to delete them from the text, pointing out to him that they were not of any educational use, had no value from a pedagogical point of view. I also argued that the nation’s children could imitate them by pretending that they were pranks that “Uncle Enver” was playing. He laughed so hard he was brought to the verge of tears when he remembered these pranks and told me that I was wrong to edit them out of the book, that the teacher could very well justify the jokes in the students eyes by telling them that at that time there was no Party and no pioneer organization to guide him.

In this book I have not deleted anything, because young people have always made and will make jokes, and we can all understand these jokes have no bad intentions. The duty of every parent and teacher is to advise their children and teach them what is right and what is wrong. The school, on the other hand, has the task of demanding compliance with established regulations. But every parent, every teacher, every principal remembers well the times they were not an “angel” in their youth. We, the older generations must understand the youth, and the better we understand them, the more we will be united with them in our march towards building socialism.

Since the time of the national liberation struggle, since the founding of the communist youth, I have not known any party cadre who has had as much interest in the youth as Enver, who loved and understood them as much as he could. He was open-minded, patient with them, and put great trust in them. During the war, when the youth organization was finding its footing, he advised us: “Watch out! The youth is delicate like glass, but if you know how to treat it, it becomes as strong as steel!” The youth proved the accuracy of this judgement in the heat of battle. Even after the liberation, in the battles for building the country. They deployed their physical, intellectual and spiritual capabilities. Conservatives, sectarians and enemies of progress have always dreaded their zeal and passion for socialism. One of them, Mehmet Shehu, in one of his bolder plots, sought to harm the party by opposing the youth. Everyone knew that he went everywhere complaining about the “long haired rebels,” even though those “long haired rebels” and even rebellious spirits, he had among his own. Here I must recount an occasion where in my presence, he insisted that Enver “intervene” with a speech or a letter to put a stop to this situation where “our youth is corrupting itself with its taste for foreign fashions…” He ranted and ranted with surprising resentment against the youth, without giving any impression of the slightest attachment to them. Enver let him talk as much as he could, listened to him, then, calmly, told him:

“You are wrong, there is nothing to worry about here, we have a magnificent youth. Where would you find one like it? They do what the Party asks of them; the youth builds railroads, clears new land and lays out fields in fantastic terraces. The majority of our population is a rural population and itself is made up above all of young men and young women who cross mountains and torrents, in the literal and figurative sense, who sit on the benches of our schools, perform together on our stages, and flock to festivals and social events. The young people of the cities also, like the workers and the specialists, took in their hand the industrialization of the country, the rise of culture, arts and sciences, they honor us abroad. Such is our youth, pure and honest. I mean this with deep emphasis, you are wrong on every front. Our youth is remarkable, we have no reason to complain about it. Today young people dress more simply, with less pretensions, because the time of so-called conventional customs is over… But, of course, there are young people who wear their hair a little too long or who dress according to fashion! Well, fashion comes and goes; the important thing is their conception of life, of work, of the moral and aesthetic rules of our society. Let’s not forget that we too, when we were young, tried to follow the ‘fashion’ of the time, in our hairstyle, in our dress, we had no distractions. And did we have to suffer from it? The desire to be well dressed, to be elegant, was not the goal of our life. The purpose of our life was something much, much more important.”

In Gjirokastra, at home and at school, the young Enver Hoxha had been regaled with stories of the struggles of his people, those led by the most valiant of Albanians, such as the heroic Skanderbeg, to the battles fought by the brave Çerçiz Topulli of Gjirokastra, which the people had immortalized in songs. Enver and his comrades recited with exaltation the poems of Naim Frashëri, Vaso Pasha and Çajupi, they sang the patriotic songs of Mihal Grameno and the songs of the people with passion, they took part in the celebration of Flag Day, sometimes under the heavy shadow of the bayonets of the Greek occupiers, sometimes under that of the Italian fascists, and they felt their love for their sorely tried country kindling in their hearts.

In Korça, the young Enver Hoxha had the opportunity to learn the glorious history of a revolutionary people like the French proletariat. The Korca national lyceum, he said, was not only an important educational centre in Albania, but also a progressive, revolutionary centre. What the students learned and read there actually armed them against the feudal-bourgeois regime of the satrap King Ahmet Zogu. Under the contract with which the school held, the regime had no say in any of the educational material, whose direction came directly from Paris. They studied in detail the French Revolution, what was the intacracies of class and bourgeois democracy, and the history of other revolutions in France and the revolutionary history of various other countries, especially the great October Revolution in Russia, from the perspective of the bourgeoisie. All of this opened up new horizons of thought for the young people of Korça.

