Ideas - When your grandmother is accused of being a 'fascist spy'

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

It was a simple honeymoon photo from 1941. A stranger posted it online and the commentary was vicious. The woman in that picture was Albanian author Lea Ypi’s grandmother. In the midst of the Second World War and the violent end times of Mussolini’s government, Ypi’s grandmother must have been a fascist, a collaborator, a traitor to Albania. In her book, Indignity: A Life Reimagined, Ypi attempts to find the truth of her grandmother’s life, in a journey that mixes philosophy, fantasy, history, and family narrative.

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at Spexavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. I did not need to read the caption online to recognize my grandparents. The woman is clad in a long white fur coat. Her hands buried deep in its pockets. In the background, a pair of skis leans against the wall. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. My grandmother spoke often and fondly of those 10 days spent learning to ski in the dolomite. I felt the happiest person alive, she would say.

You may know the feeling. Looking at an old photo of a parent or a grandparent from a long time past, wondering what their lives were like, what did they believe, how did they live? That's what happened to Leah Opie, as she took in the image of her grandmother, striking a pose at a ski chalet in the Alps. I became absorbed by the question of what it meant to feel the happiest person alive in the winter of 1941, as war raged all over Europe, as never before. Opie is an Albanian author, philosopher, and political theorist. In 2021, she wrote a book called Free. coming of age at the end of history. It was a memoir of life before and after the fall of communist Albania,

a Soviet-era state that emerged from the wreckage of World War II. The book was hugely successful, won multiple awards, and was translated into dozens of languages. Though in some quarters in Albania, it was seen as a little too nostalgic, too critical of modern capitalism. In the wake of the book, success, someone posted a photo to Facebook of Opie's grandparents. The picture of two happy, dignified people living large at a ski resort sparked an online backlash.

Opie's grandparents were relaxing in fascist Italy, as Italy was busy conquering Albania. The comments under that Facebook photo were vicious. This post may include sensitive content. Are you sure you want to see it? I take a deep breath and click. And so, Opie began a journey through the archives of a dozen countries to learn more about her grandmother's life. A life far more complicated than that one photograph would suggest.

The result is her latest book, part history, part fiction, and part philosophical exploration of the concept of dignity. In dignity, a life reimagined, weaves scraps of archive documents to piece together the life of her grandmother, Le Mon Opie, who once relaxed in luxury in the Italian Alps and became a target of communist spies and regime collaborators for decades afterward.

Leah Opie is here now. Thank you for having me back. I want to start, if I may, with the book's title, Indignity, A Life Reimagined. What did you want to understand about dignity and indignity through investigating your grandmother's story? So the book is about the concept of dignity and what it means to defend one's dignity in an age of extremes, where dignity is both invoked and also in many ways manipulated and appropriated by different political forces, by different groups, each of which make claims on the dignity of the people, and each of which associated to something different. And I wanted through the life of my grandmother, a life that spanned from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,

to the interwar period, the financial crisis, the rise of fascism, then the Second World War, Nazis, then the arrival of communism in Eastern Europe, and eventually also the fall of communism, because my grandmother died in 2006. So in one life, you had all these different political systems. I wanted to investigate the meaning of dignity and what it means for this woman whose life I describe and imagine in the book to defend her dignity on the face of all these different attempts appropriated by fascists, by Nazis, by liberals, by communists, and to try and show also that it's possible to hold on to dignity even on the face of great indignity and great injustice, but also to show the cost of defending that dignity. I was curious as I was reading where the research and the digging and the finding out began and where the decision to write a book entered into the picture. At what stage did that happen? The photograph of my grandmother that was shared on social media by a stranger, someone I'd never met or heard of the name before, and it was a photograph of my grandmother youth that I had also never seen before. it turned out on doing further investigation that this photograph was held in the Secret Service Archive of former Communist Albania, where surveillance documents relating to my grandmother, as well as all her photographs and lots of papers from her youth were kept.

Her husband, my grandfather, was arrested upon the arrival of communist to power in Albania. So all her property was confiscated her belongings as well. And that's why this photo of her youth was held in the archive. but it was interesting that it showed up on this social media post and it was followed by lots of derogatory comments about her, people alleging that she might have been a spy. Some people said she was a communist spy. Some people said she was a fascist spy. Some people said she was both. And my grandmother no longer lived at that point. We were very, very close.

