Dalmatian WWII Refugees in El Shatt, Egypt: Narratives of Sanctuary and Suffering

Dalmatian WWII Refugees in El Shatt, Egypt:

Narratives of Sanctuary and Suffering
Gabi Abramac

So much of what happened in your life

became part of my life.1

Storytelling, Memory, and Narrative

Storytelling shapes our identity from a very early age. Narra-

tives are a fundamental resource for the socialization of identities
and they nurture a sense of belonging to a community.2 Processes of
identity formation are based on narrative forms and functions.3 We
belong to social groups with shared belief systems, groups, which
have framed and shaped their memories into narratives.4 Our fami-
lies’ stories employ a wide range of discursive strategies to portray
our ancestors in a self-fashioned way. Through identification with
their trajectories, achievements, and losses, we become part of the
story, the inheritors of memory. Our ancestors’ life experiences are
embedded in, and imprinted upon, the fabric of the identity into
which we are woven. The inherited memories of my family, transmi-
tted through storytelling, always included war, displacement, loss,

1 Lily Brett, Too Many Men (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 526.
2 Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, ‘Narrating the Self,’ in Annual Review of Anthro-
pology 25 (1996), 19–43.
3 A lexandra Georgakopoulou, ‘Thinking Big with Small Stories in Narrative
and Identity Analysis,’ in Narrative Inquiry 16, 1 (2006), 122–30; Stephanie
Taylor, ‘Narrative as Construction and Discursive Resource,’ in Narrative In-
quiry 16, 1 (2006), 94–102.
4 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 2012), 32. Hereafter Hirsch, Postmemory.

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poverty, hunger, fear and oppression. They also included resilience,

resourcefulness, patience, survival and reconciliation. The life traje-
ctories of my grandparents and great-grandparents were framed by
the turbulent socio-political circumstances that shaped their native
Dalmatian hinterland. Their narratives and stories are micro-dis-
cursive accounts that also inform us about macro-level events, their
individual life stories reflect wider societal developments.
Narrated recollections of the Second World War belong to
my earliest childhood memories. My uncle, a war child, used to
boast that he could speak Italian, which made me very proud, es-
pecially when he taught me how to count to ten in that language.
Later, I realized that this was one of only two things he could say
in Italian. The other was ‘poco pane’ (‘some bread’), an expression
he had learned when he used to beg from Italian soldiers—the oc-
cupying force in Dalmatia between 1941 and 1943. To paraphrase
Leo Rosten, my uncle was a linguist of necessity.5 To me, these pa-
ssed-down memories often seemed as vivid as those of events I had
experienced myself. Even though I was born thirty years after the
war, the Second World War still loomed as an event of the past, to
be sure, but of a past that was not all that distant. I was, in Hirsch’s
sense of the word, a child of ‘postmemory’. Hirsch uses this concept
to describe
the relationship the ‘generation after’ bears to the person-
al, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came be-
fore—to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the
stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.
But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply
and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their
own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus
actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative invest-
ment, projection, and creation.6

5 Leo Rosten, The New Joys of Yiddish (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), xx.
6 Hirsch, Postmemory, 5.

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 Dalmatian WWII Refugees in El Shatt, Egypt: Narratives of Sanctuary and Suffering

Some people in the generation of my grandparents told me

how they fled to Africa and survived the war living in a refugee
camp in the middle of the Egyptian desert. I was fascinated by their
journey and trajectories, and by their gripping stories, for example,
of how one could boil an egg by digging a hole in the hot sand and
inserting the egg there for a few minutes. When I was about ten ye-
ars old, a regional newspaper, Slobodna Dalmacija, published a se-
ries of articles about El Shatt, the Yugoslav refugee camp in Egypt,
which I had already heard mentioned in these stories. I remember
eagerly waiting for my father to come home from work with the pa-
pers, then grabbing them, opening them, grappling with the huge
pages that were almost my size, and delving into the lines that reco-
unted these events.
In 2015, I decided to revisit my childhood fascination with
these stories of survival and suffering in the Egyptian desert. I re-
turned to this under-researched chapter of the Second World War,
now in my capacity as a qualitative researcher, and conducted exten-
sive ethnographic fieldwork, collecting the biographical narratives
of former El Shatt refugees and their descendants. Even though
some historical publications had dealt with the Dalmatian refugees
in El Shatt, nobody had previously gone about collecting the oral
testimonies and biographical narratives of those affected by this
mass exodus in an organized manner. In the following discussion,
I draw on secondary literature, archival records, autobiographical
memoirs and my own ethnographic fieldwork to bring the memory
of the El Shatt refugee camp alive.

