Transit Camp Research Articles

Ma’abarot: Israeli immigrant transit camps revisited

ABSTRACT This article suggests a re-periodisation of the transit camps in which hundreds of thousands of immigrants were housed in Israel’s first three decades. It anchors the meaning of these temporal housing spaces – known as Ma’abarot – and rebuts the perception of their temporality, presenting new data about institutional policies regarding these allegedly temporary living spaces and the everyday reality of their inhabitants. It suggests a re-periodisation that includes not only the initial handling of the massive Jewish immigration wave during the ‘Mass Aliyah’ (1948–51) but also the longer-term settling of the immigrants.

Iraqi Jewish Immigrants, Palestinian refugees, and intercommunal relations in Tira Transit Camp

ABSTRACT This article discusses the relations between different Jewish migrant communities during the early 1950s in the Tira transit camp (Ma’abara) that was established on the land of the Arab village of Al-Tira near Haifa. The Tira camp was divided into two parts. While the population of the north camp was dominated mainly by Jewish migrants from Romania, the south camp was home mainly to Jewish migrants from Iraq. This article concentrates on the Iraqi Jews, particularly those from Mosul who settled in the south camp, and examines their relations with Jews from Baghdad. The article examines the ways in which the borders between the south camp and north camp influenced the intercommunal relations in this space. It also explores the manner in which the relations between the different Jewish communities in Iraq were reflected in the relations among the migrants in the south camp. During the transition from the Arab village of Al-Tira to the Jewish village of Tira, dozens of Palestinian refugees returned to the lands of the village. Thus, the article also examines the crossing of ethnic and national borders and the relations between Jews and Arabs in this shared space.

Strengthening Resilience in Refugee Children Through Art and Attention to their Voices

The study focuses on refugee children living in a temporary transit camp in Lesbos, Greece, which endeavors to provide the children with safety, security, and an adaptive learning experience under transit camp conditions. The research question was: Can children develop a high level of hope during prolonged hardship and distress? The study adopted the salutogenic approach developed by Antonovsky, according to which resilience can develop under severe stress. We also used an arts-based research method to focus on how a sense of coherence can enhance an overall sense of hope. Findings confirm that hope is a component of inner resilience, and not necessarily dependent on external circumstances, even when those circumstances are harsh and threatening. Additionally, it appears that art can enhance children’s ability to communicate their social context, as well as the capacity of adults to pay attention to the children’s voices. The findings support the argument that hope is a personality trait, and not necessarily dependent on external circumstances. The findings obtained from the children’s drawings and class discussions enhance our understanding that a positive experience of support can be achieved in a protected environment, where clear boundaries are set, and attention is given to forming positive relationships.

Checkmate: Chess Artifacts and Artworks Made and Played in Extremis

Abstract A game of war, chess was played and pictured in a time of war by men and women, Jews and non-Jews in hiding, in the ghettos, and even behind the barbed wire of the transit, concentration, and extermination camps across Nazi-occupied Europe. Throughout the Second World War, instead of “throwing the game” and giving up, victims of National Socialism devised ingenious ways to improvise chess sets out of found materials and detritus—carved wood, folded paper, etched tin, and modeled bread. They also drew and painted chess games to document and allegorize their lives in extremis. Through a close reading of chess artifacts and artworks, this article reveals how access to materials and time, status within camp hierarchies, ethnic and national identities, and wartime experiences impacted the various ways these groups used the game of chess under difficult playing conditions. Insisting upon the central role of creativity and play, it argues that both material artifacts and artwork inform our knowledge of how individuals living under Nazi oppression thought and felt.

Irma Weinberg's 1928 paper "on the problem of the determination of heredity prognosis: The risk in the cousins of schizophrenics".

