The initial chaos of the various kinds of camps (filtration, transitional, internment, penal, labour) was quickly transformed into a network of forced labour camps. Similarly to the Soviet Gulag, many categories of prisoners ended up there – both criminal and political. Many of these people, especially in the initial period, were held in camps without a sentence, or even any kind of formal decision.

Forced labour camps were a part of a wide-scale repression system, which included the security apparatus, courts and other penal bodies, detention centres, and prisons. The total number of those persecuted was much larger than the number of camp prisoners. It is also worth noting that in the last month of WWII and those following it, hundreds of thousands of citizens of Central and Eastern Europe were deported to forced labour or internment camps in the Soviet Union.

Imprisonment in a labour camp wasn’t the only kind of forced labour used by the communists. In many countries, soldiers were forced to work during basic military service, if they were considered “ideologically ambiguous”. It meant both those that were indeed accused of anti-communist activities and those that came from “class-foreign” families. The “voluntary” work in communist youth organisations was also of a de-facto forced character.

Forced labour camps in the Soviet bloc countries ceased to exist in the late 1950s. It was tied both to the effects of de-Stalinization and the events of 1956 in Hungary and Poland and to international pressure. Many organisations, including the International Labour Organisation and the United Nations, protested against forced labour in the Eastern Bloc. Their efforts were crowned in 1957 by the convention on ending forced labour. It was also ratified by the Soviet Union and countries of the Eastern Bloc. In Albania, the camps existed until the fall of the communist system (1991).

Today the history of the “European Gulag” has been somewhat forgotten, and not only in countries that did not experience communism. The forced labour camps and their victims have faded from memory in the former Eastern Bloc too. No material traces of most of them remain. Only a handful of former camps now house museums. With this exhibition, we aim to restore the memory of thousands of victims of communist labour camps and their suffering.