Giado concentration camp
The Giado concentration camp was a forced labor concentration camp for Italian and Libyan Jews in Giado, Libya, operating during the Second World War from May 1942 until its liberation by British troops in January 1943. The camp was established on the orders of Benito Mussolini, the Prime Minister of Italy. At the time, Libya was under Italian colonial control and was known as Italian Libya.
Of the 2,600 Jews who were imprisoned there, 562 died, mostly from hunger and louse-borne typhus. Due to its poor conditions, Giado had the highest death toll of all the North African labor camps in World War II, and its victims make up the highest number of Jewish victims of World War II in the Muslim world.
Background
Libya was home to a Jewish community for thousands of years. Giado, a settlement in the Nafusa Mountains, had had a cave-dwelling Jewish community since at least the tenth century, though by the second half of the sixteenth century the only remaining Jews in Libya were in the areas of Yefren and Gharyan, having fled the sites of struggle between Arabs and Berbers for strongholds of Ottoman rule.During the period of European rule in Libya, from 1911 to 1951, most of the Libyan Jewry lived in the northern regions of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. In 1911, Libya was captured from the Ottoman Empire by Italy, during the Italo-Turkish War. In 1922, Benito Mussolini took power in Italy, and in 1938 his government began to promulgate racial laws that affected the Jewish communities in Italian Libya. Jews could no longer intermarry with "Aryans", hold employment with the state or in any skilled profession, or enroll their children in public or private Italian schools. In 1940, Italy entered into World War II in alliance with Nazi Germany, and the war reached Libya that year when the British entered Libya in Operation Compass. Libya was repossessed by the Axis in 1941 when German troops were dispatched at Tripoli, which at the time was 25% Jewish. The race laws began to be enforced more strictly, and Libyan Jews of foreign nationality were deported to detention or concentration camps in Tunisia, Algeria, and Italy. As Italy and Britain struggled for control of Cyrenaica, the Jews welcomed the British soldiers, some of whom were Jews from Palestine, as liberators from fascist antisemitism. Each time the Italians repossessed Libya, the Jews were punished harshly for "collaborating" with the British. Mussolini responded to the positive Jewish reception of the British by ordering for Libya's Jewish community to be dispersed or removed, in a campaign called sfollamento.
Deportation and internment of Jews
On February 7, 1942, Mussolini ordered the internment of the Jews of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, in order to move them from the war zone and prevent them from aligning with the British. Some Jews were convinced that the order was also retaliation for a number of Jews having left Benghazi in the wake of the retreat of British troops on April 2 and 3, 1941.A new concentration camp was erected for the internment at Giado, a former military post in the Tripolitanian Plateau of the Nafusa Mountains, roughly southwest of Tripoli. Most of the Jews deported on Mussolini's orders were sent to Giado, with some being sent to a camp for foreigners at Gharian. In Benghazi, the Italian authorities requested that the Jewish community prepare a daily quota of Jews to be deported to Giado. Renato Tesciuba, the official Jewish representative to the municipality, refused to prepare the list, citing "Levantine disorder" as the reason, thus delaying the deportations. The concentration of Libyan Jews in Giado was the first stage of a German plan to transfer all of Libya's Jews to Italy, and from Italy to the European extermination camps.
The first scheduled deportation to Giado was postponed. The cohort included 145 French Jews already transferred on April 15, 1942, from the Eastern city of Barce, Marj to Tripoli. The group was waiting in El Coefia to depart to the second stop on the journey, Agedabia, when the Polizia dell'Africa Italiana of Benghazi intervened and obtained the "temporary suspension" of the deportation order. The French Jews were returned to Barce, having already sold many of their belongings in preparation for their internment at Giado.
Deportations began in May 1942, and through October Jews were brought on twice-weekly convoys of 8–10 trucks from their homes in Cyrenaica to Giado following the posting of a summons in the synagogue. By late July, 591 Jews of Benghazi had been sent to Giado, with the remaining 33 awaiting deportation. A wealthy Jewish merchant named Mordechai Duani, who had preexisting connections to the Italians, provided truck transport from Derna, Benghazi, Tobruk, Barca, Ajdabiya, and Apollonia to Giado. 260 of Duani's family and wealthy friends were spared deportation. Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan cites Duani as an example of the Italians forming "Judenrat-like networks" in North Africa.