Irma Weinberg, a German-Jewish Neuropsychiatrist/Physician, authored the fourth report from the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich examining the risk for dementia praecox (DP) in particular relatives of DP probands, here first-cousins. She examined 977 cousins of 54 DP probands and found a best-estimate risk of 1.4%. She conducted within-study analyses, showing a much higher risk for DP in the siblings than cousins of DP probands. She studied DP-related personalities showing a familial link between these conditions and risk for DP. She demonstrated that the risk for DP in cousins was impacted substantially by the distribution, in ancestors, of psychosis and personality abnormalities. After completing work on this article, Weinberg worked in private practice in Frankfurt, emigrating to the Netherlands in 1934, where she worked at a Jewish psychiatric hospital. In 1943, German occupiers evacuated the hospital, transporting the patients and staff, either directly to Auschwitz or, like Weinberg, to the Westerbork transit camp. On September 4, 1944, Dr. Weinberg was transported to Theresienstadt and soon thereafter to Auschwitz, where she was murdered at the age of 53. Her history raises painful questions about the relationship between genetic studies of psychiatric illness in prewar Germany and the Holocaust.

2. Le Zigeunertransport du camp de transit de Westerbork

This article presents a proposal for an internationally embedded historiography of the Sinti and Roma from the Netherlands in German concentration camps that includes the insights offered by memory studies and new ways of analyzing oral testimony, interviews, and written memories. Through extensive genealogical exploration and research using the administrative records of concentration camps, the article aims to initiate and stimulate a historiographic approach that builds a more comprehensive picture of the intrinsically transnational character of the Roma families during the Holocaust. Furthermore, the article presents the first systematic study of information from the Buchenwald and Auschwitz records regarding the Roma deported from the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. The article serves as a stepping-stone to a monograph in which an osmosis perspective will shed light on the special family history that is not limited to the Dutch national borders.

Drancy–La Muette: Concentrationary Urbanism and Psychogeographical Memory in Alexandre Lacroix’s La Muette (2017)

That the Drancy transit and internment camp—the main camp from which Jews were deported from France—is currently inhabited, having reverted to its pre-war name ‘La Muette’ and initial function as a housing estate at the end of the 1940s, remains little-known. As a result of this multi-layered history, the site is deeply ambivalent, being both haunted and inhabited. Through a theoretical framework informed by psychogeography, this article brings to light the concentrationary presence that is layered onto the space of everyday life at the site of Drancy–La Muette and investigates the possibility of resisting the resulting spatial politics of dehumanisation. Through a close reading of Alexandre Lacroix’s novel La Muette (2017) and its spatial poetics, this article argues that it is by elaborating new ways of seeing, whereby the interpenetration of past and present, the visible and the invisible, comes to the fore, that the traumatic space of Drancy–La Muette may open up. This, in turn, allows for the circulation of affective resonances between the built environment and the individual, which resist the concentrationary logic.

Place and displacement: Historical geographies of Israel's largest landfill

This article explores the role of space in facilitating forms of political power, as shown in the destruction of landscape in the center of Israel by the Hiriya landfill. That failed infrastructure wrecked the delicate legacies of mankind and nature, thus sealing the area’s fate as a city’s repellent dumping ground that attracted all kinds of liminal activities. After the 1948 war, which resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel, the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages and the erasure of their people’s legacy, Tel Aviv begun dumping its household waste near an Arab village, the residents of which had been expelled during the conflict. The authorities promised the local inhabitants — Jewish newcomers and refugees in the nearby transit camp, as well as local city dwellers — a new and modern compost plant, but the plant’s opening was repeatedly postponed. This article reveals the rapid changes that occurred in the early 1950s in the Hiriya area, and how insistence on a modern, technologically based solution to waste treatment, suffused with Zionist ideology, resulted in the creation of an infamous site that became a symbol for environmental, infrastructural, social and health hazards. Drawing from diverse unexplored textual and visual archival sources, including aerial photographs, historical maps, printed texts and interviews, we argue that this combined method of landscape reading is crucial for understanding such a tragedy of landscape. Our study of the Hiriya landfill points to the challenges posed by infrastructure, and contributes to future research into post-industrial sites, including landfills, quarries, airfields, mines and factories.

The Story of the Jewish Dutch Diamond Workers during WWII

This article sketches the historical background of Sieg Maandag's story. His father was a Jewish diamond worker who, when the Netherlands were occupied by the Germans, was exempted from deportation. The Germans wanted to set up a diamond industry of their own and the diamond workers managed to negotiate their exemption to include their direct families as well. However, in the course of 1943 the exemption turned out to be temporary. The diamond workers and their wives and children were deported first to the Dutch transit camp Westerbork, then on to Bergen-Belsen. In her 1995 video testimony Lize Elion relates the effect of the exemption on the diamond people, e.g. their decision not to go into hiding because the exemption seemed to offer better chances of survival. From the perspective of a child from a manual worker's family Gerrit Cohensius gives an account of what happened in Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen. Personal interviews with Robby Engelander and personal documents from his family give detailed insight into the fate of the men, the women and the children of the diamond transport, of which Sieg Maandag and his family were part too.

