The Communist labour camp where 300 children died

Hundreds of cypress trees will be planted in this area that will now be called The Children Forest, to commemorate around 300 children who died inside the communist forced labor camp between 1949 and 1954.

“People here have died heroically. They did not complain, did not shout, did not insult. They accepted their suffering with decency”, says Lek Pervizi, one of the camp members who survived.

“The government brought nothing here for more than four years. Many families were sleeping on the ground. Hunger was the most horrible thing. They fed us soup at lunch, with groats coming from Russia. It was what had been cleaned off the Russian storage and had already worms in it”, says Bilbil Cami, another who survived the camp.

One of the old garrisons will be turned into a museum to preserve the memories of this camp.

“One of the garrisons will be returned back at what it was in the 1949-1954 period. There will be a memorial that will be called “Lost Children Graves”. 300 cypress will be planted in the center of the camp”, said Gentiana Sula, director of the Authority for Information on former Secret Service Documents.

The communist dictatorship prosecuted more than 5000 people in this camp. Their families were mostly from northern Albania, coming from a group known as “Resistance from Mountains”, who opposed the Albanian communist dictatorship with an organized armed grouping.

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