Not for sale

Passage through hell

Just when Nadia concluded that she would never get out of Serbia, the Russian woman with the golden locks turned up in her life again.

“Oh, look at you two. These Serbs are real pigs,” the woman remarked as she reached out and caressed the face of the Romanian girl. “Let’s get out of here,” she added. “Looks like you both could use a hot meal.”

Though Nadia had been deceived once before by this woman’s faux compassion, she could not help herself from appreciating any warmth that might come her way.

“It’s taken a while, but I finally got you visas to work in Italy,” she announced once they settled into some seats at a nearby restaurant. “Soon you will be working a normal job in a café in Rome.”

She held open Nadia’s passport and showed her an official stamp as proof. “Now you’ll be protected if the police in Italy ask you for documents. You’ll leave in two more days.”

From that point forward, Nadia counted the minutes until her departure. The Serb continued to bring a steady flow of paying customers to the apartment. She did not understand the business arrangement the Serb had with the Russian woman, and she feared him too much to ask. But Nadia mouthed a quiet curse on the apartment two days later when she walked out the door for the final time.

Two burly Russian men transported Nadia, along with the blue-eyed Romanian and three young girls from the Ukraine. They stopped in Montenegro for a few days at a place that the Russians called a “safe house.”

On the evening of the third day, they left the safe house and drove to the edge of a very large lake. The driver stopped the vehicle but left the headlights beaming out on the water. Before long, a small rubber dinghy appeared in the headlights. The Russians ushered the girls to the lake’s edge and instructed them to jump into the boat.

Nadia asked one of her burly escorts if the boat would be taking them to Italy. “No, first you will go to Albania,” the man replied. Her heart sank. She wondered whether her trek would ever end. The Russians left the girls in the care of the Albanian pilot.

As soon as they moved away from the shore, he throttled the motor at full bore for well over an hour. He spoke Russian fairly well and tried to strike up a conversation with a few of the girls. None of them felt chatty, though, and they kept their contributions brief.

Eventually they could see a cluster of lights off in the distance. The Albanian indicated that their destination lay just beyond the lights, and then he unexpectedly cut the motor. Nadia initially thought the engine had run out of gas.

“Now I’m going to choose one of you to screw,” he said bluntly. “If my selection refuses to cooperate, I will drown all of you right here. I don’t give a damn.”

The girls exchanged frightened glances. “I can’t swim,” one of the girls from Kiev said in a small voice. One by one, the girls admitted to being completely helpless in these deep waters.

“OK, let’s give this bastard what he wants,” the Romanian girl said in a resigned voice. Saying this, she instinctively grabbed Nadia’s hand, and Nadia did the same to the girl next to her, and so on, until the five were all linked together.

They braced themselves for the selection. The pilot squinted his eyes as he scanned the circle, and then he pointed at Nadia: “You come here.”

Nadia looked at her companions with dread. “Please, go on,” the Kiev girl pleaded. “Don’t be ashamed. You’ll be doing it for us.”

Nadia stood up in the raft and moved toward the pilot. He undressed her and then raped her in front of the other girls. After he finished, he declared, “You were really good. If you didn’t perform well, I was going to drown you and your friends.” He let out a loud laugh and restarted the engine.

When they floated toward Albanian soil fifteen minutes later, an unexpected welcoming party awaited them. All of the men standing on the shore hoisted machine guns. Nadia was even more surprised that some of the men wore uniforms. Her concern heightened once she lifted her eyes to the road above the beach and saw “POLICE” written on the side panels of two vehicles. How ironic. After getting so close to Italy, it looked as if she would end up languishing in an Albanian prison.

The police took the girls into custody and drove them in their squad cars to the city of Shkodra. But they never reached a police station. The officers brought them to a private home, and before departing each took a turn raping the girl of his choice.