My escape to freedom

Those were days when nearly thirteen years of imprisonment awaited me... and when death was the only hope... I hid this hope inside me like a big secret that no one else knows, and they can't strip me of it.

If literature was my cultural escape [from that prison] to freedom, my emotional escape was in those letters. I'm not sure my children know, or ever will, what those letters meant to me.

I used to feel in the moments when I read it that I am not only a free human being, but rather a human being who has been gifted by God with all the bounties of this world.

“This what the reader (perhaps) will read was my escape to freedom. Naturally, unfortunately, it was not a real escape, and I would have liked it to have been. It is here about a certain escape, which was possible in Foca prison with high walls and steel bars - an escape of spirit and thought. If I were really allowed to escape, I would have given priority to physical escape before this second.

I suppose my readers could have listened with satisfaction to a thrilling story of a prisoner's escape from a well-guarded prison and had read my thoughts and comments, on subjects of politics and philosophy.

I could not speak, but I could think, and I decided to invest this potential to the end. And from the beginning, I managed some dialogues within myself about everything, and everything that comes to mind. I stuck my mind on the books I read and the events outside, and then I began to write down some things eavesdropping at first, then I was completely encouraged, I sat down and read and wrote. And so I gathered thirteen little notebooks, of the pieces the technicians call (A-5/A-5), written in such fine handwriting, and intentionally illegible, that my printer (Mersada) took great pains to transcribe them. This is an occasion for me to thank her for her patience in deciphering my cipher of dangerous words such as (religion, Islam, communism, freedom, democracy, power) and the like, which were replaced in the notes by other words that only I knew, and that even to me during the past years have become intelligible. difficult and strange.”