Tod der Płocker Bischöfe im Soldauer Konzentrationslager

In September 1939 in Działdowo the Nazis established a transit camp for the war prisoners of the Polish September Campaign of 1939 in the former barracks of the 32 infantry regiment on Grunwaldzka Street. At the turn of 1939 and 1940 the police and the SS authorities in Königsberg transformed the Działdowo camp into the transit camp „Durchgangslager“. Priests imprisoned in the Działdowo camp from autumn 1939 to autumn 1941 constituted a special group of political prisoners. The archbishop Antoni Julian Nowowiejski and the bishop Leon Wetmański, Płock bishop suffragan, were brought to the Działdowo camp in 1941. The Płock bishops quickly became spiritual guides and the support for the prisoners in difficult moments of camp life. In order to prevent their contacts with the prisoners, the bishops were put in a separate cell number 12. They were subjected to different kinds of moral and physical torture, including the attempt to profane the cross. Difficult living conditions in the camp soon led to the death of the Płock priests: the archbishop Antoni Julian Nowowiejski died on 28 May 1941 and the bishop Leon Wetmański died on 10 October 1941. Apart from them, 47 priests and 1 seminarian lost their lives in the Działdowo camp in 1939–1945.

Transnationalism and Hybridity in Religious Practices during the Migration Process: The Zera Beta Israel in Ethiopia and Israel

This article examines the complexity of religious practices and beliefs among a group of Zera Beta Israel (Falash Mura) members before, during, and a decade after their immigration process to Israel. This community, with roots in Judaism, converted to Christianity in the 19th century, complicating their request to immigrate to Israel along with Beta Israel members (Ethiopian Jews who had not converted to Christianity). Following an average 15-year wait in Ethiopian transit camps, they spent about two years in Israeli absorption centres and underwent conversion to rabbinic Judaism. This study aims to elucidate notions of religious, cultural, and oppositional transnationalism through life experiences described by Zera Beta Israel community members. Drawing on transnational theory and an interpretative qualitative approach, it develops and analyses 25 in-depth, semi-structured interviews and conversations conducted with members of the Zera Beta Israel community in Ethiopia and Israel. The findings challenge conventional binary perceptions and conceptual categories, such as Jewish–Christian or religious–secular and demonstrate the fluidity and complexity—the hybridity—that exists in the contexts of religion and immigration.

Empty cradles: medical authority and disappeared children

During the creation of the state of Israel, thousands of babies and young children were removed from their Jewish immigrant families by welfare and medical authorities. New to the state of Israel, these families from the Middle East, the Balkans, and north Africa spoke little Hebrew and were often living in poverty or transit camps. Children were removed on the belief that their parents could not look after them. Their children would be taken to hospitals and nurseries and never seen again. The parents were told their children had died.

