Imprisoned on the whim of Enver Hoxha

Nowhere in this extraordinary prison memoir do we find out why Fatos Lubonja was sentenced to imprisonment in Spaç, the Albanian jail where some inmates worked the copper mines. He’s written about it elsewhere. His first seven years there were for ‘agitation and propaganda’, after police found his diaries, with criticisms of the Albanian tyrant Enver Hoxha, in his uncle’s attic. While he was in prison he was re-sentenced to a further 25 years for involvement in a counter-revolutionary organisation. The dictator didn’t last as long as that. Fatos served 17 years, partly in Spaç, partly in other camps. 

It wasn’t difficult to get on the wrong side of the paranoid Hoxha. One man, Zef, was incarcerated because he made the mistake of wearing a derby hat in Tirana at a time when the dictator favoured this article; when Hoxha saw him, he decided that the hat wearer thought he was losing power.