She was one of the most important people in my life and she was someone who raised me and raised me with this idea that even though she had had this life of ups and down, one should always hold on to one's dignity because dignity is not. not about honors or money or titles, the kinds of things that you lose in the change of political systems. It's something that you have inside you. And for me, seeing this photograph of her, of someone who is no longer alive, no longer able to defend their dignity or to speak in its behalf anymore, raise this question of legacy and what happens when someone who has had this difficult life but wanted to defend dignity regardless of all the difficulties. What does it mean when that person is no longer there and who is in charge of that project and who is in charge of speaking on behalf of the dead and of previous generations. And so raise this question of the

connection between dignity and legacy and then legacy and truth. And that's why the book there really becomes an entire investigation on what we can infer from the archives, from the sources, from history and what we must be able to think ourselves autonomously to connect these ideas. What started Uppi's search through the communist archives was that photo. From the book, Indignity, here's what happened when Uppi first saw that photograph online. And a warning, this section contains strong language. The photo, an old black and white image, was posted on social media by a man with a username Chim. A young, glamorous couple stared at the camera, while relaxing on sun loungers in front of a luxury hotel.

hotel. I had trouble connecting her personal rendition of those weeks with my knowledge of historical events, both in Albania and elsewhere. Operation Barbarossa and the Soviet Union, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the ongoing battle in Yugoslavia. All this would have been making headlines, just as she was learning to ski, relishing the crisp winter air. Was she indifferent to the most brutal battles of the most brutal war humanity had ever known? I had trouble squaring this with her personality and with her views. She was no fascist apologist of that I was certain, and she was far from indifferent to what was going on around her.

Perhaps she was simply trying to cope, as she had done throughout her life, sensing that something even worse was about to unfold, that her days of innocence were numbered. The rest of our family records disappeared, according to my grandmother, in 1946, after my grandfather was arrested by the communists for political agitation, propaganda, and collaboration with British intelligence officers, when the police came and took everything.

It meant there was nobody alive to question, and nothing left to track down. Nothing, that is, until that photo from Cortina of them as a couple, I had forgotten that I was looking at a photo of my grandparents on a stranger's social media page until the user comments started to multiply with the same speed as the likes, shares and hearts on the post. Is the Le Manupi pictured here related to Lea Upi, the philosophy professor? The old woman was a real lady. She hailed from one of Albania's most noble families.

She carried herself with such dignity, and those communist monsters robbed her of it. "'No, no,' I start typing. My grandmother always insisted that the one thing she never lost, even as everything else slipped away, was— But I am distracted by the next comment that flashes up on the screen. Albanians will never learn from history. Upi lectures around the world about how capitalism is wrong because it turns everything into a commodity,

presumably that includes her own criticism, for which she is paid handsomely. Meanwhile, she conveniently forgets her own grandfather who rot it for decades in a communist prison. Other remarks appear, accompanied by a warning from social media regulators. This post may include sensitive content. Are you sure you want to see it? I take a deep breath and click. You dishonored, not just your grandmother, but all the victims of communism, you communist bitch.

Then another comment follows. the grandmother too was a bitch and a third perhaps not a bitch but a communist spy and before that a fascist collaborator I stop reading and close the page

I want to talk about that decision to tell a story where large sections are written like a historical novel can you explain further why you decided to mix fiction with hard fact or as many hard facts as you could find

so in the first instance I was going to write just a sort of straight nonfiction book, which would be my reconstruction of the findings of the archive. And then very soon I discovered that both in Albania but also in Greece and in Italy where parts of my grandmother's lives had been taken place, I discovered that not just in communist archives but also in Greece, also in Italy, it was very hard to research women because there was a standpoint there that ordered facts in a certain way and that imposed an interpretation of those. those facts. And that, for example, my grandmother was born in Salonica shortly after, shortly before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. But her life was very much marked by the Ottoman Empire. And of course, you go to modern Greece and contemporary Thessaloniki. And the Greek nation state has really made a mark on how we, on memory, on how we think about sites, on cultural markers. And so it was really hard to grasp what had been going on

during the Ottoman Empire, for example. Or I went to Italy and I was told I was looking for my grandmother and they was told, well, good luck researching a woman, you know, you need to find something about the father or the grandfather or the uncle or the brother because women weren't even juridical subjects until very recently. And so they weren't subjects of the archive either. And this is what made me realize that I had gone with this naive belief of the nonfiction writer and researcher that I'm going to find the truth in the archive, but that actually the truth that I was finding was made by someone.

And there were a lot of other things that the archive would not deliver because it had deliberately excluded those perspectives. And that's where I then made the decision of writing some parts of the book in a more literary way, because I think with literature you can out of fragments construct unity, you can construct characters, you can create a kind of coherence that the archive doesn't have, but that with the use of imagination enables you to have access to those lives that the archive is deliberately excluding. You've described the writing or this gathering of information in the archives as having kind of a creative force behind it. Why do you describe it as having a creative force? Well, because as I say, the standpoint is very important.

