Tonight Professor Emanuel Gutmann, who worked in the British detention camps during the late 1940s will deliver a lecture about this extraordinary period in Cyprus history.
To give you a sense of how these dreadful camps operated, I have taken an article from the Cyprus Mail archives which I wrote back in April of this year.
The story features two remarkable men, one in Larnaca, the other in Famagusta. Both men, who are now in their eighties, worked at the camps.
Between 1946 and 1949, twelve “Jewish internment camps” on the east coast held the equivalent of almost ten per cent of the population of Cyprus at that time.
Now 62 years after their gates were shut and their inmates left for Israel, virtually all evidence of the camps existence appears to have been completely erased from history.
These gruesome looking camps, which now only exist in the fading memories of those forced into them, were specially commissioned by the British to detain thousands of Jews caught attempting to enter Palestine directly after the Second World War.
Their inhabitants had witnessed first hand the horror of the Holocaust and were now again being held behind barbed wire, this time 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 Famagusta, the detainees were then herded onto the back of trucks and taken to camps, unsure of how long they would be held captive.
You would think that the location of at least a few of these awful places, which boast such historical significance, would be clearly marked. After all, 52,000 people were forced to live there and over 2,000 babies were born in them.
Firstly, it is important to note this is a tale of two locations – Dhekelia in the republic and Famagusta, in the Turkish occupied north.
Starting in Dhekelia where the Xylotymbou camps once stood, I was almost certain that I would find a plaque, maybe a sign or even a simple marker – but there is absolutely nothing to indicate that they ever existed.
Over the last 62 years their presence has somehow been completely forgotten, lost through successive builds or removed on the back of lorries. No plans or location maps for the Xylotymbou camps survive and the British authorities have no records of them.
However, armed with a patchwork of first hand recollections, photographs and old press cuttings a chance discovery helped pinpoint what is most probably the main camp.
When exploring an abandoned airfield between Ormideia and Dhekelia we spotted the rusting shell of a single circular Nissen hut, identical to those from the photos – this appears to be all that remains of the camp.
Gary Gumpert and Susan Drucker have been researching and writing about the subject for 15 years and say that finding the camps whereabouts was a consuming and frustrating task.
The two New York-based professors of communication are working with Nektarios Vilanides of Nicosia on Memories in Cypriot Soil, a documentary film scheduled for completion later this year.
During the past three years they have accumulated many hours of filmed interviews with Cypriots, Israelis and humanitarian aid workers who remember and even worked in these camps. The title of the film was inspired by the strange silence and the absence of information regarding the presence of the camps.
“The labour force used to construct the camps was made up of 1,100 German POWs brought over from North Africa. As many as 3,000 Cypriots worked in the camps: carpenters, painters, doctors, those delivering necessities, and emergency personnel,” says Grumpert.
The fact that Germans prisoners had been brought in to build some of the detention camps for Jews seems unthinkable. Even worse is the fact that their design was modelled on German concentration camps.
Jimmy Malian, 84 and from Larnaca, was employed by the British authorities at the Xylotymbou camp and clearly remembers appealing to his bosses to re-think their plan.
“They told me to mind my own bloody business when I objected,”he recalls. “Whilst the Germans were building the camp, the Jews were arriving to see another concentration camp. It was the biggest blunder the British could have made.”
“On the first day the Jewish detainees started to stone the Germans, then shooting started, people were killed. Most of these Germans who had been brought over had never seen a concentration camp, because they had been held in Libya and Egypt since the end of the war.”
Even more perversely, money to fund the camps was taken from taxes collected from the Jewish population of Palestine.
A tent was allotted to about ten people, while 18 people were crammed into the Nissen huts. The living conditions deprived the occupants of any privacy and prevented intimate seclusion.
The scarcity of good quality food and water for the prisoners was common everywhere. Food was mostly tinned, with inmates complaining of always feeling hungry because of the low quality of food and primitive cooking conditions.
There were also other problems. In the beginning the Cypriots were worried about the possibility of the immigrants staying permanently or overusing the limited economical resources of the island.
However, as former Nicosia Mayor Lellos Demetriades recalls, when these worries were proved wrong, friendly relations with the people in the camps started to develop.
“My father was working for a doctor with the colonial government at this point, so he often went to the Caraolos camp [Famagusta] and I clearly remember if we were making sweets at home we would make extra for him to take to the camp.”
Zehavit Blumenfeld, who now lives near Tel Aviv, was held with her parents at Xylotymbou camp until she was nine months old when her family finally made it into Israel.
“The Cypriots were so very kind to us. I remember tales of one woman in particular that would come with food and sweets. It was things that people really didnt have to do but they wanted to do,” she said.
Grumpert says that the relationship between Cypriots and the internees deepened and strengthened as time passed, and it was a situation that caused concern for the British.
“The growing relationship between the Jews and sympathetic local Cypriots, particularly by members of AKEL outside the camps, was perceived as a threat by the British colonial authorities,” he said.
He cites a letter written in 1948 by R.E. Turnbull, acting Governor General, to John Martin in the Colonial Office. In it Turnbull advised that the remaining Jews, only several thousand at that date, be released, because of United Nations pressure and the potential for violence within the camps and perhaps by Cypriots themselves seeking independence outside the camps.
More evidence that there was little love lost for the colonial masters was provided by an intensely charismatic 85-year-old, who mumbled quietly in English as he explained his role within Caraolos camp outside Famagusta.
Nafi Rizi is a charming Turkish Cypriot whose remarkable life was gradually revealed in patches between long sips of apple tea. It transpires his family owned much of the Caraolos land helping him to get a job looking after the camps water tanks.
As we sat talking, I mentioned the German involvement during the construction of the Xylotymbou camps near Dheklia; the remark evokes a surprise reaction and I am shushed into silence.
“Germans did not build these camps in Famagusta though,” he scoffs, “this was all local construction works by Cypriots using galvanised iron and wood. And you know it only took a fortnight to construct them, the camps were numbered 55 to 65.
“I know about the German soldiers from Libya, but they did not build Caraolos.”
Rizi’s work on the water tanks led the British to instruct him to seek escape tunnels being dug by the internees, but his measure of commitment to the hard-nosed colonial ma
sters pitted against a lucrative side line, proved fortunate for those wanting to escape.
“You never kill a bird which lays a golden egg,” he smiles, referring to the endless stream of Jewish prisoners that paid him ten shillings a time to pass through his tunnels to freedom.
“You must balance loyalty with reality. Russians, Poles, Uzbeks and even German [Jews] used my tunnels,” he added.
Evidence of the British military camps from the exact same period is scattered around the Famagusta district and several dozen rusting half-circle Nissen huts survive just a stone’s throw from the main Caraolos site, but Riza confirms that “everything else was deconstructed and sold locally, for a very good price.”
Lecture by Professor Emanuel Gutmann, who worked in the British detention camps in Cyprus, teaching Hebrew to future immigrants. October 31, reservation essential by October 27. Social Activities Building, No7, Room 012, New Campus, University of Cyprus. 6.30pm. Free. In English. Tel: 22-893950 [email protected]
