The sinister state security of the Yugoslav dictator Tito killed hundreds of Macedonian Bulgarians in a house in the center of the city of Bitola after 1945. Some of them were hanged by their feet before being killed up. Among those killed is the legendary shipwright Pavel Shatev.
Eli Sekulovska reveals this for BGNES.
I went to face what I feared, all that sank into the quicksand. I headed for the house where my ancestors were imprisoned, that place in the center of the city that I kept avoiding. My steps are heavy and slow. The arteries in my temples are beating so madly and something deep in my chest is squeezing me. I am seized with fear, the cause of which I seek in vain.
The city is under the sign of the green, of the wild ferocious, fanatical vegetation that erupts from cheap inferior grass, poisonous, malignant, parasitic. Strange thing, I say to myself, how much mad vitality, senseless and unproductive smoulders in this now small and dilapidated town.
At last I reached the house. I open the iron gate. An elderly woman sits on the porch. I greet her with a trembling voice, introduce myself and explain to her. She is kind and responsive. He understands and tells me that this house was also taken from them. It is now privately owned. I am asking her relatives to understand me, at least to allow me to see the cellars where my grandfather, grandmother and father were imprisoned. Except for my grandfather's brother, who was put in a cell where he couldn't breathe.
The wooden door to the basement opened. Only a small beam of light illuminates the room!
At the same time, Pavel Shatev was imprisoned in this cell. He dies here. They killed him, left him without food and sick. The new Yugoslav authorities did not even allow him treatment.
I touch the walls that touched mine. I think I will recognize the features of prison calendars and records under my fingers. I don't know what I feel. Sudden emptiness and dizziness. A feeling when the space around me is lost and whose boundaries I do not see. It's a sinking into the womb, ripped from me, like a sudden drop into some kind of weightlessness. I want to leave as soon as possible, somewhere far away and I don't know where.
Am I afraid? It's not worth lying to. Yes, it's a fear I repressed in quicksand as a child, a fear that even then contributed to my failing health.
I'm leaving quickly.
I look at the house... The main house of the UDBA, which was supposed to be a fortification, a bastion, a fortified building to control everything - half fortress, half theater, half surveillance laboratory. Here the new legislation had to be controlled, the "harmful" Bulgarian elements, to purge the intellectuals, to close the mouth of every thinker, in order to raise the new hierarchy in the name of their comrade Tito. Their lives were to be marked by continuous enlightenment (often with sparks from fists).
People are tortured in different ways. They are tied to a telephone wire, often mutilated on purpose, tied to the legs of the balcony railing to hang down... and some are deliberately thrown from the balcony.
Falling in a parabola, carried by the force of the swing, the convict flies into the air and his body breaks from the pavement. On the spherical surface of the balcony, hungry and monstrously abused, at every part of the day several people, stripped and thin as skeletons, hanging by a rope by their feet. Sometimes they sway in the gusts of wind, neither alive nor dead, and passers-by watch them. Some turn their heads, others wish for what is happening to them. A passer-by will throw a stone at them, perhaps hitting them in the temple or somewhere else, blood spurting from all sides, and their hands on the coffin are clenched in a spasm as if they were holding their death wreath. All these people wish for their own death, but it never comes.
And many other things have been done, but we have to be politically correct, right? Let us not hurt the feelings of the descendants of those who did this to us. We must be nice, hypocritical and certainly “normal“ within their “normality” and “rationality“.
The old residents of Bitola say that the patients who were lying in the old hospital (today it does not exist, it was destroyed and buildings have sprung up in this place), and it was located 300 meters from this house, could not sleep at night, heard the painful screams and cries of the prisoners who were being tortured.
At that time, the huge propaganda machine of informers and collaborators of the UDBA was “working” at full speed.
Enemies had to be created. The prisoners were to be blackened as much as possible, the whiter the faces of the informers. Every day they sit in the bazaar and talk to each other, and the rest of the population is hungry to listen to provincial gossip about foreign misfortunes. This gives them strength. They say, this is us, we are strong and UDBA protects us from the "enemies"!
Something similar to today.
By the way, spying is quite a lucrative "job" at that time, and by God it is so now. For many, it provides a good, comfortable life, apartments and education for their children abroad. Suddenly they became communists, partisans, proclaimed themselves some kind of national heroes, took huge pensions. Today they are the most patriotic. It's not that they love Macedonia, but they are fighting to keep their bloody souls from coming to light.
Police investigation – 1949
The long and bloody showdown with the right is coming to an end, and now the bloody showdown with the left begins. Bitola has been turned into a torture chamber. People from both the right and the left are being arrested frantically. How many people were imprisoned here? For many, this place means the end of their life path. People are tortured, they are asked to make some kind of confessions in order to be guilty. They just had to make themselves guilty!
UDBA arrested at night. After the first hour of sleep, when you feel the sweetest.
It's probably still like that today, I don't know. On February 13, a close relative of my grandfather who lived in his house was detained. Under the label Stalinist. I don't know if he declared himself “for” Stalin or was it an order from Tito to purge the intelligentsia from the ranks of the Communist Party. The creaking of an iron gate can be heard from the house next door. Yes, they also arrest my grandfather's brother.
