The inhumane torture against the mother of two children, only to extract information about her brother-in-law, Jup Kazazi, but also because of the hatred induced by the Yugoslav communists, as the wife of the son of Isa Boletini, the hero whose family was persecuted by communism. The story of Adile Bekteshi Boletini, the wife of Adem Boletini whom the communists killed, the sister of Teofik Bekteshi who was in political prison and the mother of two sons from whom she was separated for five years.
If you browse the book of well-known Albanian families and that of persecuted families during the communist regime, you will immediately notice the frequent matching of surnames. Their labeling and treatment as enemies, in many cases, became known, trumpeted as a deserved punishment for people who in previous periods had enjoyed power and wealth, but sometimes in the second book I come across surnames of well-known families that no one he knew that in the dictatorship they were hit with imprisonment, exile, but also physical elimination. Such is the family of the hero, signatory of Independence, Isa Boletini.
Determined fighters against the Serbian rule over the territory of Kosovo, they were targeted by the Yugoslavs, but when the latter formed and controlled the Communist Party of Albania, which took over power in our country, they became enemies even across the border. Obedient to their true Yugoslav leaders, the Albanian communists killed Isa Boletini's son, Adem, in the turbulent years of the war, and when they officially took power they proceeded to imprison and deport other family members, not excluding the women, as was Adilja, Adem's wife.
Adilja was born in Shkodër in the family of Hasan Bektesh. She was educated at the nuns' school in her town and then went to Italy for another year where she trained in the craft of needlework. He knew Italian, German, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. Adilja married the son of the hero of Kosovo and all Albanians, Ademi, and together they had two sons, the young Isai and Enis, who then became a well-known doctor, inheriting the profession of his uncle, Selaudin Bektesh.
Ademi completed high school in Vienna in 1914 and the High Military Academy in Modena in 1919. Upon returning to Albania, in 1922-1923, he was assigned to the position of commander of the Albanian Gendarmerie in the South of Albania, mainly in Gjirokastër and Saranda, fight against Greek Andart gangs. Ahmet Zogu decorated him with the rank of "First Class Captain with Merit". In the 30s, he was appointed to various northeastern areas within the Albanian National Army and in 1943, Lieutenant Colonel Adem Boletini was appointed to the position of district commander of the Albanian Gendarmerie in Shkodër by the Government of Rexhep Mitrovica. At this time, on November 23, 1943, he was assassinated by Vasil Shanto of the communist group of Shkodra.
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The communists declared that it was an unintentional murder and that the target had been Major Ndrec Prenga, the district commander of the Shkodra gendarmerie, but the contents of the tracts that they then released into circulation show, if not that the target was the hero's son, at least that the killing of it didn't bother him at all. "Adem Boletini was not sentenced to death by the KPSH, but his attitude with Major Ndrec Prengë was unjustifiable", quotes one of these tracts, Adem's son, the young Isa Boletini, in an interview. According to the hero's grandson, his family was targeted and hit in Albania, as was the case in Yugoslavia, due to instructions coming from Belgrade.
Yugoslav allies were more important to the Albanian communists than the heroes of Albania. Isa Boletini was awarded the title Hero of the People only in 1962, but his family was never honored as they deserved, being invited only once to the Independence Day in Vlora and being completely forgotten at the inauguration of Isa Boletini's monument in Shkodër in 1981. During these years, several family members, including Adilena, entered Albanian prisons.
She was first arrested in 1945, when she was held in prison for five months. Then, he was arrested again. This time he was sentenced to 5 years in prison. Eviction orders came to the family again and again. A total of three times, there were decisions to leave Tirana, so much so that the last time they were forced to hide for a month until the decision was canceled.
As Fatbardha Saraçi Mulleti writes in the book "The Ordeal of Women in Communist Prisons", Adilja faced severe torture during the investigation, during which she was asked for information about Jup Kazazi, her sister's husband. After the Postriba uprising, Jup Kazazi was wanted as one of its organizers. However, the communists, who probably thought it would be easy to defeat a woman, did not manage to get a word out of her, despite all the torture they used, tying her in the air by her arms, or putting her in a barrel with ice water for hours, days on end. "I bowed down a lot, man, but I couldn't kneel to you", you said one day to one of the Security officers, "since you were really the girl of Isa Boletini".
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"Even the wife of Adem Boletini", Adilja had told her, who never accepted mercy, even when they proposed to make a request for forgiveness, so she served the days of the sentence until the end. Even when she was released, a new punishment awaited her: deportation to Kavaja, but with the intervention of her brother, the well-known pediatrician and academic Selaudin Bekteshi, this decision was canceled and Adile's sons, as well as other grandchildren of the Bekteshi family, grew up in the warmth of their uncle's shelter and heart.
Adile's other brother, Teofik, was also imprisoned by the communist regime, while his sister's husband, Nasibe, Jup Kazazi, had killed himself after the communists had surrounded the house where he was hiding in order not to fall into their hands. The Bektesh was a shelter with many problems, but also with a lot of love, which would help in any case, to withstand the attacks of the regime that did not back down even in front of the most important families.
