Mohimi i Kujtesës: Është koha që Shqipëria të ballfaqohet me të kaluarën e saj

 
Mohimi i Kujtesës: Është koha që Shqipëria të ballfaqohet me të kaluarën e 
saj komuniste 

Denial Of Memory: It’s Time For Albania To Confront Its Communist Past –  
OpEd



By: _Eurasia  Review_ (http://www.eurasiareview.com/author/admin/) August 
19, 2012  

 
By Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi 
Communist dictator Enver Hoxha subjected Albania to forty-five years of one 
 of the most centralized and repressive totalitarian regimes that the world 
has  ever known. At least 100,000 Albanians were arrested, tortured, and 
imprisoned.  Several thousand more were murdered from 1945 until Hoxha died 
and the regime of  his successor, Ramiz Alia, collapsed in 1991. 
As the Alia regime began to crumble in 1990, the Communist elite fought 
back.  Food and energy supplies dwindled and thousands of Albanians scurried on 
boats  to reach freedom in Italy. The flight was captured on television 
screens around  the world. But when the first democratically elected government 
of Sali Berisha  came to power in 1992, there was no reckoning with life in 
Albania under  communism. The Berisha government was praised by the 
international community for  a bloodless shift from Hoxha’s horrific regime to 
democracy. This praise was  rightly deserved, but not the denial of memory that 
underlay it. Sali Berisha  was Enver Hoxha’s personal physician. Although he 
did not personally participate  in the surveillance, torture, arrest, 
imprisonment in unspeakable conditions,  and murder of Albanians deemed “enemies 
of the people” by Hoxha and his  henchmen, Berisha and his family lived a 
privileged life while so many of his  fellow citizens were suffering and 
dying. 
 
Albania
Like other Eastern European nations that emerged from fascism under Nazi  
domination during World War II only to be engulfed by Communism, Albania 
buried  the story of the Holocaust (even though unlike any other nation, the 
role of  Albanians during World War II consisted of saving every Jew who either 
lived in  Albania or sought asylum therei). The suppression of the 
Holocaust was  facilitated by the fact that the majority of European Jewry who 
survived were  psychologically unable to convey the horrors that they had 
experienced,  especially to a public that wanted to forget the war and move on. The 
same  pattern would follow after the fall of communism. In Albania, the 
history of the  Stalinist Communist regime under Enver Hoxha was suppressed, 
and the majority of  survivors were afraid to speak about the atrocities 
inflicted on them by their  own people. Two decades after the fall of communism, 
Albania has still failed to  come to terms with its past. 
Reconciling with their emergence from 400 years of Ottoman rule, followed 
by  Nazi occupation during World War II, and then forty-five years of 
communism in  the 20th century is the task of all countries and ethnic groups in 
the Balkans.  In 2012, many countries in Eastern Europe have embarked on an 
accounting of the  Communist era. As Lukasz Kaminski, the president of Poland’
s Institute of  National Remembrance, told The New York Times in February 
2012, 
“In order to defend ourselves in the future against other totalitarian  
regimes, we have to understand how they worked in the past, like a vaccine.  
Across Central and Eastern Europe a consensus of silence appears to have  
ended, one that never muted all criticism and discussion but did muffle voices  
crying out for a long-awaited reckoning.”ii
In spite of the ongoing internal debate, Albania unfortunately is not among 
 the former Communist nations engaged in a long-awaited reckoning. There 
have  been no public forms of closure—no trials, no imprisonment of the 
torturers, no  truth commissions—only amnesty for the perpetrators. Opening up the 
Communist  archives is essential to revealing to the world what happened 
under the Hoxha  regime and to bringing long overdue closure for the victims—
not to mention  laying the groundwork for giving them national recognition 
and reparations for  their suffering. 