Pavel Shatev was taken to the house and has already passed the "baptism of battle". My grandfather was taken to the same house, but in a different cell. My grandfather's brother - in an inner cage without air.
Initially, my grandfather was sentenced to be shot according to the speedy procedure. Filed under S-SHOOTING! But it occurs to someone that he will need it as an intellectual. Yes, they will keep him after they destroy his entire family. And they will put the noose around his neck forever. To be obedient, to be restored to insignificance, to mediocrity. The knot in which the soul is tied is not a false knot that is untied when one end is pulled. On the contrary, it gets tighter and tighter. We follow the course of the thread, but instead of loosening, it gets tighter.
A police investigation (if it can be called an investigation) is like running a marathon with many obstacles, but in the end you get nowhere. The investigation begins, and the UDBA must at all costs make some kind of confession. Blame is being sought. It's easy with those who have guilt, but what about those who don't? Then it goes to maximum physical torture. Then they threaten to destroy your whole family.
They start with simple questions, and you don't realize that if you admit something that seems trivial to you, a chain reaction follows. They start writing the protocol. Then you learn from the police things you didn't even know about yourself, that you were a spy and almost started a war between America and Russia! That you won the war even though you show them the original documents of your work.
Even more terrible!
Have you collaborated with America and England? Oh, so you're an American, an Englishman, and a Bulgarian, and since you cooperated with India, you're also an Indian spy. Maybe German, I don't know. In addition to insulting your Bulgarian mother, they also call you offensive names. They have to make you an enemy of the state, and as soon as UDBA has an intention, it will do it. Of course, you had no part in writing the report, except when you read it and you can't help but notice the half-literate investigator's spelling mistakes.
You're looking for a lawyer, and they ask you if you're joking?
In some cases the lawyer can also be arrested. Of course he won't understand why either!
They are taking you to court, and before that they have already confiscated all the property that you and ten generations before you have acquired. Of course, they don't even mention the money raised.
I'm going through the files and logs these days. In terms of genre, they can be placed between non-fiction and science fiction. Arguably, this is the only field where fiction is accepted as a document, but it must postulate some objective reality. We laughed at the scholastics who calculated the number of angels who could dance on the tip of a needle. And UDBA not only expressed this number empirically, but also made the majority of angels play on the tip of the needle! Of course, completely empirical!
My grandfather is subjected to such tortures that even dark minds could not imagine. The investigation lasted six months and my grandfather was imprisoned in this house.
My grandmother and my great-grandmother have also been taken away ... My grandmother, also exposed to horror, does not want to admit any guilt, because there is no guilt. Then they take her 12-year-old son, my father, who will see his mother tied to a chair, and put him in another cell, the one next door. My father has been detained for more than 10 hours in the UDBA, crying loudly, and the mother is listening to the child's cry. Then my grandmother had a heart attack in UDBA. I don't know what happened to my father, but I know it left a deep mark on him. And before he died, he confessed it to me.
Which monster finished it? This question is for consideration in the field of psychopathology.
I know who he is. And today he is a national hero! And here is the point that breaks me, the point from which I can no longer continue this text.
Just sketches, scattered memories. Because I can't write when the abnormal became the norm. Because it cannot be written otherwise, unless everything looks like a nightmare. Like Lautréamon's Songs of Maldoror or... perhaps, as Arthur Rimbaud prescribes, under "disorder of all the senses".
My grandfather was arrested and after prison, until the 90s. He was wounded in the eye, his hands were shaking, his ear was injured. In 1990, at the age of 88, he wrote his memoirs. Well educated, he knew French and English very well and wrote to all international organizations. He also wrote to all Macedonian political leaders, but they did not answer him.
I remember when he was arrested. I was several years old, crying, kneeling at his feet and squeezing them tightly. My well-known “uncles“ from UDBA, they push me and take my grandfather, I don't know which way. I remember them very well. They were dressed in long leather slippers, the ultimate expression of the revolutionary chic of the time. Today, from this point of view, they look like failed pilots who long ago lost their course and whose plane crashed somewhere in the abyss.
Looking at the albums. I'm thinking. A book should be written “Macedonia vs. Macedonia”.
Starting with Dimitar, sentenced to 101 years in prison in Anatolia, as one of the organizers of the Ilinden Uprising. His brother also killed, then Steryo Bozdov, sentenced to 5 years in prison in Glavniacha. Then my grandfather is 14 years old, my grandmother is 2 years old, my grandfather's brother is 12 years old. Pavel Shatev was killed ... and another murder!
Why?
These people gave a lot for Macedonia!
But it always is. A mass of people oppose those who lead him to exaltation. Especially when this exaltation despises seduction, flattery, promises.
Today the whole sphere of life is divided, dissected, put under control. The impossibility of ascension was declared, its unusability was declared. The impersonal side of events, numbers, statistics is emphasized, and history is full of anthills and dust-cooled graves of greatness. I BGNES
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Eli Sekulovska, human rights activist in North Macedonia. The analysis was written specifically for BGNES Agency