The Yugoslav Refugee Camp in El Shatt, Egypt,

1944–1946: The Historical Background

Following Italy’s capitulation in 1943 and prior to the Ger-

man occupation of Dalmatia, some 40,000 Dalmatians were eva-
cuated to Italy and Egypt. This mass transfer was organized jointly

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by the Yugoslavian partisans and the Allied forces (especially the

British Navy). In order to be evacuated to Italy, the refugees first
had to reach the island of Vis, which was under the control of the
National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugosla-
via. From Vis, they were transferred to Italy and many of them, ulti-
mately, were moved on to Egypt. The largest refugee camps in Italy
were in Santa Maria di Leuca, Santa Maria al Bagno, and Santa
Cesarea. Due to the shortage of housing and other logistical issues,
about 28,000 refugees left Italy during the first half of 1944 to be
resettled in Egypt. There they were placed in three different camps:
(1) El Shatt, in the desert of the Sinai Peninsula, some fifteen miles
north of the southern end of the Suez Canal; (2) El Khatatba, near
Cairo;7 and (3) Tolumbat, near Alexandria. El Shatt was the largest
camp—it actually comprised camps for Polish, Greek and Yugosla-
vian refugees. The latter was divided into two camps, one run by
the Yugoslavian partisans, which housed 27,042 civilians, the other
for members of the Yugoslav Royal Forces.
The autobiography of John Hick, a philosopher of religion
and theologian serving in El Shatt with The Friends’ Ambulance
Unit (FAU) at the time,8 and the diary of his FAU colleague, John
Corsellis,9 complement the refugee testimonies in interesting ways.
Hick recalled the arrival of the Dalmatian refugees in El Shatt: ‘At
the beginning of 1944 refugees from the Dalmatian coastline of

7 Given the poor climatic conditions and following the outbreak of smallpox,
the refugees from El Khatatba were transferred to El Shatt at the end of 1944.
8 The Friends’ Ambulance Unit (FAU) was a volunteer ambulance service,
founded by individual members of the British Religious Society of Friends
(Quakers) in line with their Peace Testimony. The FAU operated from 1914–
1919, 1939–1946, and 1946–1959 in 25 different countries around the world.
It was independent of the Quaker organization and chiefly staffed by regis-
tered conscientious objectors.
9 John Corsellis, War and Aftermath. Letter–Diaries of a Humanitarian Worker
with the Quakers, British Red Cross & UNRRA, 1944–1947, available online
at http://repository.forcedmigration.org/show_metadata.jsp?pid=fmo:5360
(last accessed on 22 May 2018). Hereafter Corsellis, War and Aftermath.

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 Dalmatian WWII Refugees in El Shatt, Egypt: Narratives of Sanctuary and Suffering

Yugoslavia were reaching the Middle East in large numbers. They

had fled with the aid of the British navy from the regions devasta-
ted by the fierce three-cornered fighting between Tito’s Partisans,
the German army of occupation, and Mihailovich’s royalist Chet-
niks.’10
El Shatt was run by the MERRA (Middle East Relief and
Refugee Administration), which later became the UNRRA (Uni-
ted Nations Relief and Refugee Administration), the British forces
(the Allied forces), and Yugoslavian partisans. As Hick recalled,
the camp ‘was being run by a mixture of South African army of-
ficers (most of whom had been sent there because their units did
not want them) and a number of civilians, including members of
the American Near East Foundation, the British Red Cross, Inter-
national Voluntary Service for Peace, American Mennonites, and
ourselves [i.e., the FAU]’.11
The Allies took care of all the refugees’ material needs but
within the camp a system of self-government was in place. The
neighboring Greek camp, by contrast, was entirely under the con-
trol of Allies, as was the royal Yugoslavian camp in El Arish. In
the Yugoslavian camp at El Shatt, the Refugee Central Committee
(RCC) [Centralni odbor zbjega] ran life inside the camp, though
under the supervision of the Allies. Initially, this dual, partly over-
lapping governance led to misunderstandings between the two le-
vels of authority. Hence their responsibilities and roles were stri-
ctly separated. The RCC was divided into departments, and each
department was further divided into six sections: administration,
economic affairs, education, health and hygiene, culture and in-
formation, and the technical section. This network of institutions,
departments, sections, and divisions developed an elaborate system
of correspondence, producing a substantial corpus of written docu-

10 John Hick, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oneworld, 2002), 49. Hereafter

Hick, Autobiography.
11 Ibid.

