TIRANA, Albania — When the Rev. Shtjefen Kurti, a 73-year-old Catholic priest, was executed in 1971 for performing a baptism, the Communist authorities didn’t bother to inform his family. Only when his brother tried to take food to him in prison did he learn the priest’s fate.

“Don’t come back,” a guard told the brother. “He won’t be needing it anymore.”

Some 6,000 Albanians were taken away by government agents during the Communist era and never heard from again. Their bodies were never recovered, and they are assumed to have been executed, classified as “enforced disappearances” in the language of international human rights law.

Of the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, Albania had the harshest and most isolated regime. Enver Hoxha, a hard-line Stalinist, created a repressive apparatus that outlasted his death in 1985 and continued right up until the regime’s fall in 1991.

Even in a region where justice for Communist-era crimes remains elusive, Albania stands out as one of the few countries that have not created an institution to facilitate citizens’ access to their secret police files, as countries like Romania and the former East Germany have done.