WORK on the documentary “Memories in Cypriot Soil” which details the history of Jewish internment camps in Cyprus is nearing completion according to the producers.
The film focuses on the four-year lifespan of a handful of camps which were located at north of occupied Famagusta and near the British base at Dhekelia.
The project, which has been in production for several years, is headed by Gary Gumpert and Susan Drucker who have been researching the subject for the past fifteen years..
The two New York-based professors have been collaborating with Cypriot Nektarios Vilanides on the project.
“Our recent work in Cyprus was productive – both in terms of editing and in regard to research. We have managed to edit down at least twenty hours of interviews to two hours – with the intent of hopefully whittling down the mass to one hour,” Gumpert told the Sunday Mail.
The film focuses on the camps which were specially commissioned by the British to detain thousands of Jews who were caught attempting to enter Palestine after the Second World War. Their inhabitants were held behind barbed wire by the British who had set out immigration quotas for Jews allowed to settle in Palestine.
In all 39 ships trying to reach the Holy Land were captured and diverted to the then bustling port of Famagusta, where their passengers were taken into custody.
“The task is a difficult one because the documentary includes interviews with Cypriots who worked in the camps, those who were interned, Cypriot officials and historians who know about the camps and our own narration of research and discovery.
“What remains missing is an interview from a British soldier. Their voices ought to be in the film. The Berkshire regiment was the last group of soldiers stationed in Cyprus in 1949,” says Gumpert.
During their four years of existence over 52,000 people were forced into the camps and nearly 2,000 babies were born in them, but accurate official documentation relating to their day to day operations is scarce.
“British maps of the camps are unavailable or have been destroyed and so the process of locating the exact position of the camps has been difficult. The Famagusta area (Carallos) is under Turkish military supervision and so we are somewhat dependent on old photographs to position the camps. In the Dhekelia area, nothing but rubble wire, and concrete flooring indicate any evidence of thousands of human beings housed there.
“Until this July we were unable to explore any area within the British wire. However the discovery by the Sunday Mail of an old corrugated Nissen hut about a 100 meters beyond the gate at Dhekelia was significant.”
The newly found hut, which fit part of the jigsaw, sits on an abandoned airfield between Ormideia and Dhekelia and is an identical match to those pictured in historical photos from 1948.
“The Nissen hut had been modified and was used by British personnel as a bar sometime after the departure of the Jews, but the steel structure itself was testimony of conditions that must have been difficult if not unbearable in the heat of Cyprus summers.
“It was a haunting experience and we were momentarily carried away to that time over sixty years ago when the victims of World War II were temporarily placed in the camps of Cyprus. Theghosts of the past always hover nearby.”
The camps were finally closed down in 1949 and during their operation held the equivalent of almost ten per cent of the population of Cyprus. The 1960 film Exodus starring Paul Newman starts with the arrival of Jews in a camp and was filmed in Cyprus at the original camp locations.