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mentation, which is now held by the State Archive in Split.12

Several thousand refugees voluntarily returned to Yugosla-
via to join the Yugoslavian partisans’ combat, technical, or medical
units. Between April 1945 and March 1946, the remaining refu-
gees were repatriated in twelve transports. The El Shatt camp was
dismantled in March 1946.

Tracing Witnesses: Research Methodology and

Respondents

The methodology of my research is based on extensive ethno-

graphic fieldwork, in-depth biographical narratives and testimonies
that enrich the interpretation of archival documents, historical so-
urces, and published autobiographies and diaries. I have approac-
hed narrative as a social practice and built on the trend to combine
ethnography and textual analysis.13 Merging textual analysis and
ethnographic methods helps in interpreting the coherence of res-
pondents’ narratives.14
I used several channels to recruit research participants. Some
were recruited through personal contacts and a snowball sampling
technique. A second group was recruited by issuing a call for re-
search participation on my personal Facebook page. Most of the
participants were recruited by the call I issued through a number
of Dalmatian local radio stations who generously granted me two
minutes to explain that the aim of my research was to collect oral

12 Branko Radonić, ‘Arhivski fond dalmatinskoga zbjega (1943–1946.) Držav-

nog arhiva u Splitu (DAST 22–23),’ unpublished seminar paper, University
of Split, 2015.
13 Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein, ‘Narrative Practice and the Co-
herence of Personal Stories,’ in Sociological Quarterly 39, 1 (1998), 163–87.
14 Natalie Cherot, ‘Storytelling and Ethnographic Intersections: Vietnamese
Adoptees and Rescue Narratives,’ in Qualitative Inquiry 15, 1 (2009), 113–
48. Hereafter Cherot, ‘Storytelling’.

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 Dalmatian WWII Refugees in El Shatt, Egypt: Narratives of Sanctuary and Suffering

testimonies, which would contribute to national remembrance and

Dalmatian public history. In a matter of minutes my phone began
to buzz incessantly and by the end of the day I had a substantial
list of names and notes on the general background of potential in-
terviewees. The final group was recruited at the screening of a do-
cumentary on El Shatt on 18 June 2015, which took place at the
Croatian State Archives in Zagreb.
The most surprising aspect of the recruitment process was
the number of calls I received from people who had not been re-
fugees in El Shatt themselves and whom I would call vicarious
witnesses. They were the descendants of deceased El Shatt refu-
gees who wanted to share the memories that had been transmi-
tted to them by their parents and grandparents. Among them
were Slađana Đuderija from the island of Hvar and her mother,
Lina. Lina’s late mother was an El Shatt refugee whose father died
on the ship taking them to El Shatt. She also buried her brother
in the desert. The Đuderijas had traumatic memories of El Shatt
transmitted to them and saw it as their duty to assist research that
would document this chapter of both personal and local history.
They compiled a list of interviewees whom they had recruited on
my behalf and provided me with accommodation in their house
in Hvar. I am immensely grateful to them for their generosity and
dedication to the task of doing justice to the sufferings and me-
mory of their forebears.
I undertook the bulk of my fieldwork between January and
June 2015. I conducted several additional interviews in the cour-
se of 2016. In total, I recorded 26 biographical narratives, which I
transcribed before analyzing their narrative content. The respon-
dents came from Dalmatian islands, Dalmatian coastal cities, and
the Dalmatian hinterland. My research also included some Jewish
survivors. The interviews were mostly conducted in various Croa-
tian cities and on a number of Croatian islands. One of the inter-
views took place in Herzliya, Israel.

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Gabi Abramac

All of the interviewees were extremely keen to participate in

the study. Most of them felt that their experiences had been for-
gotten, even though they formed an important chapter of modern
Dalmatian history. One of the respondents praised Steven Spiel-
berg for creating the Shoah Visual History Archive, adding that,
sadly, no one in Croatia had ever come to record their testimonies.
In my analysis of the El Shatt experience, I also took into account
photographs, personal documents, belongings, and artefacts (such
as blankets from El Shatt and garments made of tent fabric) as te-
stimonial objects. Some Jewish refugees who participated in my re-
search had managed to take their photo albums and Judeo-Spanish
prayer books with them, turning their bundle of refugee belongin-
gs into a portable archive of the pre-war Jewish life in Yugoslavia,
which was forever eradicated during the war. Pictures showing pe-
ople posing in the sand and dressed as though for a tea party in a
Viennese café demonstrate resilience and an attempt to recreate at
least an illusion of the normalcy of pre-war civilian life. Thus, my
project utilizes ethnography as a connective tissue between histori-
cal accounts, memory, psychological and social processes, and theo-
ries of culture and politics.

