As seen through the eyes of Arben Braha, Albania’s 1st EOD Tech, HMA Program Founder & a good friend to all
“The past is never dead. It is not even past.”
William Faulkner wrote that, it is the quote that welcomes visitors to the BunkArt2 Museum in Tirana, and it follows me like a shadow. To remember is not simple for me. I pull on one thread and it unravels a knot of others, smiles and heartbreak arrive together, the faces of my family, the hard light of the mountains, the smell of oil and concrete dust, the sound of a phone that never stopped ringing, even when it was silent. This is my life as I lived it, told as I told it in those long talks, the small details that stick to a man when history runs through him. It is also the story of a country that tried to wall itself off from the world, then opened its doors and found bombs in the fields.
I am Arben Braha, everyone calls me Beni. I grew up inside the iron fist of communism, I served in a broken army that learned to become a partner, I helped build a program that cleared mines and made our villages safe again, I stood too close to explosions, I learned from men who came from far away and from the stubborn wisdom of my father, I tried to be a good husband to Rudina and a good father to Lindi and Ela. My memory is heavy, but it is honest.
Chapter 1, Origin Story
In 1946 my grandfather had been a man with land and animals, not rich, but comfortable. The state took it all and called it justice. He resisted in his heart, and that was enough to stain our surname, enemies in a book somewhere, to be moved and watched and warned. My father, Izet, was conscripted as a medic in 1964. He did not love the party, he loved people, he loved music and the idea of a free life that he had only heard about on foreign radio. He married my mother, Fatima, in an arrangement agreed by the families, in the old way, the families matched histories and character and decided it was good. By the time I was born in 1966, the system had already marked us.
By then Albania belonged to one man, Enver Hoxha, and to one party that reached into every room. After the war he cut our ties one by one, first with Yugoslavia in 1948, then with the Soviet Union in 1961, later leaving the Warsaw Pact in 1968, and finally breaking with China in 1978. The more we broke away, the tighter the fist closed at home. The Sigurimi watched and listened, a neighbor could be a recorder, a teacher could be a warning. Your biography decided your future, who your grandfather was, what land your family had owned, what you had said in a kitchen when the radio was too loud. Travel was a dream, foreign music a risk, even a magazine could move you from a classroom to a work brigade. Bunkers and tunnels spread out beneath the hills and towns, and we learned to live with sirens and drills and the heavy silence of isolation. That was the air my family breathed.
We lived first in a place everyone called The Mine, copper in the ground, living big wooden barracks, not a real house, with a school, a medical post, and the loud rhythm of work. My father was appointed as a medic there, he kept a small part of himself alive with forbidden things, a few long play records hidden in a place I could not reach, a record player that disappeared one day because it was safer if it was gone. The records stayed, silent and heavy, like a promise of some other life. Once, a man came with a projector and official films, and there in the back of my father’s ambulance he also showed the other kind, from America, with subtitles and light that felt like freedom. I remember the silence when I tapped on the door and whispered, it is me, and he opened and let me in. Later I learned his name, people called him Negevant, the projector man who drove across the country with reels of permission and reels of risk. Even the darkness had eyes in those years.
We moved to the city around 1978 or 1979. On the ground floor they put the medics, teachers and other workers, the loyal party people lived above. We were close to the border with Kosova, where the Black Drini and the White Drini run like two veins, and the government threw a dam across the water and made a lake. The lake brought garbage down from the other side, plastic and color and words we did not have. I found a Coca Cola bottle and washed it and kept it on a shelf like a prized relic. Sometimes the antenna on the roof could catch a breath of Kosovan or Yugoslavian television, news and commercials, and I would climb to chase the connection with the antenna. The neighbors would watch, and twice they took me in to ask who told me to do that, was it my father? was I trying to be clever? I learned to answer questions without answers.
After school once day, a schoolmate pulled me into his apartment and showed me a foreign magazine from outside Albania, nothing dangerous, just new cars, places to travel, women in new jeans, the kind of soft freedom that was banned anyway. I was thirteen. After half an hour there was a knock on our front door, the Police took me to the station and asked me questions while waving the magazine in my face like a knife. My school-mates father had been a police officer, so was able to get us off. We were lucky that day, but it could have sent me to labor camp, not back to class.
We were allowed to rent bicycles from the government office, but even a boy needed permission to ride. I saved coins from the ice cream pocket money my father gave me to rent them. I learned to ride and loved to fly through the streets of our town. A man came with a notebook and asked where I got the money from? why did I rent the bike so often? who was paying for this? I said it is from my father, and he wrote and watched and somewhere a file became thicker. Suspicion was a storm, it soaked everything.
I learned that truth was dangerous from a story inside the family. My father’s brother-in-law, a teacher, was made head of an election commission, and one year they offered two boxes, the party or the future. Five percent voted for the future. He reported the five percent. But system didn’t like that honesty, it was a poor reflection on their total control, and so they took him at night and kept him locked up for two years before moving his family to a new town far and away and wiped out any chance of a positive future for his family. This was the lesson a young man like me carried, that the line was always there, and it moved when you were not looking.
In 1985, Albania’s tyrannical leader, Enver Hoxha, died, my father knew before the official announcement because he listened to foreign radio at night. He went to his brother-in-law to share that news, the only person he trusted. The next day the teachers told us to be strong and to cry, and the factories sent workers to Tirana to fill the streets. At home my father celebrated by drinking raki with his brother -in-law. A neighbor came by with the official face of sorrow and saw their glasses and the smiles on their faces and left again. We waited for days to see if that knock would come. It didn’t. Not that time.
The spectacle signaled continuity as much as mourning; an isolated country affirming its unity after the death of the leader who had shaped its politics, economy, and daily life for four decades.