Daughters of the KGB Read Online Free PDF Page A

appears that some have already been destroyed. Also, while certain members of parliament, some of whom spent ten years and more in Hoxha’s prisons for a single indiscreet remark, want to reveal everything, others consider that this would lead to revenge and blood feuds in the rural population.
    When the author was recovering his Stasi file from the BStU, in the same reading room was a thin elderly man holding his head in his hands and moaning, ‘ Wir waren nur arme Menschen. ’ We were only poor people. God knows what awful secret he had just learned from his file. The point of stating that here is that the people who suffered under the KGB-clone secret police services in Central and Eastern Europe were not only the intellectuals, educated dissidents and politicians. Many of those locked away from their families for years, even decades, were ordinary men and women whose whole lives were ruined for reasons unknown or so slight that they would not merit even a cautionary warning in any democracy.
    When someone is released after a long stay in even the most enlightened form of incarceration, he or she has become institutionalised and may never lead a normal life again for that simple reason. Most of those released after long confinement in a Gulag-type camp have in addition to cope with severe physical and mental health problems. After the initial euphoria of release, many found they could not adjust to the disorientating chaos of the post-Communist era, and committed suicide. In Albania, from a population of only 3 million, an estimated 200,000 people were locked away in Enver Hoxha’s Gulag at one time or another, labouring in mines and construction projects with inadequate food and clothing and no safety precautions. So, almost every family has or had a relative or friend whose life was ruined by Communism in this way. A quarter-century after the end of Hoxha’s 45-year dictatorship, fewer than 3,000 of the former political prisoners are still alive.
    Lavdrim Ndreu spent most of his life in a prison camp. For the past twenty years, he has lived in part of a derelict former football stadium with other homeless men he calls ‘my cousins from the camp’. They have been promised compensation for the time spent in labour camps and prisons. A law passed in 2007 entitled former political prisoners to compensation of €14.30 for every day they had spent incarcerated, but even this was to be paid in eight instalments because it amounted to around €400m – a considerable item in the Albanian budget. A cynic might say the delays in payment are deliberate because ex-detainees are dying earlier than the rest of the population, so with every year that passes, the government is saving money. Protests have included ex-prisoners dying on hunger strikes and at least two setting themselves on fire in Tirana. According to a welfare organisation that attempts to rehabilitate the ex-detainees, many of them suffer chronic ill-health. Others, released younger, have married much later than they would have in normal times and are struggling to support their children, who themselves suffer the delayed-action effect of Albania’s Communist era. 2
    The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) learned that, of the hundreds of thousands of files in the Sigurimi archives, only 14,000 have been conserved and many of these show signs of having been crudely sanitised in the last days of the Sigurimi. A few individuals were able to find information about their own cases. Aged 23 in 1974, Fatos Lubonja was locked away for seventeen years – the best part of his adult life – his identity reduced to a number in the notorious prison camp at Spac. After serving five years for having kept a hidden diary which included unwise criticism of the regime, he was informed that his sentence had been extended on the grounds that he had become a dissident in the camp. He was freed when Communism collapsed in 1991.
    BIRN was able to trace a thick Sigurimi