Biographical Narratives and Emerging Themes

Although most of the narratives I recorded were coherent,

some of them consisted of fragmented memories and vignettes. I
coded all the narratives according to emerging themes, patterns,
and conceptual categories, triangulating linguistic, observational,
and interview data.15 In other words, I approached these narra-
tives as a supplement to, not as a substitute for, historical acco-
unts and archival records. Rather than looking for a chronologi-
cal sequence of events, I was looking for multilayered meanings
15 A nselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin, Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded
Theory Procedures and Techniques (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990).

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 Dalmatian WWII Refugees in El Shatt, Egypt: Narratives of Sanctuary and Suffering

in the oral narratives. My interest lay in uncovering themes that

are entrenched in the memory of El Shatt refugees, in analyzing
their emotions and attitudes, and in understanding how they
make sense of their personal and collective experiences within
the historical context. Analyzing the narratives, I identified 20
salient themes, which featured in all the testimonies.16
These themes are: (1) fear, hiding, fleeing, escaping, heading
towards the unknown; (2) a fluid sense of time; (3) loss of home,
destruction of property; (4) bodies in movement and means of
transportation (ships, submarines, trains, cattle trains, trucks,
buses, walking on foot); (5) places, landscapes, climate, and we-
ather conditions; (6) languages, cultures, and races in contact; (7)
taking pride in their own resourcefulness and organizational abi-
lities; (8) illness, disease, hospitals, doctors, nurses; (9) death and
birth; (10) alimentation, food, starving, being fed, describing me-
als in detail; (11) hygiene; (12) occupational life; (13) schooling,
education, and cultural life; (14) religious life; (15) animals (loss
of cattle, goats, camels, fish, mice, snakes); (16) the role of ideo-
logy and the processes of ideological indoctrination in the camp;
(17) forging new relationships (friendships, marriages, adultery,
illicit relationships); (18) the interweaving of other people’s desti-
nies into the respondent’s own narrative; (19) the army, soldiers,
uniforms, war, the enemy, military strategizing; (20) repatriation
and post-war developments. A fine-grained analysis of these the-
mes brings us to three types of self-representation or a tripartite
model of identity: personal, relational, and collective.17

16 I further subdivided these themes to account for a number of additional re-

current motifs, which I cannot discuss in this relatively short chapter.
17 Marilynn B. Brewer and Wendi L. Gardner, ‘Who is We? Levels of Collec-
tive Identity and Self-Representations,’ in Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 71, 1 (1996), 83–93.

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Gabi Abramac

A Typical Trajectory of an El Shatt Refugee

Rather than singling out one life story as a case study, I have
decided to present a composite narrative here, which encompasses
excerpts from several oral testimonies and two published autobio-
graphical accounts.18 I will focus on select themes to illustrate this
collective experience with quotations from the interviews.

Fleeing their Homes

Life under Italian occupation (1941–1943) was very hard.

The Italians treated the local population in a brutal manner and the
civilians suffered from the Italians’ reprisals whenever the partisans
clashed with the Italians or sabotaged their activities.

We were heartbroken that Split and the majority of Dal-

matia fell to Italy. I was a little boy, but I remember those
stories and discussions about Split not being our city any
more, and questions as to what kind of a state this Croatia
was without Split in it. (Z.B.)

Italians came to our island and every morning they would

raise their flag with the sound of a trumpet, and us kids
would go ‘Boooooo’. (V.V.)

Someone killed some Italian gendarmes in Stari Grad and

Italian reprisals followed. They headed out towards Vrbanj
and ran into a father and son who were on their way to
work on the fields. Both had a shovel over their shoulder
and they killed them. Shot them dead. They never resisted.
Nothing. Unarmed. And then at the crack of dawn they
entered the village and poured petrol on many of the hous-
es. It was wintertime, 3 January, and they burnt almost the

18 The interviewees spoke in their local Dalmatian dialects. I have translated

the transcripts into English.

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 Dalmatian WWII Refugees in El Shatt, Egypt: Narratives of Sanctuary and Suffering

whole place down … The barrels were full of oil, which

spilled over and everything started to burn. You know
how oil burns … Everything went up in flames. (A.M.M.)

