In April 1972, Asllan Beja, a well-known name in the communist regime and part of the power structures of the time, wrote to Enver Hoxha about a family matter that contained all the cruelty of the system.
It was about his sister, Nalo Hoxha. For years she had been living in exile in Savër, Lushnja, with her three daughters, after her son had fled abroad in 1960. The punishment of one man had become the punishment of the entire family. The mother and sisters had paid for the escape of their son and brother.
When the term of internment had ended, the family was not looking for anything extraordinary. Simply to leave Savra and return to Tirana. But the doors in the capital were closed. Even though one of the girls had been a teacher at the Artistic Lyceum and the other had completed higher education, they remained field workers.
This is the most difficult part of the story. Not only the internment, but the way the regime continued to keep the man down, even after the official sentence was considered completed. A life confined to Sèvres was not enough. It also required the denial of return, the denial of the profession, the denial of the right to start over.
Asllan Beja had been interested in Tirana, but without result. Therefore, the letter to Enver Hoxha was also the last attempt to resolve something that, in a normal state, should not have needed the leader's intervention.
The response this letter received was a short, cold sentence, without any human emotion: "No favors, because they don't deserve it. Let them work where they are and earn their living by their own sweat. They've lived like gentlemen long enough!"
In those few words is the whole face of the dictatorship. The interned women are presented as people asking for favors. The educated girls, left to work in the fields, are treated as if they still have to repay a debt to the government. The family, even after the end of the interned period, remains under punishment.
This was the true mechanism of the dictatorship: the exile did not end with a deadline, because the mark remained on the family. The escape of a son was enough for the mother and sisters to be removed from their lives, displaced, humiliated and, even after years of imprisonment, not allowed to return to the place where they had had a home, a job, a memory.
This letter is therefore not simply a correspondence between an official and a leader. It is a testament to a time when the fate of interned women was decided by a note on the side of a piece of paper; when education, work, and previous life were erased with a sentence; and when even the most humane request could be dismissed with the coldness: “No favors, because they don’t deserve them.”
