The Long Winter of 1945

After the liberation of Yugoslavia from Nazi occupation in the fall of 1944, Marshal Tito called for a levée en masse to break the Wehrmacht line onthe Syrmian front and conquer the Italian city of Trieste. As thousands of men were forcibly recruited from across the country, Albanians fromKosovo were sent to the front in a tragic march that left behind scores of sick and wounded to die. On March 30, 1945, when the unarmed Albanian recruits arrived in the town of Tivari [Bar] on the Adriatic coast,Montenegrin partisans killed hundreds of them.This book is a visual history of that massacre, a history which has been deeply buried in archives, suppressed, neglected or manipulated by historians, though never forgotten so much as silenced. We use the voicesof Shaban Pajaziti and other recruits from Çubrel (Skenderaj), who survived to tell their stories. Archival and other written sources provide additional important but conflicting documentary evidence, and are a stark reminder that official history is never complete without the testimonies of participants.