Today he is a businessman in the USA, but in 1989, during the communist period, Beqir Potka decided to escape at the age of 23.

His story has been turned into a book entitled “American Dream”, the author of which is writer, Eris Rusi.

In an interview for Euronews Albania, Beqir Potka spoke about how he escaped and moved to the United States of America.

“I escaped on February 8, 1989. I was 23 years old. My family has been persecuted since communism came into force. Grandfather’s brother was in America, he emigrated around the year 1920. He worked and sent money back to Albania to my grandfather. My grandfather invested it, bought fertile land, rented it out, and after the agrarian reform, they took our land. I was 7 years old when I was in the village and my father was arrested. I was close with a cousin of mine and after some time, we both agreed that we had to find a way out. We knew a soldier at the border, on Grazhdan mountain, we took the soldier with us and escaped. After spending 3 days in the mountains, we ran out of cookies, everything. After we entered the Hellenic land, there was still a worse thing, because we didn’t know anything, the language, at the time there were about 32 Albanians in all of Greece. The army interrogated us. They did not torture us. After that, I applied to come as a refugee in the United States. 16 months after staying in Greece, the US embassy approved us to go to America as refugees”, said Beqir Potka.