And so when you think that at some point, we often access to archives and we often think about history as neutral, as impartial, as facts, as objects that we just find out there. And then we realized that someone has actually always made an intervention in the ordering of the facts or in signaling certain objects as relevant and other as completely irrelevant. And that is a creative intervention. So I thought when I was reading, for example, her surveillance files, clearly the point of view of the people who are surveilling her of the spies was there present from the start. And they had decided to report to certain information about her and to get rid of others. Sometimes you could see there was a benign collaborator. So someone would write something out, no, this woman is not a traitor or she's not a class enemy. She's actually perfectly compliant member of the society. And so we shouldn't

really be on her so much. And you could see they were trying to signal something. But you could also see that sometimes they created this information to be able to save her. And so clearly spies and collaborators and the officials and the bureaucrats were compiling those documents, they were making this aesthetic intervention on the file. So there was a kind of fiction of the archive. And in this very place where you think you'll find the truth, you actually find the fiction of someone. And sometimes I think, you know, when we write literature, if there is an effort to write literature in a way that is comprehensive and inclusive and has as many perspectives as possible, maybe there is more truth to that act, which is deliberately fictional, but also with this honesty and integrity of saying, look, I'm making out this life, but I'm making it out based on those facts. And maybe there is more authenticity there than in the truth of the archive. Perhaps it's more truthful than what's in there. How hard was that for you to put on that hat? This isn't your usual space of writing. It was really hard in part because it's hard for every historian who confronts with this mass of facts.

And again, there you also have to make an epistemic intervention. You have to decide also how you're going to interpret and how you're going to select and how you're going to put together certain documents that are relevant or not relevant. And it was very easy to get lost in all of these lives. And it was a world that I didn't really know. I didn't have access. It's a world that, the life that begins in 1918.

And so even just when you're writing, it starts in Salonica, in contemporary Saloniki, and just thinking about what was the city like in this world between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Greek modern state

where literally the street name changed from being Muslim names to being Greek Orthodox names or where you first had a mosque and that the mosque had become a cinema or where you had a great fire in the city which then gave the opportunity of redoing the urban infrastructure. And so you had to know was it before the fire or after the fire.

So all those decisions complicated and make this world completely alien and fascinating, but also really hard to write about even just very small decisions. Like she went to school and you had to think, how did she go to school? Did she walk? Did she go on a horse and carriage? Was there a car already? This already makes this process of selecting information really difficult, although really interesting as well. One last thing about this part of things is that you talk about this exercise as being also a way to dismantle the authority that is contained in these fragments in the archive.

Just tell me about that. Well, I think for me it was once I realized that I couldn't really trust the authority of the files, then it became a question of what can I ask? What are the perspectives that are being excluded here deliberately? and how can I try to find something that gives me information about the question that I'm interested in, not the question that the archive wants me to be interested in or those people who compiled the archive. And that's what, again, that's where literature really helped me, because literature often asks the question from the point of view of a subject and from the point of view from an existential perspective, from a psychological perspective.

So entering the lives of these characters, these people who then became characters, who enter those lives and you try to see the world from their perspective, And in seeing the world from their perspective, you then enter it also. You confront the archives and you confront the sources with questions that weren't there in the first place, but which you think should have been there and they were deliberately excluded. I want to turn to your grandmother herself. As a young woman in Salonika, she witnessed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And she was there, right there, when massive population movements happened,

in exchange between the Greeks and Turks. I know that she had spoken to you as that being a very difficult time in her life, maybe one of the worst. But I'm wondering how you think experiencing that, watching it happen actually shaped who she was. Yeah, I think it had a real impact in the way in which she thought about identity. And the way she thought about identity had a real impact on the way I now think about identity. I wrote my PhD thesis on cosmopolitanism. And I've been always fascinated by this idea of what does it mean to be a citizen of the world or at least to resist being. thought of as just a citizen of one particular place, just because you happen to be born in that

place. In her case, it was really interesting because she was very young when the Ottoman Empire collapsed. And so it was this transition from this way of thinking about identity that was imperial with territorially fluid boundaries, with lots of different languages. Salonica was a melting pot. It was very important trade and commercial and diplomatic center of the Ottoman Empire where there were Jews, Bulgarians, Romanians, Greeks, Turks. And of it became a Greek city, but Greeks at the point in which she was born weren't even the largest group in the city. The largest group were Sephardic Jews and she'd gone to school with them. And so she was very aware of the hybridity of culture and of identity and the fact the complexity

of these, all of these markers that we now take off as your Albanian or your Greek. And the way she thought about, and of course it was also a moment in history where then identities begin to consolidate around the nation state. And that drives a process. of then fighting the other or finding those who are different. And so this process of population movements and displacement and even when it wasn't a forced decision like with the Greeks and with the Turks,

the population exchange meant that the Greeks who were in Asia Minor had to return to Greece and the Turks were in Greece had to go to Turkey and Albanians like her were in the middle they could choose. But even when you don't have this deadline or when you don't have the coercion behind this decision, you still feel that there is pressure from society to actually go to where you think you're being.