The deported Jews were allowed to bring a small quantity of personal effects, including food, clothing, and bedding. They often smuggled valuable personal effects, including jewelry, which they could use to barter with local Arabs for food. The journey across the Sirtica desert took five days, and the Jewish prisoners were made to sleep outside en route. When the deportation convoys passed through Arab villages and cities, Jews had the opportunity to trade and eat. In at least one instance, Arabs threw rotten tomatoes at Jews passing through their town on the way to Giado. An account by a prisoner named Bruria records:
In the synagogue they started hanging lists every day of 20–30 families that had to leave. The Italians came to the president of the community and asked to prepare the lists of Jews. He refused because he understood the circumstances. However, a bad Jew volunteered to prepare the lists. Each Jew had to see if his name appeared and if so he had to leave. We did not know whereto. We figured that it was not good. They took Jews from Benghazi and from the vicinity: Derna, Barce, Tobruk... By the way, the bad Jew was not taken by the Fascists to the camp. Each day, Joseph would go the Synagogue to view the list and I used to sit and cry. One day he said, Bruria we are going. The journey took five days; we traveled about 2,000 km from Benghazi to Giado. The trip took a few days and nights. They took us like animals to the slaughter house. 40 people in each truck and each truck two Italian policemen. They took only Jews. According to one rumor it was the Germans who gave the order.
Approximately 2,600 Jews were deported to Giado. The vast majority of Cyrenaican Jews were deported to Giado. Among Tripolitanian Jews, only those with British or French citizenship were sent to Giado, with the Tripolitanian Jews who held Libyan citizenship being sent to nearby labor camps like those at Buq Buq and Sidi Azaz. These deportations left only 120 Jews in Cyrenaica, who were spared "because of their good connections with the Italian authorities". Benghazi was the last community to be cleared out and deported.
At least 400 Jews at Giado were sent to other sites, including in the nearby towns of Gharian, Yefren, and Triginna, to manage overcrowding. In these towns, Jews were housed in separate buildings, with one family per room, and monitored closely with no freedom of movement.
Life in the camp
The concentration camp at Giado, set up in a former military camp originally built by Ottomans and later used by the Italians to whom they lost Libya, consisted of ten long barracks, each with a capacity of 400 inmates, surrounded by barbed wire. In each barrack was a deputy and an elected capo, a Jewish prisoner who acted as a representative and negotiator for his barrack to the camp's administration. Families hung blankets to act as partitions in the undivided quarters. Barracks had no furniture but beds, which were sometimes insufficient for the prisoners in number. A machine gunman watched from a hill opposite the camp in order to prevent escape. One of the barracks served as a jail for prisoners who were determined to have committed crimes, though prisoners accused of multiple or serious crimes were sent to a criminal prison in Tripoli.The camp's commandant was General d'armate Ettore Bastico, the governor of Libya and the commander-in-chief of Italian troops in North Africa. His deputy was Major Guerriero Modestino, who acted as the head of camp. Bastico was known for his antisemitism and humiliating, cruel treatment of prisoners. Modestino was considered to be more sympathetic to Jews. The two regularly walked camp grounds together, Bastico wielding a whip or club and threatening inmates. Prisoners were not allowed to speak at night.
The prisoners at Giado were almost exclusively families of Libyan and Italian Jews from Cyrenaica, especially Benghazi, which contained one of the largest Jewish communities in Libya. Family units were kept together. The camp also briefly held Jews with French citizenship and with British passports.
Labor and society
Forced labor began on June 28, 1942. Though there was no daily work quota, men interned at the camp aged 18–45 labored in various daily assignments from morning until night: cleaning toilets, disposing of garbage, transporting sand and stone, and tiling roofs inside and outside the camp. They did not work on Saturdays. Those who fixed roofs outside the camp received a daily wage of 5 francs and one bun. Once weekly, they did the twelve-hour task of weeding and transporting dirt. The usefulness of the work was dubious to the Jews, who suspected that their assignments' main function was humiliation. As disease, malnutrition, and exhaustion increased, the work assignments decreased. It is not known whether any private firms used Jewish prisoners at Giado as forced laborers. Prisoners who oversaw the distribution of rations were spared the mandate of labor.The Jewish families formed a camp council, led by Camus Suarez, consisting of an elected capo from each of the ten barracks at Giado. Each barrack also housed a deputy. Capos organized the daily life of their communities in Giado, overseeing labor and distributing goods including firewood and food, which was sometimes sent by the Jewish community in Tripoli. The capos also converted a camp barrack into a makeshift synagogue, so that the imprisoned Jews could practice their Judaism in detention. The synagogue housed a Torah scroll from Derna. A number of rabbis were among the prisoners, including Frija Zoaretz.