The Qafa family name has been synonymous with fighting for Albanian independence for over three hundred years.

Since the 1600s, Qafa men have lost their lives and taken lives fighting against the Ottoman Turks, the Yugoslavian Serbs, and the communists. Simon Qafa tells the story of Pjeter Cup Qafa, his father, who was known as "the legend of the mountains" for his role as one of the most important freedom fighters of his day.

Simon's life is chronicled here with a roller coaster journey from his childhood in Albania and Kosovo, the seminary in Rome, prison in New York, and as a family man and active advocate against communism.

DECEMBER 5, 1977

DETROIT, MICHIGAN

In a very modest home on Dane Street, a middle-class Detroit neighborhood, Pjeter and Liza Qafa raised their three sons and three daughters the best they could. The Albanian couple wanted their children to become Americans in every sense of the word and embrace the American way of life.

The Qafa family had immigrated to the United States to escape the suffocating, pathetic scourge of a life under communism in Albania.

Pjeter and Liza taught their children respect for the old Albanian ways of family devotion and the rules of the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini, devotion to the Roman Catholic Church, loyalty to their new adopted country, and a fervent disdain for communist rule. The Kanun, a compilation of northern Albanian traditional customary laws codified from oral history by a medieval prince, was a large part of the family's way of life.

It was the communist Albanian government that forced the Qafa family to flee the country which owned, or at least to attempt to own their very hearts and souls. ...