Outside of their school hours, the students read a lot of progressive and revolutionary literature. “Already in those years,” writes Enver, “the important thing for me was not only the way in which the events during revolution had precipitated, but moreover how the revolution itself was organized and initiated.” When he was asked about this time, he recalled his intense attention he gave to reading the illustrious French encyclopedists, Diderot, Rousseau and others, he told how, after reading the history of Mathiez and that of Jaurès on the revolution, he understood even better the role of the masses, the bourgeoisie, the revolutionaries and the contradictions of their goals and ideas. He points out that he was particularly drawn to the “fiery speeches” of Robespierre and Saint-Just.

Enver was also an avid reader of literary works. He recalls the enthusiasm with which he and his comrades read Ronsard, that great French poet, especially because he had devoted one of his sonnets to the exploits of Skanderbeg. “We rejoiced to learn that even the great Voltaire had written about Skanderbeg and his family, while the ‘History of Turkey’, that multi-volume work by Lamartine, with its long passages and whole chapters which warmly evoked and praised the Albanians and Skanderbeg, the high virtues of our people, their wars and their prowess, filled us with pride… They even wrote about scenes of tragedies that took place in Butrint, Albania.” He was deeply enthusiastic in French literature and he had deep admiration for many authors. Anatole France, he said, “pleased me very much”; “I devoured” Dumas; Hugo was “my favourite poet,” and he often recited passages from his works from memory.

“These works,” he wrote, “enriched my culture and fuelled my hatred of the oppressors, but I learned from their actions, from the bourgeois revolutions of the time, and from the radical ideas being discussed. All this prepared me politically to better discern the correct ideological path among the many paths of life, those in which we had to advance in these very dark years for our homeland and for us, the young people.”

After going through the complex bureaucratic processes to obtain a scholarship, Enver, then twenty-three years old, left to undertake his university studies in France, in Montpellier. He describes his trip through Italy and France, a plywood box “suitcase” in hand, in his third class train car (though he described the conditions as being “as if it was fourth class”). He was travelling in lands he had only heard of in the pages of novels, he knew well that Montpellier was a centre of Provence, known by the stories of Alphonse Daudet, especially by the “Lettres de mon Moulin” (Letters from My Windmill), and its very old and famous university where he would find many of his schoolmates from Korça.

Enver had often spoken to me of Montpellier and his life in this city during the three years that he stayed there. He had described to me the streets, the houses, the general mildness of the climate despite the occasional inclement days, he had spoken to me of its cheerful people full of temperament. I had always wanted to know this city where Enver had spent part of his life, but it was only in 1987 that I had the opportunity to visit it. More than 50 years had passed since he had lived there and of course a lot had changed. Enver describes the station he arrived at as “quiet, dimly lit,” whereas now, Montpellier is served by the fastest train in France, built according to the most recent techniques of our time. I don’t know if the small hotel at the station, the “Terminus,” where Enver got off still exists, but today in the city attention is drawn to a large luxury hotel with many floors.

I was afraid that I would not find even the traces of the streets, houses, faculties, parks and cafes that Enver had described to me, but the day after our arrival when we began our visit, we found many things as he had depicted. The square called “the Egg,” after its shape, with the cafes and shops that surround it and, on one side, the municipal theatre and, a street below, the library that Enver often frequented, had not changed after all these years.

Naturally, the main purpose of our visit was to see the house where Enver had lived. It was not very far from the city centre. We parked our cars, because the street was so narrow that when a car passed ours we had to stick to the very side of the road; almost on the sidewalk. I took note of the seemingly endless number of winding alleys. Enver said: “I was surprised, I felt as if I was in the narrow and sloping streets, in my native Gjirokastra… I was overwhelmed by a sudden joy but also by a strong longing nostalgia, I walked briskly, because I was the son of my beloved Gjirokastra and these cobblestones were a reminder.”

