By Sidonja Manushi
In the centre of a newborn city, on the second floor of a newborn house, in 1932, physician and well-known intellectual Jani Basho was cradling a newborn boy in his arms.
He had only recently received King Zog’s – Albania’s King – permission to turn this two-floored, red bricked house into a women’s clinic; a place they could enjoy the sunlight coming in from the tall windows, the yard with its rainbow of colors, the wooden staircases adorned with a faint smell of mold that reminded a walk in the woods. The clinic was a place women turned to mothers, babies were born and wall-climbing plants multiplied in abundance.
The baby Jani Basho was cradling in his arms that day however – just like many others all over Albania – lived to see the house transform through the course of history, loose its initial cause of nobility and turn to be the all-seeing eye of a blind power.
After King Zog fled the country, World War II ended and communist partisans took over Albania, the house became the host of the Secret Surveillance operations, which not only spied and interfered in the lives of those it deemed suspicious and enemies of the state, but also questioned, tortured and humiliated them for years in a row. Many were ultimately sentenced to death. Soon enough, the country was similar to Bentham’s Panopticon – an institutional building designed to allow all inmates to be observed by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched – and Jani Basho’s old women’s clinic was its epicenter.
“Cursed and serious, silent and gloomy was the building during the day, yet it transformed into real hell at nightfall. Amid the intoxicating smell of the weeping willows, lime trees and the Iodoform that was poured on the bloody wounds of the arrested, the screams and yells of those who were being beaten and electrocuted arose, while the volume of the radio was turned up high and the dog of the Italian mechanic who was also convicted, Mario Massarini, was urged to bark endlessly, to cover these painful screams that gave you goose bumps. It was more painful to hear others being tortured, than to be tortured yourself…to this day, when I happen to pass by it, my knees shake and my heart beats fast…” , reads the wall of the same house where all these atrocities happened, which has now been turned into a museum.
The description comes from one of the survivors of communism’s suffocating system; the confessions of many survivors have been gathered and are exhibited in the house, currently named the ‘House of Leaves’.
Albania has a plethora of communist legacy – something to be expected after suffering one of the longest communist regimes. Across the country countless unimaginative bunkers built to protect it from a nuclear attack testify to the vision of one man only: Enver Hoxha, whose name hardly any Albanian, young or old, does not know. Two of them (Hoxha’s personal refuge and the headquarters of the Ministry of Interior) have already been made into museums (Bunk’art 1 & 2), aiming to preserve collective memory and teach of the country’s communist past.
Yet, there is something about the House of Leaves, its quiet, normal exterior, its past purpose and its haunting story that does more than simply convey lessons on communism – it marks you.
As a museum, the house is now a mixture of modern architecture and lingering traces of the years gone by. Its front wall, protecting the house from the stream of cars and people passing by it daily, has been cleaned and painted white for the public; the windows have been repaired; the walls have been adorned with modern screens, showing educative videos on Albanian history before and during communism and propaganda movies made by the Party (as Albanians call the ex-communist party); its rooms now hold an exhibition of artifacts from the country’s most mysterious and controlling period, while memories of the time babies were being born, making the house a place of creation, rather than destruction, are nowhere to be seen.
“State security is the sharp and dear weapon of our Party, because it protects the interests of our people and country, as well as against inside and outside enemies,” is written on another wall in the House of Leaves, quoting Hoxha himself. Deservingly on one of the main corridors of the museum, this quote depicts the extreme overlapping of the ‘state’ with the ‘people’ during communism, and of the very definition of the word ‘enemy’ itself.
The Party would not have been ‘the Party’ had it followed the practice of seizing all political and economic power but allowed people to go their ways concerning personal issues and beliefs. All totalitarian regimes that have survived on the long run have been much more invasive and psychologically pressuring than that – the Party is still remembered in Albania because of its invasion of something much grander and personal: the psyche of its population.
The countless Chinese and Western spying equipment exhibited in the House of Leaves are prehistoric versions of what we now have, yet they served the purpose of interfering with every inch of one’s life behind closed doors all too well. The Bug, the most infamous spying device showcased in the house, is a good symbol of the system as a whole, of the ways it would creep in and out and take over the very essence of human rights and freedoms. For the political prisoners, the screams and torturing of others were more effective and hurtful than their own; for the country, taking away its citizens’ rights to individual thoughts, feelings and ideas was more destructive than taking away their lands.
It was thus not difficult to deem almost anyone an ‘enemy’ of the state. Whenever a diverse idea flourished the Party would know, and would take measures. Bugs were placed inside homes, hotels, foreign embassies…many of the Party’s own collaborators were later accused and executed for treason as well while internal party paranoia and fear intensified and the stakes rose higher.
It is very difficult for the people who have not experienced that time and system to imagine and empathize with what it must have felt to lose all power and certainty over one’s life, just like it is difficult for those who lived through that experience, to let it go.
Upon its inauguration, PM Edi Rama said the following concerning the purpose of the museum: “What I learned from the experience of Bunk’art 1 and 2, is the physical relation with remembrance as an opportunity to tell the younger generation or foreign visitors who didn’t experience this period of history, and that upon confessing a story, the more time passes, the less we, who witnessed that time, fully believe in it.”
Tourists and students are the main visitors of the museum now; sometimes, elderly people stop by it and take a longer look, but rarely go inside. The issue of what to do with communist legacy and artifacts came into question in Albania too when the Bunk’art ideas were first introduced, as there were many people who opposed the idea of communist ‘heirlooms’. Yet, more than heirlooms and museums these buildings have walls with eyes that have seen a lot, evidence of a not-so-distance past which has been carved in the memories of those who experienced it and will not be swept away by the demolition of physical things. In this sense, collective memory serves to both respect the memories of those who suffered and to remind us of what can happen when our minds, rather than our things, are taken away from us. For this, it is good the House of Leaves is alive to tell its story.