belong. And so in her case, she moved as an 18-year-old to Albania because that's where she was told that that's the language she spoke at home. And that's where she was told that she came from, even though she'd never been to Albania. That was her decision. It was her decision, but very much under pressure from these forces of the time because she was an Albanian in Greece and it wasn't okay anymore to be an Albanian in Greece. And of course, she went to Albania and she was a Greek in Albania because she had come from Greece. And so she had this way of thinking to go back to the initial question about identity where you're nowhere really at home. And there are so many people like her. And so many of us who actually are nowhere exactly, we don't feel like we really belong

anywhere because of this complexity with which we approach the question of identity. It's true. And I did wonder whether, you know, you just alluded to the lessons that we can learn from her experience and the shifting boundaries of what an identity is, but specifically in situations where empires crumble into nation states. are there some blanket lessons that we can learn from how identity is shaped in those specific situations? I think in that case, it's really about the artificiality of the nation state principle and the way in which we now order the world by taking that completely for granted. We think that the nation state has always been there and has shaped people and we belong to nation states. And we are always asked, you know, where do you come from?

And actually, it's just what we have a passport of and from. But if you think about the fact that passports didn't even exist until, you know, the beginning of the century and that these are all artificial decisions made by people in power, made by particular political elites, often for reasons of avoiding war, but often also for their own self-interest. And yet, those artificial markers become the way in which we naturalize the world. And then people fight wars on behalf of those principles and they fight each other and they really, they become highly contentious questions. That picture from Cortina featured two people, Limon Uppi, Leah's grandmother, and Aslan Uppi, her grandfather. Aslan was the wealthy son of a former prime minister of Albania.

And after the Second World War, when the communists took power, the family name was forever tied to the old wealthy elite. What Leia found in the archives is a picture of a cosmopolitan woman, born into privilege who suddenly found herself an enemy of the state. On the facade of the building that has by now become familiar, two words are written in gigantic capital letters, files, authority. I had always pictured my visits to the office

as akin to surveying the aftermath of a battle, or like a frozen pit, a descent into Dante's ninth circle of hell, where are the ultimate sinners, those who betrayed their family, their friends, their country, and ultimately humanity are punished. Surely this is where the old communist spies also belong,

for turning the trust placed in them into a cog in the ruthless machinery of the secret police. On page six of investigative file 531, the strange word, Greek, keeps recurring. Lemann Upi, born in Salonica, of Greek citizenship, Greek citizenship, I repeat to myself. It's bizarre to think of my grandmother as Greek. She spoke French to me most of the time,

and although I knew she was born in Salonica, I hardly thought of Salonica as a place, let alone as a Greek city. She always referred to it as Salonique la Magnific. It's hard for me to associate the word Greek with my grandmother. I continue to scroll down the file and up again. There it is. at the top of page 7.

On the basis of evidence concerning oppositional activity against the people and on suspicion of being an agent for a foreign intelligence service, in particular the Greek one, we propose to categorize as 2B and to prepare a preliminary investigation on citizen Le Mans Upi,

born in Salonica, of Albanian ethnicity and Greek citizenship. Typeset and signed by Lieutenant Colonel D.B. The reasons and evidence we propose for a preliminary investigation around the possible categorization of 2B are as follows. 1. The fact that even though Le Mane Uppi has been living here for a long time, she continues to have Greek citizenship and is always hoping to be able to return to Greece. 2. The fact that even though she has been privately advised to apply for Albanian citizenship,

she has not only rejected that option, but in the presence of the elements she tried, trusts most, she has expressed hatred towards the People's Republic and the party in power. She has also expressed hatred towards the Soviet Union and indeed towards the whole socialist camp. I stop reading. In the presence of the elements she trusts most. I'm speaking with Leah Opie, Albanian philosopher, writer and author of the book, Indignity, a life reimagined. This is Ideas. Nala Ayad. This program is brought to you in part by Speck Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot.

Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Spex Savers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. book at specksavers.cavers.cavers.com. I exams are provided by optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.com to learn more.

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Leia Opie's book is about the nature of dignity in a world of chaos and collapse. Her grandmother was born in Greece in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Her life, which began in comfort and privilege, was shaped by shifting borders and political upheaval. Opie's grandparents with their connections to the old world's elites

found themselves targets of the communist Albanian state. And, according to the archives, they were closely watched by friends and acquaintances. One of the most exciting discoveries made while trying to piece together my grandmother's life from the files

are the collaborators' names. I read the pseudonyms out loud. The informant's names sound like objects. One, the tribune, two, white chewing gum, three, March wind. The employees laugh. They're all like that, they say. The pseudonyms of collaborators, one wonders who came up with them.

I don't find it funny. These three entities are like vindictive Greek gods. They're about to descend on my grandmother in the form of a natural catastrophe, a hurricane or a flood. It's easy to be distracted. The files are sometimes tedious. long lists of street names, followed by the time in which the object was located, like some sort of prehistoric Google map.