We first sent an employee of the embassy the address of Enver’s former home we had noted, to explain to the homeowners the reason for our coming and to ask them to receive us. The French are said to be cold. However, we were received with great warmth and kindness. Of course, we knew we wouldn’t find the good old “chubby old lady,” as Enver describes her, who was already in her seventies fifty years earlier, but we asked if she had any relatives who might have retained some memory of this time. The owners of the house, who had known neither the old woman nor the old man of the 1930s (the one who often came to visit her, but whose connection with her Enver does not specify), told us that both, lacking support, had suffered in their last years, that they had ended up in the hospice, where they died. The new mistress of the house was a pleasant old woman. His daughter, also very kind, gave us all the explanations we asked of her, showed us the room Enver had lived in, with two French windows opening onto a balcony, just as he describes it. Moved, I stood for a moment looking at the street, the rooftops, the horizon, as Enver must have done so many times from there while smoking and thinking nostalgically of his country, of Gjirokastra, of Korça, of his mother, his father, his sisters, his childhood and youth comrades. In the middle of the room was a work table, on which the young girl of the house had thoughtfully placed the pot of flowers we had sent to the owners. We apologized for disturbing them and asked to take our leave, but they insisted on offering us something first. Our hostess had even called a neighbour to help her, so as not to interrupt our interview. The warm welcome I received was not unlike the Albanian families back home, I would even say from Korça, because it is this city that these clean rooms reminded me of, decorated with handwork, and even the hairstyle of the mistress. We were delighted with this visit. Having thanked our hosts, we finally took our leave.

We went for a walk on the Esplanade. As for the botanical gardens described by Enver, we only saw it from the outside, for it was closed. We knew well the love that Enver had for flowers. Even today, I still think about Enver’s comment: “To get to my classes, we had to go to three different buildings. But what interested me and accentuated my temptation was the fact that the same building housed the courses of zoology and the faculties of law and history. I went to listen to the lectures of the latter and felt my enthusiasm and passion for these subjects increase even more.” He recalls with what zeal he followed the courses of literature and philosophy, neglecting those of botany, physics and chemistry, in other words all of the classes of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, which the Ministry of Public Instruction had arbitrarily mandated for him to be the focus of his study, much to Enver’s chagrin. This negligence led to him losing his scholarship, which caused him great material difficulties, often leaving him without eating, but offered him the possibility of partaking in another school: that of the working class, of the revolutionary and communist political movement. 

Love had its origin, in Gjirokastra, in the flowerpots on the windowsills, or in the grand botanical gardens in Montpellier. Probably both at the same time. In Montpellier, Enver, just as he found the cobbled streets of Gjirokastra, also found its beautiful flowers, as well as those of the balconies and courtyards of Korça.

Of course, we couldn’t leave Montpellier without visiting the amphitheaters that Enver had frequented. But we were left disappointed by the many changes that had been made as compared to the picture he painted for us in his memoires. A new set had been built for the natural sciences. A manager received us very kindly, but told us that none of the teachers of those years were still alive. The old registers were preserved and Enver Hoxha appeared there with a date of birth October 3, 1908, the one written on his passport, according to the old Julian calendar, which corresponds, according to the Gregorian calendar, to October 16. We were delighted to learn that the Rectorate still had its premises in the same building. We went there to visit it, but we could not enter because the door was locked. From the outside it was just as Enver had described it, with an arched doorway opening onto a small courtyard surrounded by a portico. I told myself that during his three years of stay in this city, Enver must have often walked in this courtyard and under this portico when it was raining or windy, and you can understand why a wave of emotion fell upon me.

We also considered visiting Palavas beach, which Enver describes and where he sometimes went with friends. It was, he writes, some three-quarters of an hour by train, a trip made on an old train which rolled very slowly and the station was a sort of “sheet metal shed.” The owner of the house where Enver had lived had also told us that until after the Second World War, more than a beach, it had been a strip of marsh land, that there were no villas and hotels like now. Today, on the other hand, it was a very well-kept beach, with lots of buildings and ultra-modern hotels, but whose architecture I didn’t really appreciate. We intended to stay in Montpellier another night to visit the library, the theatre, a cafe frequented by Enver and his comrades, but what I had already seen was enough for me. I was seized with sadness thinking about the things I couldn’t find as Enver had described them to me. It created a void in me, in addition to seeing that those which remained were “worn out by the years.” Above all, I was saddened thinking, “What’s the point of seeing all this when I can’t confide my impressions in Enver!” I remembered the nostalgia with which he questioned me when I returned from a service trip to Gjirokastra, Korça or other places he knew every corner of. Once, when I told him, speaking of Gjirokastra, that I found it sad (because I had visited it on a rainy day), he was angry! How he would protest if I spoke ill of Montpellier to him! He would talk to me with youthful enthusiasm about the people and the language of Provence, he would describe to me the lively dances of these regions, he would remind me of the tales of Alphonse Daudet, the poems of Mistral, he would describe to me the fairs and monomial students. “Let’s get out of here!” I said to the comrades. And we left the same evening.

