Personal History

This past Sunday I had lunch with Pjeter and his 72-year-old mother. We went to a restaurant in a sports park (hard to explain, but it was a nice restaurant). In celebration of Greek Orthodox Easter, Pjeter's mom gave everyone at the table an egg dyed a beautiful crimson red. After she had distributed the eggs, she placed a hardback book on the table. Among the pages of the book were lodged about a dozen old photographs. Here is the story told by the book and the pictures:

During WWII, an American military transport plane carrying Army nurses took off from Catania, Sicily on a mission to fetch wounded soldiers from forward positions farther north. A storm and German Messerschmitts blew the plane off course, and it crashed in rural Albania, near Pjeter's ancestral home. All 30 Americans survived the crash landing and eventually made their way on foot to Pjeter's grandfather's village. Pjeter's grandfather was asked, because he spoke some English, to help the survivors. He did, trekking with them for several weeks through the mountains in winter so they could be rescued off the eastern coast of Albania. Soon thereafter, he was kidnapped by the Albanian security forces. For years his family did not know what happened to him, until finally one of the police officers who had been among the group that executed him revealed the location of his body. One of the pictures carried by Pjeter's mom was a black-and-white photograph of human bones in a shallow grave - her father's.

Other photos showed Pjeter's grandmother with the author of the book, one of the rescued Army nurses who had returned to Albanian in the mid-1990s to thank those who had helped them. Pjeter's mom was only a little girl when all this happened, but she obviously cherishes the exploits of the grandfather she hardly knew.