Uloga logora u gušenju ustanka u Srbiji 1941. godine

The internment of tens of thousands of people in the newly created network of permanent and temporary camps was an important integral part of actions of the occupation forces in Serbia during the suppression of mass insurgent movement in the summer and autumn of 1941. The main purpose of these camps was to be a reservoir of people to be shot for the German losses in the battles with the insurgents in the proportion of 100 for one killed, or 50 for a wounded German soldier or Volksdeutsche. The network of permanent camps consisted of camps at Banjica in Belgrade, Šabac and Niš. For the territory of Banat, a camp was formed in Veliki Bečkerek (today Zrenjanin), ending the formation of a network of permanent camps. They also served as a place of internment of hostages, real or potential opponents of the occupation, but also some other categories of men and women. Starting from April 1942, permanent camps in Serbia were given the function of a source for forced labor in concentration and labor camps in Germany or in occupied countries, including Serbia itself. The main role was played by the camp at the Belgrade Fair and the camp at Banjica, where detainees from other camps were sent for forced labor. This was also the result of a change in policy towards captured insurgents and their sympathizers, which was a reflection of the growing need of the German war economy for labor. In May 1942, the role of the central German camp in Serbia was taken over by the camp at the Belgrade Fair, now under the name Anhaltelager Semlin (Prihvatni logor Zemun). Temporary camps served almost exclusively for the internment of captured members of the insurgent movement, their sympathizers, civilian population and as a source of people for mass shootings. Among temporary camps, the most important were the Transit Camp in the barracks on Senjak, in Šabac and the Jewish Transit Camp Topovske Šupe (Cannon Sheds) in Belgrade. The second camp served exclusively as a source of Jews and Roma for mass shootings and was the main and largest reservoir of these categories of prisoners. The camp ceased to exist at the time of the formation of the Jewish Camp Zemun, which, after the killing of the Jewish prisoners, became the central German camp in occupied Serbia.

'What Has Been Written Upon the Forehead, the Eye Must See': An Arabic-Jewish Author Between Baghdad and an Israeli Transit Camp

As an integral part of Arab society since the pre-Islamic period, Jews participated in the making of Arabic literature. We know of prominent Jewish poets such as al-Samawʾal ibn ʿᾹdiyāʾ in the sixth century A.D. and Ibrāhīm ibn Sahl in al-Andalus in the thirteenth century. During the first half of the twentieth century, Arabic literature in fuṣḥā (standard Arabic) written by Jews witnessed a great revival, especially in Iraq and Egypt, but this revival was cut short as a casualty of Zionism and Arab nationalism and the conflict between them. We are currently witnessing the demise of Arabic literature written by Jews; the Arabic language among Jews will probably remain mostly a tool of the military establishment and the intelligence systems as encapsulated in the dictum 'know your enemy' instead of being a medium for coexistence and knowing the Other. The article concentrates on the literary activities of one of the most talented Iraqi-Jewish authors, Shalom Darwīsh (1913-1997), whose promising anticipated literary future in Arabic literature encountered a deadlock following the aforementioned exclusion of Jews from 'Arabness'.

Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’sAusterlitz

Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’s<i>Austerlitz</i>

5. Figure de l’accusé en témoin de l’accusation

In March 1945, Pejo Peev Draganov, a former official with the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs (Komisarstvo po evrejskite vuprosi—KEV) in Bulgaria, appeared before Chamber 7 of the People’s Courts, an emergency court established in the fall of 1944 by the coalition of the predominantly Communist Patriotic Front for the purpose of bringing to justice the alleged perpetrators of anti-Jewish crimes in Bulgaria. As the head of the Skopje transit camp, where Macedonian Jews from Vardar, a Yugoslavian province occupied by Bulgaria during the war, were imprisoned before being deported to Poland, Draganov was accused of participating in Jewish persecutions. He left the courthouse a free man. Twenty-three years later, in 1968, Draganov once again appeared before a court of justice, specifically the Hesse District (RFA) Courthouse, in response to the lawsuit brought against the former minister plenipotentiary of the Reich in Sofia during the Second World War, Adolf-Heinz Beckerle, who had negotiated the deportation of Jews from the occupied territories with the Bulgarian authorities. This time, he testified as a witness for the prosecution. This arrangement was the result of a complex negotiation between the Prosecutor’s Office of Communist Bulgaria in Sofia and the West German prosecution.By taking as an entry point the career of this former defendant (in the sense of Howard Becker), the changes in his positioning on the chessboard of justice, and his movement within the space of East-West relations, the aim of this article is to question the production of post-war justice for war crimes in Europe from a transnational perspective, with a focus on its shifts over space and time. The research is based on an extensive examination of the archives of the trials held in 1944-1945 (in Bulgaria) and 1967-1968 (in the Federal Republic of Germany) regarding the judicial systems of these two states and their troubled collaboration during the Cold War.

The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call

The immigration to Israel of most of Yemenite Jewry in 1948–1950, titled “Operation Magic Carpet” is symbolic of a miraculous leap in space and time from distant Yemen to the modern Jewish state. The Yemenite Jews’ utopian ethos, however, was far from able to foresee the trauma that awaited them in the transit camps where they were placed after their arrival in Israel: the kidnapping of thousands of infants in what became known as the “missing Yemenite-Jewish children affair.”

