By Nathan Morley
Nowadays, the plight of Jewish detainees in Cyprus is a popular theme. So popular, in fact, that a few years ago, a half-cylindrical Nissen hut was hoisted into the courtyard of the Jewish Centre in Larnaca, a genuine relic salvaged from a 1940s internment camp.
As the living memory of that period in Cyprus fades, this strip of rusting iron gives an insight into the lives of those caught attempting to enter Palestine after the Second World War.
For years, I’ve written about those dreadful camps, visited the sites, spoken to former inmates, babies born in them and even those involved in building them.
In all, 39 ships trying to dodge British patrols and reach the Holy Land were stopped and diverted to Famagusta. Those on board – refugee men, women and children – were caught trying to enter Palestine illegally.
Resembling little makeshift Stalags – the camps sat on the coastline along the southeast of Cyprus. Of course, they are long gone, and 75 years after closing, no ruins testify to their existence.
For those that know these parts, it is a coastline tainted with the ghosts of history – from the Romans to the Ottomans – and even now, as I write, Larnaca is being used as a staging post for a new maritime corridor to Gaza.
Recently, I discovered a new insight into the Jewish camps within the pages of a dogeared copy of Golda Meir’s memoirs, ‘My Life,’ which I found in a charity shop.
It provides a fascinating snapshot of her impressions of the compounds. Years ago, when tasked with finding the locations of the camps, I interviewed a Jewish doctor who met Golda in 1947 in Cyprus. ‘She was appalled,’ he told me. ‘She was very angry at the conditions in the camps.’
For those that don’t know, before gaining recognition as Israel’s prime minister, Golda worked for the Jewish Agency, encouraging immigration of Jews to Israel.
And, funnily enough, whilst in Jerusalem last year – I walked past her old apartment in the Talbiyeh district, and, again, the issue of her Cyprus visit sprang to mind.
It is probable she visited two camps – one in Xylotymbou, on a hillside east of Larnaca, and the other in Famagusta in the north.
It seems that only a few newsmen visited the camps, so her account – detailed over five pages in her memoirs – gives us a powerful insight. In fact, it paints an even more wretched and dehumanizing picture than I had ever imagined.
It is hard to believe that inmates, many witnesses to the Holocaust, were again herded behind barbed wire, a trauma which seems unthinkable.
Interestingly, Golda’s memoirs shift our gaze to a slightly different aspect of this episode in history. On arrival, presumably at Xylotymbou – a field of one-story huts surrounded by barbed wire – she could not comprehend what she saw. And though her recollections of the Jewish inmates make fascinating reading, her impressions of the British guards fly off the page.
As she stood staring at English conscripts in green uniforms manning plywood watchtowers, she wondered how they reconciled themselves to the fact that not so long ago they were liberating the same people they now kept penned behind barbed wire. ‘I looked at those nice young Englishmen and was filled with pity for them,’ she wrote.
The camps, she noted, were ‘ugly clusters of huts and tents -with a watch tower at each end – set down on the sand with nothing green or growing anywhere in sight’.
She went on to say that there wasn’t enough water for drinking, and even less for bathing, despite the blistering heat. And although the camps touched the sea, none of the refugees were allowed to swim, and ‘spent their time, for the most part, sitting in those filthy, stifling tents, which if nothing else, protected them from the glaring sun’.
Her words reminded me of an interview I conducted with Jimmy Malian in 2011. A measured man, sadly now deceased, he worked for the British forces during this period and told me the fascinating story of how the camps were built – he even remembered the first tents arriving on the back of a lorry.
Remarkably, he also remembered how a ragbag of German infantry men captured in Africa were tasked with building the compounds – an astonishing aberration. As construction got underway, Jimmy gathered the courage to protest to the British about this disturbing situation.
Jimmy Malian
‘Whilst the Germans were building the camp, the Jews were arriving to see another concentration camp,’ Malian told me. ‘It was the biggest blunder the British could have made.’
‘They told me to mind my own bloody business when I objected,’ he recalled.
A short time thereafter, Hitler’s defeated men – aided by local labourers and British troops – had cobbled together a canyon of corrugated huts – presenting a bizarre, unpleasant sight.
‘From Dachau to Cyprus,’ declared a line of graffiti scrawled across one camp building. During their four years of existence, over 50,000 people were forced into them and nearly 2,000 babies were born behind the wire.
Though the camps closed in 1949 – and evidence of their existence has been erased – the Jewish Centre in Larnaca is eager to create a museum. If this ever comes to fruition, they should consult Golda Meir’s papers. Perhaps – if any exist at the IWM – a few testimonies from British guards, peppered with accounts from reporters including The New York Times’s Clifton Daniel would paint a fascinating picture. During a visit to Famagusta in 1947, he observed: ‘There have been no epidemics although inadequate clothing, crowded living conditions, the damp winter climate and the type of food have contributed to the onsets of scabies, boils, rheumatic diseases and gastric disturbances.’
If you have the desire, the story of this episode in history is captured in the 1960 Hollywood epic Exodus, filmed in Cyprus, and starring Paul Newman.