All of these respondents frame their own experiences in

terms of the wider political and military events of the time. Hence,
the depth and breadth of the narrated material is directly related to
their level of education and their ability to view local events within
a wider context. While some respondents only knew that they were
running away to escape the arrival of the Germans, others elabora-
ted in depth on the military strategizing of the era.

There were all kinds of soldiers, but people said that the
worst ones were those called fascists. Those were the ones
we were afraid of. (M.J.)

The island of Vis was strategically important as a point

of collaboration between the partisans and the Eng-
lish.19 The most outward point. The Allies had the idea
that they would disembark on the Balkans and then ad-
vance towards Panonnia and Berlin. But that was too far
from the Allied bases in the Atlantic. The Brits insist-
ed on this scenario, planning to advance from southern
towards central Europe. But strategic planning demon-
strated that this was too dangerous, and that northern
France was a better solution. Partisans were getting food
and ammunition supplies through Vis, but the question
arose: who was the ally in this case? The partisans who
were connected to the Russians, or the Chetniks who
were in a way closer to the British? Partisans and Chet-
niks fought each other, so obviously the Allies could not
support both at the same time. As the partisans gained
more influence, the Allies turned toward them. Thus,
not all citizens of Dalmatia were evacuated. Rather, it

19 The respondents frequently referred to soldiers of the British army or repre-

sentatives of the British government simply as English or Englishmen.

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Gabi Abramac

[the evacuation] occurred only in those places with a

strong partisan presence where the Allies thought they
would be able to disembark. (Z.B.)

The evacuation was a journey into the unknown and the re-
fugees were unclear as to their final destination: ‘Sometime in late
December, we set out from Brač towards the unknown’ (M.V.).
They first had to reach the island of Vis in order to get on to the
ships to Italy. The refugees typically walked by foot, carrying only
a bundle of belongings with them. In most cases, their fathers and
husbands, many of whom had already joined the partisans, stayed
behind to fight. Many of the narratives portray the march to the
boats that would take them to Vis as a fatherless experience. The
mother takes the exile upon herself and goes off into the desert
with her child and a few bare necessities, almost like the Bibli-
cal character of Hagar (Bereshit/Genesis 16, 1–16 and 21,8–21).
‘There were three of us—two, four and five years of age—and we
had to hold onto our mother’s skirt to make sure we didn’t get lost
and stay behind’ (M.V.). All the narratives mention hunger at this
point, walking towards the unknown and fleeing from imminent
danger. Many of the respondents mention the cattle and dome-
stic animals that were left behind when they fled, though some
families managed to take a goat with them. The motif of the bond
between humans and animals features prominently in the narra-
tives. Of the 26 respondents, six recounted in detail how their
lives, or the lives of family members who that had stayed behind,
were saved by a goat, which provided them with milk. One respo-
ndent reported that his family, when returning to Split after hi-
ding in the woods, had carried the goat that had saved their lives
in their arms. The effect of internalized perceptions of biosocial
relationships certainly deserves further sustained analysis.
The refugees’ arrival in Italy was followed by decontamina-
tion and temporary accommodation. In this context, the respon-
dents acknowledged the help of the local Italian population:

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 Dalmatian WWII Refugees in El Shatt, Egypt: Narratives of Sanctuary and Suffering

We had to wash and be decontaminated. There was a lice

epidemic and they treated our clothes with steam. Then
we were boarded on trucks and taken in different direc-
tions. We spent the first few days in a camp in Tuturano
and then we were transported by train to Santa Maria
di Leuca. Accommodation was arranged with Italian
families. The Italians welcomed us and gave us food. We
Dalmatians could speak some Italian, and the Italians
were pretty kind; they offered us some food even though
they were starving, too. After that we were transported
on trucks to the port of Taranto. Our accommodation
was an abandoned brickyard. It was full of dust, but we
were given some blankets and instructed to wait for the
ship. (Z.B.)

After a short stay in Italy, many of the refugees boarded the

ship to Egypt. This is the point where some people from isolated
islands and the Dalmatian hinterland saw people with different
racial features for the first time (in the form of soldiers of colour
in the service of the British Army):
It was all fine until some of our elderly women saw black
people for the first time in their life and they started
complaining. They had to be persuaded, through a lot of
yelling, that black people were humans just like us. Final-
ly, those women got on board too. (Z.B.)