The politics of remembering and forgetting: Vietnamese refugees at Singapore’s Hawkins Road Transit Camp

This paper examines the genealogy of Vietnamese refugees based at a transit camp in Singapore between 1975 and 1996. Created by UNHCR with permission of the Singapore government, Hawkins Road Camp hosted Vietnamese refugees with confirmed destinations in their transit. The transit camp was found to be heterotopian, oscillating between the state’s economic pragmatism and humanitarianism. Its heterotopian traits can be traced to its varying (in)visibility throughout its operation from physical demolition to eventual cyber-presence. The heterotopian space of the camp is found to be constructed by two epistemes or politics of truth – the first functioning when the transit camp was in operation and the second operating when the camp was decommissioned and demolished. The first episteme created discursive practices which directed measures at reluctant acceptance and discreet (unpublicised) care of refugees. This is evident from the low media presence, obscure camp location and invisibility not being marked on key landuse maps at the time. The second episteme enacts discursive practices which shape the textual and tangible marginalisations and erasures of refugee presence and history. It is matched and resisted by online commemoration of the transit camp by a stakeholder community concerned with the histories of the transit camp. In doing so, we illuminate the omission of humanitarian ideals for discourses focused on extreme resource vulnerability and economic pragmatism by the Singapore state and provide a geographical critique of such refugee governance. We add to the current literature on the politics and landscapes of remembering and forgetting by examining the subject positions of peoples entwined in these power-relations and highlight the need to attend to the shifts in these subject positions. The shift from a transient unwanted population to one that has never existed has propelled physical and textual erasures of refugee presence.

Food Supply, Starvation, and Food As a Weapon in the Camps and Ghettos of Romanian-Occupied Bessarabia and Transnistria, 1941-44

The Romanian regime of wartime leader Ion Antonescu concentrated the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovyna in transit camps and ghettos, and then deported them to the Romanian-administered territory between the Dnister and Buh rivers, in southwestern Ukraine. Of approximately 160,000 Romanian Jews deported to “Transnistria,” only 50,000 survived the ordeal. The Romanians, with local Volksdeutsch and Ukrainian collaborators, also massacred and were otherwise responsible for the death of approximately 150,000 local Ukrainian Jews, including the large Jewish community of Odesa. While not comparable to the Jews in number, deported Romanian Roma and local Roma were also subjected to physical brutality, forced labour, and incarceration.&#x0D; Famine and starvation did not cause all Jewish and Roma deaths in Bessarabia and Transnistria. Mass executions exacted a huge toll. So did exposure to the elements, exhaustion, and typhus. Still, while there was no famine in the region, starvation was a permanent presence. Romanian authorities controlled the food supply and denied it to their targeted victims. This article describes the steps taken by Romanian occupation authorities to isolate Jews and Roma; to limit the flow of food supplies to them; to prevent them from accessing food in local markets; and to prevent help that might have been offered by those local civilians who took pity on the starving victims. Official documentation and testimonies of both officials and survivors provide a vivid picture of the consequences. Specific cases reveal factors that made the situation in one locality better or worse than that in another, or that caused a situation to improve or deteriorate. Variations notwithstanding, however, all sources lead to the conclusion that Romania’s goal was to eliminate the Jews and reduce the Roma population. This made starvation, the use of “food as a weapon,” an acceptable element of state policy.

Psychoanalysis in the Meantime

ABSTRACT This paper describes the psychic toll the migratory, humanitarian crisis is exacting on the self (and its sacred core) of displaced people worldwide, specifically young children and adolescents, who are currently being held in transit camps. The sacred core is Winnicott’s elaboration of the true self and that which is most deeply personal and private, and “most worthy of preservation”. For exiles held in detention, the self and its core are in urgent need of protection and recognition, as they struggle to exist in what I refer to as The Meantime. The Meantime is when migratory mourning stretches to infinity, resulting in extreme dissociation, or depersonalization, that becomes a collective way of life that destroys reality and the self. In order for the self and reality to survive The Meantime, relationships with “need mediating subjects,” whom I call The Responsibles, must be created.