This is a sketch of the clothes warehouse, where prisoners would keep their work clothes and dress to get ready to go to the mine.The warehouse had cotton fur costumes, rubber boots, puttees, miner’s caps, etc.
Prisoners in Spaç were also provided with prison clothing, which was used both during work and rest in the camp.The provision for each prisoner included:two cotton twill costumes a year, a brown fur coat (stuffed with cotton waste) once every three years, two pairs of long underpants and two stiff poplin shirts, which, as ex-prisoner Shkëlqim Abazi testifies, “that fabric rubbed on the skin like sandpaper”, two pairs of puttees (square pieces, the same material as shirts, with which they wrapped their feet before putting on their boots, when they went to the mine), a pair of rubber moccasins and a cloth hat like the puttees’ fabric.At the beginning of the ‘70s, a cotton twill fur costume was added, stuffed with cotton waste and sewn with seams to hold the cotton inside.This product was designed to better handle the cold in the mine, but it was very heavy and uncomfortable for the mine’s conditions, adding to the prisoners another form of suffering, as it would absorb the humidity during the eight hours in the mine, increasing manifold the miners’ weight by the time they exited.During winter they would not dry until the next day and were thus often a source of disease for prisoners.Prisoners were also provided with a cotton twill jacket thinly coated with resin that served as mackintosh.The uniform also had two pairs of gloves and wool socks and two pairs of rubber boots and a carton cap.The work clothes were held at the clothes warehouse in the camp.
Anyone who didn’t meet his target was forced back to the tunnel with the other shift and held there until the end of that shift with no food or rest at any given moment until they met their daily target. Police officers inflicted extraordinary violence to those prisoners who refused to enter the tunnel.
Showers were in front of toilets.Mainly in the first years, but also in the later stages, there was no hot water in the camp and the showers only brought the mountain’s icy water.Prisoners mainly washed with water, which they warmed themselves in metal tubs in the private kitchens.They then washed with the warmed water by pouring it on their bodies themselves with whatever vessel they had.Showers, like the toilets, were open and doorless.Prisoners were forced to wash in these conditions of utter lack of intimacy.
Temperature in pyrite tunnels changed extremely compared to temperature out of tunnels, where prisoners got out to empty their wagons. Inside, temperatures varied from 50 to 60 degrees Celsius, whereas winter temperatures hit -20 degrees Celsius outside. In winter, prisoners worked naked inside the tunnels, whereas outside they wore fur coats they stored at the entrance to protect themselves somewhat from the extreme change of temperature. This was the cause that the predominant disease of the camp was the cold. It accompanied prisoners for as long as they were forced to live in that hell.
Based on rare images that managed to film the area after the fall of the dictatorship at the beginning of the ‘90s, Spaç Camp looked like this. The last political prisoners left the camp in June 1990.