As the renowned literary figure Ismail Kadare has written in his 
introduction  to Bedri Blloshmi’s 2010 account of the murder of his brother Vilson and 
Genc  Leka by the Hoxha regime: 
“Communism has fallen in Albania, but not its dust and stench. The snake 
eggs  are still everywhere. They continue to spawn deception, psychological 
violence,  and particularly hatred. They are spread out in the left and right 
parties, in  the small and big ones. They remain vigilant to ensure the 
historic protection  of the fallen dictatorship. They instigate a superficial 
critique, often at the  level of poems and artists, to turn attention away 
from that which constituted  the essence of the system: genuine crime.”iii 
To expose the “genuine crime” requires a confrontation with Albania’s  
Communist past—a confrontation that entails first of all listening to the 
voices  of Enver Hoxha’s victims. In what follows are the oral histories of three 
 Albanian Americans (Pellumb Lamaj, Raymond Sejko, and Eqerem Mujo) who 
managed  to survive years of incarceration in the infamous Spaç Prison. 
Resistance to Persecution, Imprisonment, Torture, and Murder: The Story of  
Pellumb Lamaj
From 1945 to 1991, some 5,500 men and women were executed, and close to  
100,000 sentenced to prison (forty prisons in number) and fifty forced labor 
and  internment camps because they were considered “enemies of the people.” 
Poet and  activist Pellumb Lamaj, who made his way to the United States two 
years after  the fall of communism, would turn out to be one of them. He was 
twenty years  old, when he was sent to the Spaç prison in 1979, where he 
would spend eleven  years of his life. 
Pellumb was born on a farm in Clirim, Albania, near the city of Fier, on  
January 4, 1959. Because there was a concentration of anti-Communist 
resistance  in this region, many families were placed in internment camps. In 1967, 
when  Pellumb was eight years old, his father, who was supporting a family 
of seven on  meager wages, was charged and convicted by a “kangaroo court” 
for raising his  own livestock and trading his cows for milk without 
permission from the local  government. 
Earlier, during World War II, members of the Lamaj family and his mother’s  
family, the Lepenicas, were killed while fighting against the Italian 
fascists  and then the Nazis as members of the “National Front” (Balli 
Kombëtare). In both  cases, they were betrayed by Communists. Xhelal Lepenica, Pellumb
’s great uncle,  was killed during the civil war that erupted in Albania at 
the conclusion of  World War II. After his murder, Albanian Communist 
forces danced on his grave,  burned and destroyed his property, and confiscated 
all of his material  possessions. From then on, the brutal and torturous 
regime of Enver Hoxha  inflicted pain and suffering on the Lamaj and Lepenica 
families for decades.  This intensified after Qemal Lepenica, one of Pellumb’s 
uncles, fled from  Albania in 1951 to Germany. 
After his father’s conviction and incarceration in 1967, Pellumb, his 
mother,  and siblings were forcibly transferred to a village named Skrofotine, 
near  Vlora. As Pellumb has recounted: 
“We were placed in the middle of nowhere—my mother with five children. As 
a  boy of 8, subconsciously, I began to understand the meaning of the 
Communist  terror. My father’s incarceration led to the most difficult period in 
our lives.  During this time, my mother was my hero. She was the backbone of 
the family. At  school, the other children would call us kulak, which meant ‘
enemy of the  people.’ When I went home, I would ask my mother, ‘How 
should I respond to these  taunts?’ She said, ‘Tell them that you are proud to 
be a kulak based on your  family’s background.” 
When Pellumb Lamaj completed grammar school in 1974, he was the only 
student  prevented from joining the Albanian youth organization because, according 
to his  teacher Armando Kushta, he “had his eyes fixated on the West” and 
displayed  signs of being “a capitalist.” According to Pellumb, “This was 
Kushta’s attempt  to try to dissuade me from entering high school.” 
(Ironically, after communism  began to fall in Albania in 1990, Kushta would be 
among the first individuals to  leave the country and immigrate to the United 
States.) 
Pellumb’s family considered his arrest only a matter of time, since he and  
his brother refused to collaborate with the secret police, known in Albania 
as  the Sigurimi—a refusal that under Hoxha’s regime meant jail time at 
best,  execution at worst. Looking back, Pellumb said that March 1, 1979, is “
the day  that I will never forget”: 
“It is indelibly etched in my mind. That day, the Sigurimi arrested me and  
charged me as an “enemy of the state.” After several months of 
confinement, I  was convicted on the basis of false testimony and sentenced to fifteen 
years of  hard labor at the infamous Spaç Prison. I was one of the youngest 
prisoners sent  to Spaç. To this day, the scars of their torturous regime 
remain on my body and  in my mind.” 