Occasionally I feel guilty that as I begin to read I lose interest in my grandmother's life. Instead, I wonder which, if any of my descendants, might one day search through the large set of online data about me. Communist authorities could only have dreamt of such extensive development in the forces of production. Perhaps Le Mans' humanity mattered more to the system tracking her preferences than I do to the one tracking mine. She is surveilled by her peers. They observe her. They make a note of her movements.

They meticulously record her location. They must care about what she thinks specifically. In the way no company will ever care about me specifically. I am a generic consumer, a cog in a data. gathering machine, a means to profit. She's still recognized as human by another human. For all the asymmetry in their power, for all the manipulation and control, she remains an end in herself, a subject whose dignity can never be fully destroyed. You say in your book that your grandmother's past stood before you like a quote, like a tough border guard asking, what is the purpose of your

prison. How would you answer that question? Yeah, I'm not sure that I had a good answer in the book because I don't think one has a good answer to the border guard either. We find and the way in which we answer, and for me, the interesting, it's not so much about having an answer. It's more about putting pressure on the question, just like with all these questions of migration and belonging and identity. If we accept that we have to give an answer to that question, we've already lost somehow. And often the answer is to be able to challenge. and say, well, why are you asking me this? You know, who are you?

What is the standpoint from which you have the authority to ask me this? And what is the human morale that is behind this? What is the kind of moral ground for this authority rather than just the political ground that you have because someone has put you in that position and you have to ask me this question? And what the book does, I think, is really to try and exactly put pressure on this idea that we often take for granted very simple things about ourselves, about the way in which the world is ordered and structured for us. And we accept the question.

And then we try to answer it, not realizing that sometimes the answer is to just actually question the question. And say, well, why are you framing it this way? Why is this of interest to you? So not to push the metaphor too much, but did you get past the border guard? Do you think in the end? I think only insofar as what the book tries to do is to dismantle this authority. So I suppose I went past, but not in a conventional way. Maybe around. Like a kind of illegal way of accessing and or I found to try. But I think I really did try to challenge this idea. And also when we think about the past, we always assume that there is a point of view of the present that carries more integrity than anything that happened in the past. So we interrogate the past, thinking that there are some lessons that we learned and that the standpoint of the present is naturally superior to that of the past.

And for me, writing the book, I was very aware of the fact that I was writing at a moment where we can no longer say that about ourselves. This might have been the case until 10 years ago. Maybe we had grounds to say, well, we learned something from World War II. we have an international human rights regime or we have international institutions. And so there was some lessons from history that developed into being entrenched into norms that we now all accept. But then when I was writing the book, all of that was crumbling before my eyes. And so I couldn't no longer trust the superiority of the present to the past. And so this question of how do you engage a past that you don't think the present has overcome really

and that it's in fact a past that keeps returning and history that keeps repeating itself, that's where it became really important for me to approach it in a way that would tease out the analogies and the overlaps with the present. Still, it must have been a destabilizing experience. It was a very destabilizing. And I think what made it particularly destabilizing was this idea, this eerie idea of living in a world where I constantly heard about migration or remigration or population movements or manufactured consent around questions of membership or this idea that, you know, there would be cities created for people to be. be safe and they could all be moved there and forced to move there so they could be safe. All of these were very much arguments that if you read the 1920s and 30s, this was constantly being discussed, you know, the idea that population exchange, for example, was the answer

to not having a genocide. Yeah, the unmixing of peoples was a solution to not have. And there you are living in real time through conflicts of the presence where exactly the same solutions are being presented. And you know from the history of people like my grandmother what huge consequences and what tragedy is produced on someone's life. And it was this sensation of just seeing this old movements and old shifts return in the present without very much awareness of how it was just the history repeating itself and that we weren't really learning very much.

Leah's grandfather, Aslan, Opie, was arrested in 1947, accused of crimes of betrayal against Albania. He confessed to meeting with British intelligence agents and speaking against the communist government. And according to the archives, here is what his official confession says. On various occasions, I expressed myself as follows. The popular democratic government of Albania is a dictatorial government. They kill, imprison, and pass judicial sentences in an arbitrary way. The measures taken by the organs of the state security service are harsh and extreme. I said that in Albania there is not.

no freedom of speech or of the press. Only communist elements can write freely while others are censored. The statement was read out to me, and I signed it of my own will without pressure. Signature, defendant Aslan Uppi. Also in the archives, his sentence. The military tribunal has decided to uphold the charges against the suspect and condemn as follows. Aslan Uppi is sentenced to 20 years of prison, forced labor, the loss of all civil and political rights, as well as the confiscation of his wealth, both financial and in kind.