The respondents also recounted a German submarine

following the ship (for which there is no historical evidence); they
recalled seeing Mount Etna and the Greek islands—new landsca-
pes, new races, and new food never seen before, such as bananas.
Their sense of time was rather fluid and they were not certain how
long this voyage had lasted: ‘Some say we were on the ship for four
days and four nights, but I don’t know if that is true’ (M.J.)

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Life in Egypt: The Organization of, and Conditions in,

the Camps

Some of the refugees disembarked in Alexandria and were

taken on trucks to the El Khatatba camp, while the others sailed
to Port Said where they were loaded onto cattle trains and taken to
the El Shatt camp.
From Alexandria, trucks took us to the desert in the mid-
dle of the night. I saw sand as far as my eyes could see. The
desert, the moon, and black people with camels. There
were black people there. We were afraid of black people.
(M.J.)

I realized only later that the camp was west of the Nile and
that it used to be the camp of the British army fighting
at El Alamein. The camp was on the edge of the Sahara
and it was called El Khatatba. We knew about El Shatt,
but we were temporarily placed in El Khatatba. Life in El
Khatatba was sickening. An uncomfortable wind—Ghib-
li—used to blow from the Sahara. When Ghibli blew, we
had to close all tent openings, and the sandstorms made
it almost impossible to breathe. We stayed there for about
four months. (Z.B.)

I cannot discuss the detailed descriptions of camp life here.

The respondents described the food, weather, climate, tents, and
ships that passed through the Suez Canal in minute detail. They
also talked extensively about cultural life in the camp and schoo-
ling in the sand.

Life and Death in the Desert

‘And although the night sometimes brought death’, Hick

noted in his autobiography, ‘the morning often saw the birth of

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 Dalmatian WWII Refugees in El Shatt, Egypt: Narratives of Sanctuary and Suffering

a new life’. 20 Official records list 715 deaths and 475 births in El
Shatt. Death constantly featured in all of the narratives. Respon-
dents spoke of siblings who died in the camp, of letters informing
them that their fathers had been killed in combat, or of news rea-
ching them that an uncle who had stayed on the island had been
shot by a German firing squad.

M.J. recounted the death of her half-sister in Africa:

After a while, many children got sick and they would

get a high temperature. My half-sister was one of them.
My brother and I walked through the desert to get to
the hospital. There was wire around the hospital and we
lifted it to sneak in. The little one was lying in the tent
and we called her by her name—Nikolina. She leaned
over, looked at us, and there was a sort of a feeble smile on
her face. I always say that was her farewell to us. She had
only recently turned two. [The respondent starts crying].
I’ve always felt sorry for her. She had never even gotten
to know her father [who had joined the partisans]. El
Khatatba was worse than El Shatt. Children were dying
overnight, and in the mornings or in the afternoons a car
would collect their corpses to be buried. Their corpses
and their families in the car. Eight people from my vil-
lage died, six of them children.

V.V. talked about the death of his cousin:

The blacks, Arabs, they were cowards, but there was a

truck full of them … They used to unload the cargo next
to our makeshift promenade, and they used to look at
our women who used to go for walks there. And then
one of them saw my first cousin and her boyfriend who
were walking there, and a group of them attacked them
and raped her. My cousin’s boyfriend tried to fight back

20 Hick, Autobiography, 54.

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Gabi Abramac

but there were so many of them. And from fear … from

the shock … she lost her mind and died within a week.

Children born in the desert were often given peculiar, topo-

nymic names such as Elšatka, Sinaj, Sinajka, Suez, Sueska, Sueza,
Nila, Nilka or Zbjegan (‘the one who fled’).
The refugee cemetery in El Shatt was seriously damaged in
the Six Day War of 1967. A memorial site was established there in
2003 with the support of the Croatian government. Some of the
former refugees criticized the new cemetery because the Commu-
nist red stars and all other symbols were removed in 2003, which
distorts historical reality. At this point in their narratives the in-
terviewees engaged in cautious criticism of the national and local
political elites and historical revisionism. Some of the respondents
had returned to El Shatt to visit the cemetery. They described these
journeys in terms very similar to those one might use when reca-
lling a pilgrimage. As Hirsch has pointed out, ‘embodied journeys
of return, corporeal encounters with place, do have the capacity to
create sparks of connection that activate remembrance and thus re-
activate the trauma of loss’.21

Resourcefulness

The respondents took a lot of pride in their resourcefulness

and adaptability to camp life:
Our people would go to the Suez Canal and collect what-
ever the current brought there. And then they would use
that material to make a chair, a bench … or toys. These
people were so resourceful and talented that the English
were in awe of what we had made. They used to say, ‘One
day, they will use these small wood chips and twigs to

21 Hirsch, Postmemory, 212.

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make a ship and sail back home on it’. That’s how capable
we—our elders—were. (M.V.)