Pellumb said that the Spaç Prison was something out of Dante’s Inferno.  
According to him, 
“Spaç was a black hole at the bottom of a canyon, surrounded by dark and  
dreary hills. The only time a prisoner could catch a glimpse of the blue sky 
was  at midday. At night, when the lights were turned on and aimed at the 
security  fences to prevent any escape, the sky was streaked with the 
reflection of the  barbed wire. 
“Prisoners were divided into groups that worked nonstop in rotating shifts 
in  the mines under the watchful eye of the guards who inflicted  punishment—
routinely, indiscriminately, and often brutally. Because we also  received 
barely enough food to survive, many men perished. Every day, when we  
entered the mines, we felt as if we were marching towards a guillotine, not  
knowing if we would survive another day. 
“The regime stole our youth and dashed all of our hopes and dreams. But I  
never forgot the words of older prisoners who said that, ‘If you make it out 
of  here, please tell the civilized world that we were martyrs, that we 
sought  freedom from those who took freedom away from us, that we opposed a 
criminal  state ruled with an iron fist by a ruthless tyrant, Enver Hoxha.” 
In May 1984, there was an uprising at the Qafe-Bari Prison. Three prisoners 
 were executed and others were sentenced to twenty-five years, some of whom 
were  then brought to Spaç, tortured, and thrown into solitary confinement. 
When  they
were released into the camp days later, their bodies were scarred and  
their clothes caked with blood. Especially because some of the men had been  
Pellumb’s friends in the past, he started to help them with bits of food and  
clothing. Witnessing this, the collaborators and the jailers, called the “Red 
 Guards,” immediately reported Pellumb to the chief of the secret police. 
Soon  after, he was handcuffed and taken to the chief’s office. 
“He started screaming that he would teach me a lesson I would never forget. 
 He ordered the Red Guards to take me into a room near his office, where 
they  tortured me for hours. They attacked me with sticks, their boots, and 
wooden  bats until I lost consciousness. When I finally opened my eyes, a 
doctor in a  white coat was peering over me, checking my pulse, and giving me an 
injection.  He told the chief of police to stop the torture, because my 
pulse was too weak.  I was lying on a cement floor in a pool of blood, unable 
to move. My left hand  was broken and bleeding, and the big toe on my left 
foot had been crushed. 
“The torture had begun in the morning, and I guessed that it was the middle 
 of the night, when they tossed me into a cell. I would spend a month in 
solitary  confinement before they sent me back to the camp. When I arrived in 
the camp,  all the prisoners saw the scars on my hands and feet, and 
everyone realized that  I had been tortured because I had helped my fellow inmates. 
I was proud that I  had, and I told the chief that, ‘One day you will be 
brought to justice for your  crimes.’ But, unfortunately, justice is sometimes 
only a dream. Many of the men  who were responsible for decades of 
persecution, torture, and murder in Albania  are living lives of privilege and 
wielding power in a corrupt government. There  was no ‘Nuremburg trial’ for the 
Albanian Communists who tried to destroy their  own people, and the West has 
chosen to ignore their crimes.” 
In August 1990, Pellumb Lamaj was released from prison—in his words,  “
symbolically soon after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.” Two years later, he  
received an opportunity to come to the United States. About this, he 
reflected,  “I was fortunate because there was no room for me in Albania. The same 
people  that had persecuted me and others, including the chief of police, 
remained in  power.” 
Pellumb never forgot the fate of his family, his fellow prisoners at Spaç,  
and those who perished under the Hoxha regime: “For the past twenty years,”
 he  said, “I have pursued justice through every media outlet that I have 
been able  to reach to expose the poison and the torturous regime that 
engulfed Albania and  extended its tentacles to all Albanian lands in Eastern 
Europe.” 
