Shaqir Raçi
The interviewer: Mr. Raci can you tell us what you remember from when the war started? When the story of Jasharaj happened did you watch the news? Who were you with??
Shaqir Raçi: We watched the news. We didn’t have a TV but… we heard what had happened from others.
The interviewer: Yes…
Shaqir Raçi: We felt really sorry about what happened, but there was nothing to be done. We couldn’t even do a thing about ourselves. We stayed there… they took us to Bllaca…
The interviewer: How did you get to Bllaca? By train, right?
Shaqir Raçi: Yes, by train. The train was full of people. When we went to Bllaca we saw that the place was terrible. There were too many people and the place was all muddy. I don’t know about you…
The interviewer: We, the youth, do not remember Bllaca. What was Bllaca like?
Shaqir Raçi: Bllaca was close to a river. They had built tents there so we too built one. We stayed there for two nights.
The interviewer: In a tent?
Shaqir Raçi: Yes, we stayed in a tent. They told us we could leave after the second night there. We thought they were taking us somewhere abroad but they took us to Albania. We went there by bus.
The interviewer: By bus?
Shaqir Raçi: We went to Nersek. You can look it up. We first got to Nersek which is close to the border with Greece. Just when we arrived there we came to see that it was like living in a stall… a van took us there after we got off the bus. I told the driver of the van to wait there. I told him that wasn’t even a place for livestock let alone us, the people. The boy waited there… some of our friends had been there the night before – I asked them if that was the place to stay and they told us that it was. The food was poor and we didn’t have a good night’s sleep he said. That was a stall – he told me that the beds were uncomfortable. I asked the boy waiting there how much would it cost to take us to Tirana. I can’t remember how much he asked for, I believe I paid him 200 notes. We then went to Tirana. I had a relative in Tirana who had his own apartment there. It was 12 in the afternoon when we arrived there. Our relative had already had his own family in the apartment and didn’t have enough room. But, he told us we could go to the Sports hall. There was a sports hall in Tirana and it was full of people.
The interviewer: The sports hall?
Shaqir Raçi: Yes. It was crowded when we got there so we sat somewhere. Then, a man who had an apartment came there and was looking for a family. He asked Veli who we were with – he responded that he was with his sister, Gjevria, and her husband. Also, he told him he was with his father, wife, and sister. Then, he offered to go with him to his apartment to see whether it was suitable for us. Of course, we said yes. He was searching for a family from the city. Veli told him that we would go. So, we stayed in his apartment till the day we decided to return home.
The interviewer: Did the whole family return back home?
Shaqir Raçi: Yes, the whole family. I returned first. I and 4 or 5 other people I knew, who were from Llap and Prishtina (one of them was the son of my cousin), returned by a van. When I got home nobody was there… Some relatives of Beqir were staying at my house. His mother had died and their uncles were there. Back then I had got all the groceries from the market we owned and put them in the garage. Nothing was left when I returned – the sugar and flour (500 kilograms of flour) were all gone. I spoke on the phone with my family – the phones had a poor connection back then but I asked the son of Imer, who had come from Switzerland, to lend me his phone so I could talk to Veli and tell him to come home since everything was okay. Although the food we had from the market we had near Ismail Qemajl….
The interviewer: Yes, I remember…
Shaqir Raçi: … was all gone, the oil and everything else, but since we were all fine nothing really mattered…
The interviewer: The house was not burnt down…
Shaqir Raçi: It wasn’t. I told them that the tractor was not damaged either. The car we had in the garage was not damaged, they had only taken the fuel. So I told him about the car, too. Then, they returned home.
The interviewer: Was the other part of the city damaged? Was it burnt?
Shaqir Raçi: Where?
The interviewer: In Prishtina.
Shaqir Raçi: It was quite damaged. I remember the satellite, close to the police, when NATO bombarded the place, was damaged. I could see places that were burnt in some parts of the city. The neighborhood of Muhaxhereve was less damaged maybe because the police were located near that neighborhood. But, the other parts of the city were damaged. We went through a lot, but since we survived…
The interviewer:…we’re not complaining since we survived…
Shaqir Raçi: We shouldn’t think about those damages because there were people who lost their mother, father, brother… their whole family was killed… Thank God we survived… We had some relatives in Bellopoja – they were four brothers and they were all massacred and then thrown in the well. They threw them in the well – they were killed altogether with their sister-in-law. He husband survived because he opened a hole and somehow got in the house blocks. He hid there but they took his wife and nobody knows where they took her. Maybe they killed or massacred her but nobody knows – this happened in Bellopoja…
The interviewer: Thank you!