The sentence starts from the date of arrest. Tirana, 26 November, 1947. After Aslan's trial, Le Mans was ordered to leave Tirana, the capital of Albania. She refused According to this archived letter to the Albanian government. On the 16th of this month, a police officer knocked on my door to ask me to join him at police station number one, since I was suspected of not obeying the orders of the urbanization commission. Since I feel I am not guilty in this matter, and since the accusations are unfounded, I am writing to request that you please intervene so that the matter can be reconsidered and the charge is dropped, and so that I can remain in Tirana.

with my young child. Le Mans Upi, Tirana, 20th October, 1948. The letter was ignored. Le Mans was exiled to a work farm in the countryside. How much agency do you think your grandmother had in the face of all these political forces that she encountered? Well, she always insisted that she remained free throughout these shifts and that, in fact,

this is what gave her the strength to resist the kinds of compromises that many people who found themselves in similar circumstances did not resist. So often she was her husband went to prison and then she would be after she, after he went to prison, she would be called on in the Secret Service offices with an offer to become an informant. And she always said she resisted this offer. And the reason she resisted it was that she said, well, there was something inside her that nobody could take away from her and that she was very aware of the cost of it. And so there was a cost. But she resisted making those compromises. behalf and in the name of this inner freedom and of this agency that she always had. Now, of course, one thing is to exercise this agency. And the other thing is whether it works or not, whether the consequences, you know, in many ways, the book is also a way of exploring the cost of doing that and the cost of defending one's integrity because it's a life of tragedy. And that's why it's also important then to think about legacy. And that's where the connection with the next generation, because someone spent their life holding onto a principle. And yet you see and you ask yourself, what is the meaning of this life that is now over when I experience the same things. And what is my responsibility as someone

who acts in the present to try and remember that and to remember that here is someone who didn't want to give up on their dignity and who thought that that dignity is exactly what was carrying them through those circumstances? That's why I think it's a lot about how we engage with those past lives, not just as lives of the past, but also as lives that shape us and orient us in the present. A lot of the lives that you describe in this book are ruined by holding on to dignity, by standing by those principles. What is the lesson we're supposed to take away from that? So my, this is a difficult question and that's in a way the question of the book and that's why it starts with legacy. It starts with this photo on social media because one argument would be to say, yeah, you so you tried. And this is also always the, the response, the anti-moralist response, right? Or the ultra-realist response to the moralist that says, okay, so you're holding on to these principles and yet look at the tragedy and look at what's the outcome and none of it still. days and so all those efforts were pointless.

And that's why for me it's a really important lesson to learn that the next generation is responsible for continuing to carry over those principles. And the meaning of those lives isn't contained and isn't finished when the life is over. It becomes a question of what does the next generation do to carry over those lessons and to speak on behalf of those lost truths in history and of those silences that then power constantly tries to suppress and the voices that power constantly tries to suppress and to give a voice to those silences. So I think exactly because there are these tragedies and because there are these consequences that aren't ever happy consequences, it becomes a mission of many generations,

each of which has to do their share in carrying these through these messages of dignity and power. One of the epigraphs that you include in the book comes from Emmanuel Kant, quote, in the kingdom of ends, everything has either a price or a dignity. What does that line mean to you? I think Kant was writing about what has an inner worth beyond comparison, and that is the fact that we have this capacity for free will and that people treat each other as not just as means to an end, but also as ends in themselves.

And so there's something about the human that is like that. But on the other hand, my book is actually also a reflection on that epigraph, because although Kant thought, well, the free will has inner will, worth beyond comparison. And then we also have this instrumental rationality and this calculating logic that also shapes our relations. There is a price to defending dignity in this way. There is a price to be paid for treating other people as ends in themselves and not just as means. And so the whole book is a reflection. That's why the title is indignity rather than dignity, because most of what we see is actually in dignity. And so defending dignity, preserving it is an active effort and one that often fails.

And when it succeeds, it doesn't succeed just because of the person who is defending it. It succeeds because of the next generation and because of the way people relate to each other so as to preserve this meaning and this larger moral message. I just want to sharpen one question I haven't asked exactly. You've touched on it, but what the relationship is between moral agency and dignity. So dignity is the way I see it is exactly this capacity for moral agency that we have is what gives dignity to people. But the capacity is one thing, and exercising that capacity and succeeding when you exercise is another thing. So one is a moral question. You know, we have dignity, we have this capacity. We are the kinds of beings that could act on this free will. On the other hand, we are not just that. We're

also beings that are manipulated that act out of, you know, respond to propaganda. We respond to fake news. We respond to all kinds of epistemic constraints. So this moral agency by itself is not enough in the absence of a moral world. And in the case where you have political institutions, as in my grandmother's life that actively try to undermine that agency, the moral question becomes also a political question of how can you reflect this in the world, in outside and in trying to change in such a way that all of us, this capacity, they can also realize it. I want to anchor all of this in that example of that moment when your grandmother had the choice to flee Albania, just as the new communist government was starting to crack down,