Hoxha Purges His Rivals: The Destruction of the Sejko Family
Born in 1922 in Konispol, Teme Sejko joined the Communist Party during 
World  War II while fighting with the partisans. After Albania was liberated 
from Nazi  occupation in November 1944, Teme studied at the military academy in 
Moscow. He  would return again from 1955 to 1957, as he rose to the rank of 
rear admiral and  commanded the Albanian naval forces in Vlora. In short, 
he was part of the  Communist regime during the first phase of Enver Hoxha’s 
rule. 
In the late 1950s, Hoxha began to shift his alliances away from Marshal  
Tito’s Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. When the rift between the Soviet Union 
 and Maoist China took place in 1961, Hoxha sided with Mao, and he and his  
closest allies initiated purges to eliminate rivals. Teme Sejko was one of 
the  people they targeted. So were his brothers, because they were perceived 
as  having political views that threatened Hoxha. On the morning of July 
28, 1960,  Teme went to work as usual, only to find himself arrested and 
charged with  “participating in a conspiracy involving Yugoslavia, Greece, and 
the United  States.” His family never saw him again. For a year he was 
incarcerated, while  the regime prepared a show trial against him and several other 
officials. On May  27, 1961, Teme was convicted of being “an enemy of the 
people” and sentenced to  twenty-five years in prison. But just three days 
later, his skull was broken and  he was strangled to death with a cord. 
When Teme was arrested, so was his brother, Taho, a journalist who had also 
 fought with the partisans during World War II. In 1956, at a meeting of 
the  Communist Party of Tirana, he had criticized the growing disparity 
between the  living standards that the Communist elite enjoyed in Albania and the  
poverty-stricken majority. Taho Sejko immediately lost his job and was  
transferred to a clerical position in a factory in Shkodra. Although Taho was  
not executed along with Teme in May 1961, he was imprisoned and tortured in 
an  attempt to force him to publicly embrace the Hoxha regime. Taho refused 
to  capitulate, and in March 1962, he was secretly convicted and shot to 
death. His  family, including his mother, were expelled from Tirana and 
relocated to  Shkodra,
after being told that Taho had gone mad in prison and had been  confined to 
a state mental hospital. 
In 1963, three years after the Hoxha regime arrested Teme and Taho, their  
brother Sulo was jailed. He was tortured, and later his body was found at 
the  bottom of a well. Their sister, Merushe Sejko-Plaku, was interned in a 
camp from  1963 to 1968; then she was banished from 1968 to 1974, only to be 
interned again  for ten years—from 1974 to 1984. 
Her husband, Rexho Plaku, was a wealthy man who had led the group of  
partisans in World War II that Teme, Taho, and Sulo had joined. But shortly  
after the war, he was jailed by the Hoxha regime, and he would spend thirty-two  
years in prison. 
Teme’s son, Rajmond Sejko, ultimately the only one in the family to 
survive,  described the deplorable conditions in which he and his mother, Shpresa, 
and  brother, Sokol, were forced to live once his father was branded as an “
enemy of  the people.” He said that: 
“The same military court martial that condemned my father, on the same day  
condemned my mother, my eleven-year-old brother, and me (I was thirteen) to 
a  five-year period of internment, known as ‘internal exile.’ We were 
forced to  relocate to a remote and very poor hamlet called Otllak outside of 
the town of  Berat, which was home to only 100 people, including 20 internees. 
We lived in a  small one-room hut, with a dirt floor, thatched walls, and a 
plastic roof. There  was no heat or running water. We had to walk for one 
hour to get drinking water;  we washed our bodies and our clothing with water 
drawn from irrigation canals;  and, instead of a toilet, we had a roofless 
outhouse. We were confined to  Otllak, and needed advance permission from 
local authorities to travel, even to  see a doctor. At least twice a day we 
had to report to the village security  officer. 
“My mother and I worked long hours six days a week in the fields, starting 
at  5:00 a.m. in the summer and 7:00 a.m. in the winter. During the five 
years that  we were interned, no relative or friend dared contact us, including 
my mother’s  brother, Engjell, who lived only ten miles away. Much later, 
in 1975, Uncle  Engjell’s Russian wife would be arrested and jailed for five 
years, simply  because she was overheard telling ‘political jokes.’ 
“When our internment finally ended in June 1966, I was eighteen years old. 
