When meeting Betty, one is struck by her noble features. Her father Xhemil Meço, a well-known anti-communist, had fled to Detroit in 1944. Since he was unable to take his family with him, it was on them that the wrath of the party fell. Because fleeing the country was considered a political crime, the rest of the family had to pay, and was sentenced to internal exile. Betty still lives in the prison housing because she cannot afford to live elsewhere.

When Betty’s sister died at an early age, the authorities refused to give her mother a means of transporting the body to the cemetery (at that time only high party members were allowed to own cars). She was told to wait in the road for a vehicle, to hitchhike with the body.

Thanks to information from Betty’s brother Fadili, who spent ten years in prison, I was able to find my father’s grave in 1985. Like a dead sister, Betty accompanied me to Tirana to reclaim his bones in 1995, three years after Albania became a democracy. I will never forget her emotion when she first learned of my father’s death.

She says, “The respect I feel for Robert’s parents is enormous. I got to know Dino shortly after he was released from his first prison sentence. When he found out I was the daughter of Xhemil Meço, he beamed, and said I would always be welcomed at their house, this at a time when we, the politically persecuted, were constantly spied upon, when even our own relatives shunned us.”