The grandson of a refugee who was in El Shatt recalled his

grandfather’s stories:
They were so resourceful and used to make clothing
out of nothing, and the Englishmen used to say: ‘These
people came here naked, but they’ll go back home fully
clothed and dressed up.’ (J.R.)

You know, when it is time for First Communion, every-

one wants to look nice and wear a white veil and a dress.
But how does one do this in a refugee camp in the desert?
Well, the Englishmen gave us some gauze and we used it
to make first communion dresses. (A.M.M.).

We were given blankets in Tuturano, which we used to

sew coats. (A.M.M.)

I initially wondered whether this motif of resourcefulness

might in fact be a narrative developed collectively in the camp.
Yet the diary and personal correspondence of John Corsellis, a
humanitarian worker with the Quakers, British Red Cross and
UNRRA, confirms the recollections of the former refugees:
The work that is being done there is extremely impressive
and increased my admiration for the Yugoslavs: some
eight months ago these refugees arrived with virtually
nothing except the clothes they were in, and they were
housed in army tents and fed. They now have flourish-
ing carpentry, shoe-making, tin-smiths’, tailors’, black-
smiths’ and painters’ shops: the carpenters started with
about the same number or less tools than Roy has, and
with the help of the blacksmith they have equipped the
shops with planes, saws, hammers, chisels, and work
benches and vices and now they cover an area as large as
Knipe’s cow yard and sheds, and turn out an incredible

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variety of things including marionettes, blackboards, ea-

sels and guitars.

The shoemakers recondition condemned army boots and

make rope-soled sandals and sandals with soles from rub-
ber tyres, also making new shoes. The tailors make new
garments and repair old ones.

But the greatest significance does not lie in the articles

produced but in the fact that a large number of youths
who would otherwise be kicking their heels in idleness are
getting excellent training in useful jobs: especially those
working in the carpenters’, tinsmiths’ and blacksmiths’
shops will be able to help in the enormous reconstruction
job that awaits them in Yugoslavia, and disabled soldiers
are being taught tailoring and shoemaking. Also there is a
very active painting and sculpting school, which has pro-
duced some remarkable work, especially some by a young
Yugoslav who has only been doing it two months.22

Intercultural Exposure and Empathy

All the informants recounted in detail the harsh way in whi-

ch the British treated the Arabs, and showed deep compassion for
the Arabs’ living conditions. Their suffering was deeply embedded
in the respondents’ recollections. All of them talked about the lo-
cal Arabs with a heavy heart, sighing, with tears in their eyes, and
some voiced intense anger towards the British soldiers. Several in-
terviewees recalled secretly giving the Arabs food and hiding them
under the beds in their tents. Some of the refugee women even
managed to gain the trust of Bedouin Arab women who ‘unveiled
themselves’ in front of them.

22 Corsellis, War and Aftermath, 14.

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Ideological Indoctrination

Textual analysis of publications circulating in the camp

shows that they were devoted to the systematic indoctrination with
socialist ideology. In his diary entry for 21 October 1944, Corse-
llis described his efforts to learn Serbo-Croatian in order to under-
stand the socialist propaganda: ‘I am beginning to get an effective
vocabulary, and will soon I hope have enough words to enable me
to struggle through their newspaper and the propaganda sheets
sent out to the Yugoslavs by the Ministry of Information’.23 Hick
noted the Communist zealotry of the refugee nurses: ‘They had a
passionate loyalty to the partisan movement and lived in a Russian
Revolution-like atmosphere. The normal way of saying hello was a
dramatic “Zdravo” or “Smrt Fascisma” (Death to Fascism), with
the communist clenched-fist salute. But they were tireless workers,
totally dedicated to the cause.’24
V.V. recalled how outraged he was about the Italian occupa-
tion of his native island of Hvar and how he was so intoxicated by
the partisan spirit of liberation that, as a teenager, he left El Shatt
to join the partisans, guided by the vision of setting his island free:
As far as the eye could see there was only sand. We used
to play football, but not during the heat of the day. It was
impossible to step on the sand during the day. I was about
13 or 14, and five or six of us were playing football when
a man came and asked who wanted to volunteer and join
the partisans. And we all said yes! All of us! We ran away
and joined the partisans. We didn’t tell our mothers, our
fathers, no one! To tell you the truth, we had no idea where
we were going. There were about 2000 volunteers from
three camps. And then we came to Italy and the Amer-
icans armed us. Yugoslavian and American instructors
taught us how to use guns. We stayed in Italy for three

23 Ibid., 13.
24 Hick, Autobiography, 51.

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months until we learned how to kill a man. How to kill a

man and save your own head! The training facilities were
excellent: we were given everything that an American sol-
dier had—chocolate, shoe polish, toothbrush. When we
joined the partisans, we were starving.