My  mother, brother, and I moved into the town of Berat, but we continued to 
be  isolated and stigmatized. In 1967, I was conscripted into the army and 
assigned  to a troop that consisted only of the sons of condemned parents. 
All of us  received the worst assignments. For two years, I did hard labor on 
an army farm  until my discharge in 1969.” 
Rajmond thought that he and his family were finally free in 1970, 
especially  because that year the Hoxha government permitted a tiny bit of 
liberalization,  including the right to see Italian and Yugoslavian television. The 
latter showed  how poor and undeveloped Albania was compared to the Albanians 
living just on  the other side of its borders. When people began to call for 
change, the  government retaliated. In December 1972, they cut off all 
access to television;  they attacked a festival devoted to traditional Albanian 
music (calling it  decadent); and they began a series of purges and arrests 
of “liberals,” which  included all former political internees and 
prisoners. Rajmond’s brother, Sokol,  was among them. After being fired from his job 
in a factory in Berat, he was  arrested in 1973, tortured in prison by a “
specialist in torture” named Ali  Xhunga, put on trial in January 1974 on 
charges of “terrorism, sabotage,  spreading anti-government propaganda, and 
participating in organized crime,” and  then executed in March of that year 
after false witnesses lined up by the  government testified against him. He was 
only twenty-four years old. “To this  day,” Rajmond said, “it haunts me to 
think of the suffering my brother  endured.” 
With Sokol’s death, Rajmond said that their mother, Shpresa Sejko, was  
devastated. 
Towards the end of 1974, she wrote a statement, accusing the government of  
killing her husband and her youngest son, and distributed it to her 
neighbors.  On February 19, 1975, police arrived at the Sejko’s home to round up 
Shpresa and  also Rajmond. Rajmond, who was at home alone, was immediately 
brought to the  police station. His mother was in Fier visiting the widow of 
Tahir Demi, who had  been killed along with Teme Sejko. After questioning, 
Rajmond was released to  locate his mother. But by the time he reached Fier, 
Shpresa was headed back to  Berat. And by the time he returned to Berat, he 
found her lifeless body on the  ground under a sheet in front of their house. 
She had been shot by local  officials who were declaring her death “a 
suicide.” 
Rajmond was taken into custody, and a security official proceeded to  
interrogate him for an hour. Himci demanded that Rajmond admit to coercing his  
mother to commit suicide. When he refused, the official brought in others 
from  the Ministry of the Interior, including one who in 1974 had pressured 
Rajmond  and his mother to testify against Sokol. They interrogated Rajmond 
from 5:00  p.m. to 1:00 a.m., focusing on the statement that his mother had 
written against  the government. 
When Rajmond was formally charged a few days later, he was accused of “
action  in opposition to the government” with a sentence of three to ten years 
in  prison. With that, his first interrogator psychologically and physically  
tortured Rajmond for eleven consecutive days. After a show trial in May 
1975, he  was charged with having written and distributed the statement signed 
by his  mother and was sentenced to eight years in prison. After subsisting 
on a diet of  gruel and sleeping on cold concrete floors in jails in Berat 
and Tirana,  shackled and beaten with fists and a wooden club, Rajmond was 
transferred to  Spaç. By then, he had lost forty-four pounds. 
“The Worst Prison in Albania”
Built in 1968, Spaç Prison was located in a desolate stretch of land in the 
 northeast, Merdita region of Albania. Rajmond recalls it as “perhaps the 
worst  prison in Albania,” because the majority of prisoners were worked to 
death there  in copper and pyrite mines: 
“In Spaç, I lived in a barracks about five meters by five meters, housing  
fifty-two men. The building consisted of twelve other rooms of this kind on  
three floors. We slept on platform bunks stacked three high and lined with 
thin  straw mats, old sheets, and a few threadbare blankets. Because of the  
overcrowding, lack of ventilation, cigarette smoke, and the gas fumes from 
the  mines that seeped into our clothes and skin, the air was fetid. I 
remember  waking up on my top bunk, my throat clogged and unable to speak. Food 
consisted  mostly of bread, beans, and sometimes milk. Those who worked in 
the mines got a  bit more.” 
