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This book was written mostly from a cupboard in Berlin during the Covid-19 pandemic. It turned out to be the perfect location to hide from the children I was supposed to home-school (my own) & to muse about my grandmother's words: 'when it's difficult to see clearly into the future, you have to think about what you can learn from the past'.

In some ways, I have gone full circle. When you are a system change once, it's not that difficult to believe that it can change again. Fighting cynicism & political apathy turns into what some might call a moral duty; to me, it is more of a debt that I feel I owe to all the people of the past...

Only once did (my mother) draw attention to a cousin's remarks that my grandfather did not spend 15 years locked up in prison so that I would leave Albania to defend socialism. We both laughed awkwardly, then paused & changed the topic.

If there was one lesson to take away from the history of my family, & of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances that choose. It is easy to say, ' what you had was gotcha real thing', applying that to socialism or liberalism...it releases us from the burden of responsibility...& we don't have to reflect, apologise & learn.

Her friends as a student: "spoke about Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Salvador Allende or Ernesto Guevara as secular saints. It occurred to me that they were like my father in this respect: the only revolutionaries they considered worthy of admiration had been murdered."

My father recited the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach as if he were reciting a verse from the Koran or the Bible. Thou shalt not cover. Thou shalt not study philosophy.

All his life my father had admired politicians only once they were dead.

March 1997: soon there will be foreign soldiers: Italian, Greek, Spanish, polish. International peacekeepers. I guess it's going to be good for the economy, good for prostitution.

When confronted with the same decisions about structural reforms, his colleagues became cynical. 'Oh,well', they would say. 'We survived the Turks. We survived the fascists & the Nazis. We survived the Soviets & the Chinese. We'll survive the World Bank'. (My father ) was terrified of forgetting what that survival had cost.

It was Flamur who brought Van de Berg to our road
The two men met in the food market where Flamur worked as a pick pocket