but to do so would have meant collaborating with a Nazi. What do we learn about dignity from that exact moment, that turning point in her life? I think we learn, on the one hand, the cost of protecting dignity and preserving dignity. We also learn the fact that the consequences of those moral decisions are out of our hands. And so we can't know. We can follow a principle. But we don't really know where that principle is going to lead us. Because in the end, in her case, her life turned out to be a series of tragedies. And if only she'd made a different decision, her husband would not have gone to

reason. She wouldn't have had deported. She wouldn't have been a single mother. And of course, there's another aspect to it, which is I would not have been born. And so there is also a sort of question of identity, which is that often we are what we are also as a result of those tragedies. For the people who found themselves, this was a tragedy. But for me, I owe my life to those decisions and to those wrong decisions. What do you do with, I mean, this is how you described it in the book. You say, in the end, my life is owed to the harm that she, your grandmother, endured. what do you even do with that fact? How do you grapple with it? Yeah, I think for me, the way to respond to that dilemma is to think, okay, so it is what it is. Here I am. I can not, I'm born now.

And I have to think about what responsibilities I have for the future rather than going back to the past. So I need to think about what can I do to out of this life that has been the result of those tragedies. What can I do to give a meaning to it that somehow Vinny's, indicates a standpoint and this moral standpoint and this dignity that was involved also in these other lives. Because it didn't happen in their lifetime. Yeah, it didn't happen in my lifetime. Yeah. But of course, I was very mindful of the fact that, and this is a big problem in philosophy,

so-called non-identity problem. People say, well, would it have been better to never have been born? Because I was the result of all those consequences. And for me, that's a very nihilistic outcome. So a much more productive way of thinking about it is to think, okay, how can I now feel responsible and act responsibly and make sure that I vindicate that dignity in my actions going forward and in the way in which I speak about those past lives and about my relationship to them. Do you feel that this book and this exercise, this endeavor that you've been on, vindicates your grandmother's life?

I think, I hope so, but I also cannot be fully sure because in the end, it's my perspective rather than her perspective. I feel there is this is a sense of kind of tragic loss. We don't have access to those perspectives. I don't have her voice. Everything I say about her is mediated by what I think. And so in that sense, and there's a point in the book where I talk about culture and I say, well, this is all culture is just faring the bed in the world of the living and imposing on them our projects, our ends, our questions. And that is, there's a sense of loss. Maybe those lives would want to be just left alone and be left to be out there.

But I feel if we have, if we interact with them in a responsible way, if we think about what is the meaning, that I can ascribe to this life, that is as continuous as possible with how this person would have seen it. I know it's not her voice. It's not my grandmother's voice. But maybe it's a voice close enough that it would make my grandmother not resentful of being used in this way. But aren't the dead kind of also imposing questions on us? I mean, don't their interests continue to live even though they have left us? They absolutely. And of course we, I mean, so the fact of, for example, they make wills and we try to respond to them. And there is a paragraph in the book. where I talk about the fact that my grandmother always said to me, I'd like you to say a few words about me when I'm dead. And I was haunted by, you know, what I said and how I, what I said was very artificial.

And it was only when I finished writing the book that I thought, finally, I've managed to say the words that I wanted to say about her. So they direct us. But of course, they have much less power of directing us and we have in taking the way they direct us and then shaping or reshaping or changing the questions. And this is why it's a constant, I think, moral dilemma of how we engage with the dead and knowing that we've done so in an authentic way is very difficult. And we can never fully know that we have really been true to their intentions or to their aims

because we no longer have access to those intentions and to those aims and to those minds. They are just lost to the past. Beyond looking into their past and trying to answer some of the questions that weren't when they were alive, is there any other way to vindicate the tragic lives of our predecessors? I think culture and memory and the way in which we constructs memory and we think about memory, and we think about memory, that is perhaps the most important thing we can do. And the way in which the dead feature and the way in which we remember them

and the efforts to remember them from a point of view that they would have recognized, as opposed to one that is completely beyond anything that they would have recognized as ours, is maybe one way that sort of links us. And yeah, I think, but it's difficult. And I'm not sure that we can never know that we've done it fully, that we've done them justice and that we've done it right. I want to linger for a moment on this because in my estimate it's part of the appeal of this book that you've written and maybe the wide appeal of this book is that in some way are we not all those of us who are alive today the products of absolute horror and catastrophes that have happened before we were born. Yeah, I think we are.

But we're also the product and this was the bit that I was very keen to emphasize in the book. We're also the product of the struggle for something different. And so while, yes, we are the product of these tragedies, there are in our institutions, in our fights now, memories and efforts and examples or counter examples, rather, of ways of thinking about the world that is different. And there are these real moments of freedom and of opening. And I don't think it is in the way in which often it's presented politically as though that's guaranteed and it's always there and our institutions are free institutions. I think what our institutions have and transmit is more really the struggle for freedom. and there are moments where that struggle is there and lasts and it produces something that can last a bit longer. But it's an active effort to keep it that way.