Rajmond worked in the mines from 1975 to 1982. Two years before he arrived 
at  Spaç, there had been a revolt. After it was put down, the four leaders 
of the  uprising were executed and eighty-seven prisoners had their sentences 
extended  for twenty years or more. In the aftermath, greater restrictions 
were imposed on  every prisoner. For example, family visits were restricted 
to five minutes.  During his time at Spaç, Rajmond’s maternal grandmother 
visited him once a year  for six years, each time traveling hours to reach 
him. Eventually she was too  old and infirm to return. Books and 
language-learning were banned. When Rajmond  was caught trying to learn Italian, he was 
thrown into solitary confinement in  freezing temperatures. 
Banishment
Rajmond Sejku was finally released from the Spaç Prison in October 1982, 
and  he returned to Berat to live with his grandparents. He worked as a 
laborer under  the supervision of a foreman who spied on him for the government. A 
year later,  in October 1983, he was secretly condemned to another period 
of internment, but  this time he was banished to the small village of Kutalli 
for five years, where  he lived in primitive conditions. His grandmother 
joined him there, after his  grandfather died in Berat. Rajmond was forced to 
work on a farm seven days a  week and to report to the local officials for 
questioning two to three times a  day. At one point, Vojo Nano, a member of 
the secret police, tried to recruit  him as a spy. Enraged, Rajmond tried to 
grab Nano by the throat. 
In 1985, Enver Hoxha died and his successor, Ramiz Alia, came to power. 
Three  years later, when Rajmond’s banishment was supposed to have ended, it 
was  instead extended for another five years. A year afterwards, in March 
1989, the  Alia regime tried to return Rajmond to prison once more, when he was 
denounced  by Ali Gega, a Communist party official in Berat. Gega had 
falsely accused  Rajmond of “speaking out against various Albanian government 
officials.” Hysni  Kallmi, a resident of Kutalli, was selected to testify 
against him at a public  hearing, but Rajmond stood up for himself and managed to 
overcome the effort to  re-incarcerate him. Nine months later, as the 
Communist government was losing  its grip on power, it issued a general amnesty 
for political internees and  prisoners. On December 30, 1989, Rajmond was 
freed. Less then a year later, the  regime of Ramiz Alia would fall. 
Escape, Exile, and Life in the Camps: The Story of the Mujo Family
In April 1945, some of Hoxha’s military forces, pulled Bajame Mujo and her  
children, Eqerem, Fatmir, and Nevrus, from their home, set the house 
ablaze, and  took them to Kruje, where they were herded into a camp with other 
families. The  reason for their capture was that Sefer Mujo, husband and 
father, along with  Sefer’s brother, Alo, had resisted the rise to power of Hoxha’
s Communist regime  at the end of World War II. Hoxha and his henchmen 
hunted down and executed  anyone who fought against them. However, a few 
escaped, and Sefer and Alo were  among them. Sefer and Alo made their way to 
Munich, Germany, where they joined a  group of exiles who had formed a battalion 
and were being trained at a military  base under the auspices of the U.S. 
Army to return to Albania to try to rescue  their families and overthrow the 
Hoxha regime. 
For two years, none of the Mujos’ friends or relatives knew what had 
happened  to them. Then, in 1947, along with 1,000 other families, they were 
herded into a  camp in Valias outside of Tirana. It consisted of a military 
barracks, left  behind by the Italians forces when they handed over Albania to 
the German Nazis  in 1943. Bunk beds, consisting of wooden blanks lined the 
walls; soldiers were  placed at intervals throughout the camp; and it was here 
that Bajame Mujo and  her sons would endure years of suffering. Later they 
were moved to a nearby  brick factory, where, according to Eqerem, they 
became “slave laborers.” 
Meanwhile, Sefer and Alo courageously made their way back into Albania. As  
Eqerem Mujo and his brothers would eventually come to learn, “My father and 
 uncle would go back and forth from Germany to Albania, leading missions to 
 overthrow Hoxha’s evil regime. They may have wanted revenge; they 
definitely  wanted peace; but, above all, they wanted their lives and families back.”
