Below is the a creative, non-fiction vignette written by Erjona Gashi about Sahare’s interview.

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I sat with Sahare in the backyard of a small coffee shop, the scent of roasted beans mixing with the warmth of a Prishtina summer. The park stretched before us, green and alive, filled with laughter and movement. Sahare was home for a visit, slipping between past and present, between the parents she left behind and the life she built elsewhere. 

She had been a pediatrician here, working alongside my sister. Now, she worked in Germany, healing strangers in a land that would never quite feel like her own. Her voice cracked when she spoke of leaving, her fingers tightening around the delicate rim of her coffee cup. 

“My heart burns every day,” she said.  

“I never wanted to leave. Not even during the war. And now that Kosova is free, I have left her.” 

She exhaled, pressing a hand to her chest, as if to steady something inside her. 

Sahare: 

“You know, I thought I was going to be left alone. I can’t explain it, but I was hopeful. I was strong. I kept telling myself it would all be okay, that I could endure. But there was always fear—this shadow that stretched over my brother, my father, my mother. 

I don’t know why I wasn’t afraid for myself. I told myself—whatever happens, let them kill me. I couldn’t see a future for myself anyway. For three months, I lived with that thought, drowning in the weight of it. Every day, I imagined the ways they could come for us, how they might break down the door, how they would beat us, how they would kill us. 

But my greatest fear—the one that choked me, that wrapped itself around my throat every night—was that they would do something to me in front of my family. That was my nightmare. 

I didn’t want to survive it. I prayed that if they came, they would kill me before they touched me. I would rather die than bear that. 

Nobody in my family spoke of these things, but we all knew. At night, I heard the screams of women from the checkpoint. Not once. Not twice. Almost every night. Their voices carried through the dark, raw and breaking. 

And some nights, there were men’s voices, thick and muffled. They kept them locked up. Used them. God knows what they did to them. God knows where they took them from. 

The screams never left me. They lived in my bones. I dreaded the mornings, the moment I had to step outside. What if they took me? What if today was the day? 

But I had to go. I had to buy bread. If my father or my brother stepped out, they would not return. That was how it worked. The soldiers took the men. 

And the women—” 

She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. The silence said enough.