Forsaken Albania

By Artan Lame
Rome-Tirana 1941. Let’s open the New Year with a card, even though it is sixty five years old. To explain this event, I have to first explain how the censuring of the postal service was done during World War Two. Here, I will describe that of Italy, but it functioned more or less in the same way in all countries. After writing a letter or a postcard, a citizen had to deposit it at the Censuring Office, which stamped and sealed it with an even number. Here the letter was opened and read and if there were any military secrets, or information that could help the enemy, hostile or defeatist propaganda etc, phrases that were prohibited were all cancelled out with black ink. After completing this job, the office employee stamped the letter and wrote his personal code number on the envelope and another red seal with the words, “Verified and Censored,” easily detected by the Post Office employees that the letter had been checked. This entire system made people very prudent, not so much to avoid writing things that could be interpreted as military secrets, but to write things that the Police could classify as wanting to disseminate panic, or expressions of distrust in the “final victory.” Things became even more complicated, when the censor office had to check correspondence in a foreign language, for example correspondence from the countries occupied by Italy such as Albania, Abyssinia or Libya. In the case of censorship of correspondence in Albanian, Italians who knew Albanian were used because, for security reasons, native Albanian speakers could not be trusted with this work.
This brings us back to our country. This Albanian citizen sent a post card from Rome to a friend in Tirana, called Zydi Duda on 24 April 1941. Obviously the Albanian living in Rome has a problem and wants to tell Zyhdi in Tirana that he was in trouble, but naturally he was afraid of the censoring. So what was his solution? He uses a colloquial Albanian and expressions that he is sure no foreigner would understand, describing the very bad situation he was in. And he was right the ruse worked, the censorship passed the post card, thinking that everything was alright and the postcard reaches Zyhdi in Tirana unscathed. So the expression he used in Turkish actually proved useful to the Albanians in World War Two.