And we can now see we're now at a moment in history where everything, you know, this idea of international law and international institutions or this idea that there's something to justice that is beyond might is right. That is all being challenged. And all of that needs to be sent from scratch and defended from scratch. And I think our connection with the past is what enables us to think about the positive moments also of the past where those unscernied. Fetters fought for us to have access to a way of thinking differently and of being different. There is something about the human spirit, my grandmother would say, that withstands all attempts at offense, injury or humiliation, something animals are incapable of, because they are incapable of thoughts disconnected from their immediate existence. We call it dignity. Back then,

she could still speak for herself. In death, she's powerless, unable to mould or vindicate her legacy. And yet, a version of her somehow continues to exist alongside those comments. Like the photon, a desecrated grave, continues to exist alongside the pile of bones, scattered in the mud.

Does dignity require someone's continuing existence? An active capacity to defend that dignity? Protected from assault? stand up in its name? Or is it an inherent quality we possess just because of who we are, disciplined by a will that is free, and for that reason also susceptible to error?

And if the preservation of dignity requires one to be alive, does this mean that dignity is not so immaterial, after all, that a dead person cannot have dignity, that dignity is the kind of property that turns to dust, just like someone's hair, skin or fingernails.

My grandmother, however, is condemned to silence. You know, the smile in your grandmother's face during the Second World War in Italy as the fighting raged, with everything that you've learned about her and everything that you still don't know, how do you think about that photo now? I think it was a moment of her life where she felt that she was in control somehow. And it's also an interesting disjunction between a world in which where everything's out of control and feels out of control in this World War II. And yet for her, she thought about this moment in her life. She often spoke of it as being the happiest time of her life.

And when I saw that smile on the photo, I immediately thought of this memory. I had never seen the photo before, but she told me all these stories about her honeymoon and how this was the happiest time of her life. It's because she felt that from that moment onwards her life was no longer hers. And so she had no more agency over it. And so she felt nostalgic and she had this nostalgia. But nostalgia wasn't really nostalgia for a place. It was more nostalgia for a time where she had felt that her life was hers to live. And that's how I made sense then of this episode and the way that she had singled this out.

And maybe she wasn't really, it wasn't the happiest time of her life. It's more that in the light of what happened after she thought of this moment as something that stood out because it was a marker between a past and a present that was then much more continuous with my life, with her role in Albania, with the way in which she was continuing to be with my grandfather, for example. So all of that, I think this interpretation of the photo was very much reliant on something that was her post-factory construction of an event that preceded a great tragedy that then marked her life. So therefore, defined it as a good time because it was everything else that came after. It was horrible. Yeah. There were passages that were really compelling in the book where you describe yourself essentially cheerleading her as you were.

watched almost imagining in real time these terrible people saying these terrible things about her or doing the opposite. It felt as though you were with her on this journey. Yeah, but I think it's because I had a sort of human solidarity with her. And so I don't think, I mean, of course I was cheerleading with grandmother, but I also felt that there was this woman that was trying to teach me a lesson about how to live with dignity in times of great crisis. And I wanted to draw strength. And I did get some strength from that woman and from that life. And whether it was my grandmother or not was less relevant because for me I was cheering and I wanted to, it was a sort of strange moment of hope in an age of hopelessness. And I wanted to talk about this life in a way that would

also signal something to those who engage with this life in the present about the fact that you shouldn't give up on everything, that you should try to keep the struggle and you should try and fight and that there's something that we never lose even in the bleak times that we live in. And for that reason. I think I was cheering a role model as much as my grandmother. Had that photo not come along, do you think you would have ended up in this role in some way or another? I think I would have written a very different book. I mean, I might have written a book about my grandmother anyway, but I think there was something about the form of the book that was really triggered by the way in which I found this story. And there is the hybrid nature of the book,

this movement between fiction and nonfiction and all the methodological questions that I raise and all this, the fact that it's a book that is as much about truth as it is about legacy or the fact that it's a book that talks about reconciliation, not as something in the past, but as something in the future, all of those imperatives, I think, were reconstructed more because of the way in which I found the photo. And in terms of how you think about dignity, do you have a new definition of dignity after this exercise? No, I think it was the same as her definition of dignity. And I think it's because my understanding of the way I think about morality or values or our place in the world is very much shaped by how she thought about it. And I didn't change my mind after this. I just saw more perhaps how hard it was. And I was much more aware of the consequences. But in terms of the content and how I thought about it and the responsibilities, it's very much the way she thought about it.

And I very much still agree that there is something about the human being that has this core capacity for moral agency. And that is what we call dignity. I'm so grateful to see you here in our studio and to talk about this with you. Thank you so much for coming in. Thank you for having me. Leah Opie is an Albanian philosopher, political theorist, and author of the book, Indignity, A Life Reimagined. Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast. If you like the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive, where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes.

This episode was produced by Pauline Holdsworth and Matthew Laysen Rider. Technical production, Sam McNulty. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.