The story of a former soldier, his humanity and his rejection.
Ferdinand is an Albanian army officer, we are in January 1997 and his life up to that moment is an open window on the future: youth, a promising career, a girlfriend, a homeland …. but Albania is a country in turmoil, exhausted in 1991 from half a century of Communism opens wildly to neoliberal economic policies made of privatizations and free market that, After a few years, they lead to the bankruptcy of the main financial companies and the risk of a civil wa . It is January 16, 1997 and begins a period consigned to the annals as “Albanian anarchy”. It’s winter, the cold wind freezes the bones and yet the revolt spreads throughout the country, in the streets you can breathe smoke and gunpowder, blood begins to flow.
Ferdinand is a young army officer with the windows of life open to the future… He is summoned to the military command … the order is one of those that leaves you breathless: he must take to the streets, defend the stability of the government, he must shoot young people, mothers, brothers, citizens like him.
Ferdinand is an officer in the Albanian army but he is first and foremost a man and refuses to shoot. He escapes at night on a makeshift boat, leaves the affections, the known places, the shared dreams … he crosses the darkness of the sea and realizes his little revolution, because at twenty years old leaving everything and saying no to those who put a gun in your hand and ask you to kill in his name is really a revolution. He knows very well that this refusal will pay dearly. Landed in Italy will know poverty, hunger, loneliness, the impossibility for ten long years to see his country again because he is now a deserter and risks being shot …..
Fortunately his story has a happy ending: Ferdinand, then, his girlfriend managed to get her to Italy and today he has a small construction company and a family of his own. I decided to tell this story because while I listened to it a powerful image emerged, of those that give you breaths of oxygen in this paradoxical Christmas 2022 … because while we struggle between gifts and endless banquets in the Mediterranean people continues to die, in Ukraine continues to die, young Russian soldiers continue to die like Afghan women or Iranian boys. Of course some are fighting for survival or freedom, others accept instead of being soldiers always and anyway…
Ferdinand no, he chose his revolution when he claimed the right to be a human being … always and in any case …. and his revolution is a gift, of the beautiful ones that can illuminate even this paradoxical Christmas 2022 …..
Sara Lazzaro
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