Ridënimi – Second Sentence

Memoire, Koha 2018 Pages 375 A documentary novel describing his second trial, published for the first time by Botime Përpjekja, Tirana, 1996. (The Second Sentence, I. B. Tauris, London 2009, translated by John Hodgson; and in other countries: Greece, Poland, Serbia, Montenegro) In Second Sentence, prize-winning Albanian writer Fatos Lubonja delivers a raw, harrowing, and deeply human memoir of life inside the brutal prison camps of Communist Albania—facilities as claustrophobic and cruel as Stalin’s gulags, yet with the uniquely terrifying feature that prisoners could be re-tried and re-sentenced while already incarcerated. The narrative opens in 1978, with Lubonja laboring in a copper mine in Northern Albania as part of his original sentence. The atmosphere in the camp is tense and suffocating. When two fellow prisoners secretly write a letter criticizing Enver Hoxha—“the foremost leader”—they are mysteriously disappeared. Only later does Lubonja realize the implications: he, too, is arrested again inside the camp, accused of involvement in a fabricated counter-revolutionary organization. Along with seven others, he faces a new trial and further punishment. What follows is a gripping and poignant account of his time in solitary confinement and interrogation, where physical deprivation is matched by psychological torment. With heartbreaking honesty and literary precision, Lubonja explores themes of friendship, betrayal, dignity, and survival under totalitarian rule. Second Sentence is both an extraordinary portrait of the closed, impenetrable world of Communist Albania and a universal story of endurance, integrity, and the moral costs of resistance.