Repatriation

By the end March 1946, all the refugees had returned home.
Some of them had found a spouse in El Shatt; some had become
parents; some had buried loved ones there. Many came home to
find that people they knew had been killed and that their homes
had been destroyed. They now began their new lives in the Socialist
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
We found out that the war was over on the night of 9 May
1945. We all came out of our tents and celebrated the end
of the war. We were very impatient to return to Yugoslavia.
We came back in July 1945. A new life, a new lifestyle, re-
construction, hope, and enthusiasm in the free homeland
was about to start. (R.A.)

Although we could have gone to America—our trip and

all the other costs would have been paid for—my father
kept saying, ‘I want to go home. I want to go home. I want
to see what’s going on back home!’ And we went back
home to Pučišća and started our life anew. Everything had
been set alight. We found nothing in our house. Nothing.
Everything had been set alight. (M.V.)

Three hundred and forty fighters from my hometown of

Vela Luka were killed in the war. (A.M.M.)

In that difficult situation, my mother was the real hero.

My father migrated to Australia in 1938 and she carried
the entire burden all by herself. While we were in El Shatt,

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we found out that our father had passed away in Austral-

ia. We were four boys, born between 1932 and 1937. The
house had to be repaired. We struggled on our own. We
were given thick brick tiles for the roof. Then we repaired
our attic. Even we, the kids, participated in rebuilding our
house. Life went on. (Z.B.)

Conclusion

The evacuation to El Shatt represents an important, yet lar-

gely forgotten, collective experience in modern Dalmatian history.
The oral testimonies I have drawn on for this chapter offer profo-
und insights into the experience of being a refugee, of being in exile
and of encountering various losses. They also provide instructive
accounts of the ways in which the refugees’ social, cultural, and
religious life in the camp was organized on a daily basis, and the
systematic indoctrination of the camp’s inhabitants with socialist
ideology. Drawing on the notion that remembering trauma is inte-
gral to public pedagogy,25 I have assumed that storytelling makes a
crucial contribution in this context.
Historians and social scientists have previously paid no
attention to the vicarious memories of these refugees’ descendants.
Yet Aleida Assmann has argued that the family is a privileged
site of memorial transmission.26 The narratives of the second and
third-generation respondents I have collected demonstrate a high

25 Cherot, ‘Storytelling’; Henry A. Giroux, ‘Public Pedagogy as Cultural

Politics: Stuart Hall and the “Crisis” of Culture,’ in Cultural Studies 14, 2
(2000), 341–60; Stuart Hall, ‘Race, Culture, and Communications: Look-
ing Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies,’ in Rethinking Marxism 5,
1 (1992), 10–8.
26 A leida Assmann, ‘Re-framing Memory: Between Individual and Collective
Forms of Constructing the Past,’ in Karin Tilemans, Frank van Vree and Jay
Winter (eds.), Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern
Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 35–50.

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level of intergenerational transmission of trauma and memory. This

transmitted memory may be seen as evidence of evolving modes of
bearing witness and therefore merits further investigation.
I also want to raise awareness of the urgent need to record
the testimonies of the former refugees in El Shatt and their des-
cendants to build a visual digital archive. Given the digital gadgets,
which virtually everyone now owns a public call could be issued
to mobilize the families of El Shatt refugees to record their bio-
graphical narratives and these could then be uploaded to an online
database.
The refugees’ sanctuary and suffering in Africa are no mere
footnote to the history of modern Dalmatia. The experience has
shaped the worldview of the former refugees and their descendants
and has an important contribution to make to the construction
of collective memory. Since I collected the narratives of former El
Shatt refugees and their descendants at the height of the European
refugee crisis in 2015, the respondents inevitably reflected on the
contemporary refugee crisis as well. Both on moral and empirical
grounds they expressed their conviction that those fleeing danger
and setting out on boats in the middle of the night to sail towards
an unknown future should be helped and offered refuge just as they
once were in Africa.

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