As we can see in these memories, when Enver evokes Montpellier with love, it is above all because this city gave him precious gifts for the future of his life as a revolutionary. “I can say with certainty,” he says, “that in France, and particularly in Montpellier, I acquired vast and valuable knowledge about the evolution of universal culture, in particular French culture. This knowledge, which I developed with perseverance, was of great help to me both then and later in my life as a revolutionary.” Especially in the years 1932-1933, when Hitler and the nazis in Germany were becoming ever more powerful, the activity of the FCP among the masses was quickening. The section of the FCP in Montpellier, says Enver, had a kiosk of its own, where books and pamphlets on Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin were sold, inexpensive pamphlets accessible to workers, such as the work “Elementary Principles of Philosophy” by Politzer, a French communist philosopher. In Montpellier, Enver frequented the workers’ clubs run by the FCP. In these clubs and cafes conferences were held, meetings animated by discussions and debates, communist orators took the floor to also respond to opponents of Marxism. These kinds of debates and polemics, says Enver, were most interesting, because everyone could ask questions, intervene, applaud, whistle, drink beer or wine in the smoke of cigarettes which formed a thick fog. “Sometimes,” he said, “I also attended meetings knowing there would be a police raid because it sometimes descended into fist fights.”

In Montpellier, Enver met an FCP propagandist named Marcel who worked in a café and, like the Albanian communist Koçi Bako, provided him with books and pamphlets. When Enver did not understand something, he went to Marcel, who explained it to him with kindness and competence. Thus, day by day, Enver learned the science of socialism better, the mastery of which became for him a goal in life and which he placed above the other disciplines taught at the university he attended. He had made up his mind to it: he would study more thoroughly the subjects for which he was most gifted. This, too, would allow him to serve his country even better. Albania at the time needed light, progress in all areas. But above all, he thought, Albania urgently needed to find the right way to resolve the essential questions of its political and social development. He therefore did not define reformist political action as the goal of his life. What was absolutely obvious to him was that his country was suffering under an abhorred regime and that this regime had to be overthrown. He knew well that the waters of Albania had begun to boil, that the new forces of progress and social development, the workers and the revolutionary communists, were preparing and organizing themselves. He recognized the importance to side with them, to campaign with them and to help them to the best of his abilities and his strengths.

When, in 1934, Enver saw his scholarship terminated, he was forced to return to Paris. However, this time he arrived with a different mindset; he was more mature, endowed with a broader horizon, but with empty pockets. He hoped that his comrades would help him find a job in a factory or elsewhere so that he could continue studying law or some other course in historical and social sciences at the Sorbonne. Enver says that when he returned for the holidays in Albania, seeing the suffering of the people and the inability of his family to make ends meet, he tried to find a job, but, having failed, he left for abroad.

For a time he stayed in Paris with friends. His sister was sending him a small remittance from Italy. He found a modest job as an address copier and rented a very small room, one and a half meters by two metre, where there was just enough room for the bed, an attic, with a skylight from which one could only see the roofs of the surrounding buildings. “For ten months, in Paris,” writes Enver, “I never had enough to eat…” This situation lasted until when, from recommendation to recommendation, he ended up finding a place to give Albanian lessons to the honourary consul of Albania in Brussels, a Frenchman of Hungarian origin, as well as his press officer. Apparently they liked his “presentable” looks and his mature attitude for a young man and they agreed to hire him as their private chancellor with a good salary which the consul paid out of his own pocket. This not only saved Enver from misery but revived in him the hope of continuing his studies. He applied himself to doing so as soon as he arrived in Brussels.

His job at the consulate was easy; he had to grant visas, read the press and collect clippings of articles relating to Albania. But now Enver was a militant communist, he had met the famous communist of the CPF Paul Vaillant-Couturier in Paris; he established links with the editorial staff of “l’Humanité” and began to collaborate with this newspaper. In his office at the consulate, newspapers, pamphlets and communist books had piled up to such an extent that when the press attaché arrived unexpectedly from Paris one day, he was scandalized. Enver was fired on the spot. The hope of continuing his law studies also faded. Despite all the love he had for the people of France, he could not return to live there because it would have been impossible for him to ensure his subsistence, and even less to send some help to his family from there. In a letter to his sister he said:

“Beloved Fahrije, in Bari, Italy,” he wrote “how happy I was to receive your letter… you have warmed my heart… for almost four years I have only received letters full of reproaches, reproaches which are justified, but which sadden me and break my heart…”

Under these circumstances, he decided to return to Albania permanently.

At the end of the four years he spent in Montpellier and Paris, Enver wrote of France: “I retain the best impressions and memories of this country and its people… It is a country with a deeply rich past of great figures of the pen and thought… especially during the French Revolution which had a great influence on the destiny of Europe and the world.”