 
Under constant physical and mental abuse, and in the daily struggle for 
food,  Eqerem said: 
“The thought of my father and uncle only fleetingly crossed our minds. But  
the knowledge that they were intent on rescuing us (which we learned when 
the  news was leaked that their battalion had made their way into Albania and 
had  already retrieved some families) helped to keep me, my mother, and 
brothers  alive. It filled us with hope and joy, and for fleeting moments, we 
were  free.” 
In 1949, when Eqerem was seven years old, the Mujos were moved to another  
camp, this time in Tepelena, on Albania’s southern coast. According to him,  
“Conditions were so deplorable that many died and we children spent our 
days  huddled together looking out of the windows as our mothers and fathers 
formed a  line that looked like ants, while they transported the wood that was 
needed to  heat the homes of the Albanian elites.” 
The Mujos were next moved in 1954 to a farm in Lushnje that “had been 
turned  into a concentration camp.” In the years ahead, they would be shifted to 
the  many camps spread throughout Albania. Eqerem and his brothers were 
eventually  allowed to attend high school. But not long after they graduated, 
someone  accused Eqerem of being a spy. 
In April 1976, at the age of thirty-four, he was arrested. After eight 
months  of investigation by the authorities, he was tried and sentenced to seven 
years  in prison in Spaç. A year later, his brother Fatmir was also accused 
of being a  spy and was sentenced to six years in the Ballsh Prison in 
Fier. 
When Eqerem and Fatmir were released at the end of 1983, they returned to a 
 farm where their mother and Nevrus had lived a hardscrabble existence 
during  their incarceration. Even so, because their father and uncle had escaped 
to  Germany and were part of the resistance movement, the persecution of 
the Mujo  family continued. Four months after Eqerem and Fatmir left prison, 
the family  was detained and sent back to a camp in Lushnje. They would not 
taste freedom  until the Communist regime fell in 1990. 
As soon as the regime fell, Eqerem said, “My family planned our way not 
only  out of the camp, but out of Albania. We crossed the border into Greece 
and,  through many twists and turns, ultimately succeeded in flying to the 
United  States. Landing in New York, we were met by an old man with a smile and 
tears in  his eyes. It was our father, Sefer Mujo, whom we had not seen for 
forty-eight  years. My uncle, Alo, stood by his side. The relief that my 
brothers experienced  that day was overwhelming. Even so, our relief was 
tempered by the absence of  our mother, who had tried to protect us on the long 
journey only to succumb to  breakdown and death just months before.” 
Conclusion
The precise number of those who were interned and executed under Enver  
Hoxha’s dictatorship may never be known. What is known is that the failure to  
confront the cruelty, the fanaticism, and the instruments of terror 
perpetuated  during the Communist era has denied the survivors the healing and the 
justice  that they deserve. It has also left deep scars on the psyche of the 
Albanian  people and prevented Albania from joining a democratic Europe. The 
time has come  for Albania to make sure that the denial of memory does not 
succeed, to grapple  with the unfinished business of the past so that it 
does not continue to distort  the present, and to begin to construct a new and 
viable future. 
Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi is Balkan Affairs Adviser to  the Albanian 
American Civic League. 
This article could not have been written without Pellumb Lamaj’s  
partnership, together with the contributions of Rajmond Sejko, Eqerem Mujo, and  Luan 
Mazreku. It was first pubished in Illyria on June 8, 2012 and in Prishtina  
Insight on July 20, 2012. 
Notes:
i. Cloyes DioGuardi, “Jewish Survival in Albania  & the Ethics of ‘Besa’,”
 Congress Monthly, January-February 2006, pp. 7-10.  See also Rescue in 
Albania by Harvey Sarner, 1997, originally published by  Brunswick Press in 
Cathedral City, CA, distributed by the Albanian American  Foundation, Ossining, 
NY. 
ii. Kaminski, Lukasz, as quoted in “Europe Reckons with Its Legacy of  
Communism” by Nicholas Kulish, The New York Times, February 21, 2012, A section, 
 pp. 1 and 3. 
iii. Kadare, Ismail, introduction to Fabrikimi I Vdekjes: Dosjet e 
Sigurimit  tëGenc Lekës e Vilson Blloshmit by Bedri Blloshmi, (Tirana, Albania: 
Botimet  “Almera”), p. 6.