Interview with: Valza
We asked Valza to tell us about her experience during the time she was forced to leave her house. She responded by telling us this story.
Like everyone else we didn't even try to leave Kosovo, because of the reason that my dad was in the Kosovo Government and it would have been worse if we tried to leave knowing that the minute that they would have seen us they would kill us all. We stayed at our apartment with 20 other people. We didn't know what each day would bring to us, and as everyone else that stayed in Kosovo we all just waited for a miracle to happen at some point. In the middle of March my grandpa got really sick and no one could leave the house to take him the hospital, but even if we could do that what hospital would we take him to? The one in Kosovo only had Serbian doctors and the minute they figured that we were Albanian they would do anything in their power to not see us alive and well. So we just left him there and he got worse and worse until he one day died. We couldn't go to the proper grave yard to bury him so we just buried him in our back yard. Two houses from us lived a doctor with his family and one day he had tried to go out and buy something and on the way back they shot him at his door step. The families around there were devastated, he was the only one that kept us encouraged and told us that we would be ok and look what happened to him? We had supplied our house months before and we still had food, but we were all hoping that soon the war would end and we can go on with our normal lives, even though we all knew our lives would never be the way they were. I had two uncles, one in Germany and one in Norway who were worried to death because they couldn't reach us and didn't know where we were, and how we were, due to the phone lines being cut. We had no water and no electricity. Electricity would come ones a week for 1 hour, and we had water ones a week as well for about half an hour. One day the Serbian soldiers came and we all went down in our basements and didn't make any noise hoping that they wouldn't find us, after all we were 20 people the youngest being 3 months and the oldest 79 years old, how were we going to hide from these beasts. Luckily we heard one say there is no one in this house and they went thought the whole house and broke everything and anything they saw in their way. We were devastated when we went up and saw the situation of our home. We had no news of what was happening in the world. Accept for one night where we heard bombing everywhere. It was the scariest thing I had ever gone through and the only thing that I was praying for is that we all get out of this war alive and everything would come together. I couldn't sleep day or night. I wanted to see everything happening. In July 2, after 4 months of torturing the war finally came to an end and everyone came from wherever they were: Macedonia, Albania, Germany, Switzerland, etc. We all went out and celebrated and at the same time cried about everyone in our families that had died. We found a phone from my neighbor that had lived in Germany, we called my uncle and let him and his family know that we were all well. Though we had finally achieved peace with the great help of the world, and many of us found jobs working anything that they could, there were a lot of people that came from the villages. Their homes were burned, their families were killed and they all walked around hoping someone would give them something to eat, wear, drink anything just to keep going, the women from the villages most had not been educated beyond 8th grade and without at least high school there are not many jobs available for them. Even now after 4 years it's not all well and there are still a lot of poor people that sit on the side walk asking for money, but we have one thing that we had always wanted and that's peace, and I believe and pray that everything will fall in its place eventually. |