The France that had decapitated the kings, the France of the Paris Commune, tempered Enver as a revolutionary and militant internationalist. He admired the rich secular history of the homeland of the enlightenment philosophers and studied their works on societal progress deeply. However, the brilliance of Paris never blinded his worldview, and he was still focussed on the struggle to liberate Albania. Indeed, he returned to Albania determined to fight for the liberation of the people from the oppression and obscurantism of King Zogu’s regime. It was with this resolution that he did not hesitate to deliver ardent speeches on behalf of the youth, in Gjirokastra, in front of the grave of the democratic patriot Bajo Topulli, and in Shkodra, at the ceremony for the removal of the ashes of fearless fighters Çerçiz Topulli and Muço Qulli.

In 1936, he came to Tirana. For this young man who was returning from France, dismissed from his post because of the communist literature discovered at his home, it was not easy to find work. Once again, he and his family remained dependent on the generosity of strangers, friends and distant relatives.

“For me,” says Enver, “what was important was to earn enough to live on by getting a decent job, to send some money to my father and my mother who lived in poverty, to deeply know the economic and political situation of the country and to establish links with communist and patriotic elements.”

Eventually he was appointed a French teacher at the gymnasium in Tirana, where he worked for four or five months. Enver said that he started his job as a “proletarian” teacher, that he could not afford to get sick or take time off like everyone else, because he was paid by the hour and his salary was proportional. The number of hours he worked was shocking! This arrangement in Tirana being very precarious, he did everything possible to be transferred to Korça. He knew the city and its inhabitants well, the school, there were also many more comrades and friends. The bottom line, in his words, was that he knew, especially from prominent communist activist Ali Kelmendi, that the communist movement there was better organized and more assertive.

Around April 1937 he was transferred to the Lyceum of Korça, as a teacher of the French language. This position was also very useful for him to cover his activity in the ranks of the underground communist group “Puna” which operated in the city. Although unfortunately not mentioned much in this text, he spoke much of his activities in Korça, especially during the eve of the Italian fascist invasion, in his books “When the Party was Born” and “Laying the Foundations of the New Albania.” Nevertheless, in these memories he does speak with love and gratitude of the communist comrades and the workers of Korça. “It is for me,” writes Enver, “a subject of satisfaction and pride to have had the chance to prepare myself as a faithful soldier of the Party, precisely in the ranks of the “Puna” association of Korça… Korça holds a special and privileged place in my life.”

“In Korça,” he continues, “new, wider windows opened up to me on life, which helped me to acquire a deeper knowledge and understanding of it… I will never forget that it is precisely to Korça that I owe, at the same time as my secondary school certificate, my understanding that there was another school, much more difficult and complex than any official school, a school through which all the youth of the time attended. The first lessons of this ‘school’ which was indispensable to Albania, was offered to me by the inhabitants of Korça, workers and progressives, and above all by the Korça of the poor, the Korça of the workers and small artisans, above all by the most advanced elements, the proletarians.”

“I am not exaggerating when I say that that generation gave today’s youth the right direction in life, and I am not saying this to please them, I am emphasizing it because they were our first masters of communism.”

During the summer of 1984, when we went on vacation to Pogradec, I took his childhood reminiscences with me to read them to him and pass the time. In the past we had laughed to the point of tears reading many of the passages, whereas this time I saw him only moved and as if seized with a deep longing. One of those days, when we had finished this reading, he said to me: “Listen, I wrote something about Korça in my Diary, when we were there together…” While preparing the publication of this book, I remembered his words and having looked through his diary I found the notes he had thrown there in August 1975, when he visited the city of his youth and where he expresses so much love, nostalgia and gratitude for Korça and its inhabitants.

This is why I add to his memories of youth, these notes, although they date from 1975:

“Through these memories,” Comrade Enver Hoxha said in conclusion, “I want my great Party, which raised me, educated me and instructed me, to know my life in its details, with its positive aspects as with its weaknesses. As for the value that these memories will have for this purpose, that is another matter, but now that my hair is turning white, I can affirm with pride and complete conviction: it is a life that I have taken until its end in the service of my beloved Party, my beloved people, communism and the proletarian revolution.”

My dear Enver! Why did you think you can only serve the Party and the people until you die? The Party and people do not let you die, they keep you alive in their hearts and minds, and you will forever continue to serve your beloved Party and people, communism and the proletarian revolution even after death.

On your eightieth birthday and after reading this book you would surely repeat with pleasure this saying of Victor Hugo which you held so dearly:

“For the man in his youth is handsome, but to him in his old age comes greatness.”

* * *

Notes

1 He completed these notes between 1971 and 1975.

2 A type of school adolescent Albanians attended between the ages of 15 and 18. In our place and time, it is analogous to high school or secondary school.

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