75 years on, harsh British detention of Holocaust survivors in Cyprus remembered

One of the last remaining metal huts that housed thousands of Jewish prisoners attempting to reach Israel will be the centerpiece of a new Jewish Museum in Larnaca

  • A picture shows the last remaining housing hut at the Jewish Museum of Cyprus in the port city of Larnaca on July 26, 2021. (Christina ASSI / AFP)
    A picture shows the last remaining housing hut at the Jewish Museum of Cyprus in the port city of Larnaca on July 26, 2021. (Christina ASSI / AFP)
  • A picture shows an old photograph of a British detention camp in Cyprus displayed at the Jewish Museum of Cyprus in the port city of Larnaca on July 26, 2021. (AFP)
    A picture shows an old photograph of a British detention camp in Cyprus displayed at the Jewish Museum of Cyprus in the port city of Larnaca on July 26, 2021. (AFP)
  • A man holds an old picture of Jews detained by British soldiers in Cyprus washing clothes at the camp, at the Jewish museum of Cyprus in the port city of Larnaca on July 26, 2021. (Christina ASSI / AFP)
    A man holds an old picture of Jews detained by British soldiers in Cyprus washing clothes at the camp, at the Jewish museum of Cyprus in the port city of Larnaca on July 26, 2021. (Christina ASSI / AFP)
  • This combination of pictures created on August 9, 2021 shows a certificate of honor for Prodromos Papavassiliou who helped Jews incarcerated in British camps in Cyprus after World War II; and the latter's son, Christakis Papavassiliou, the president of the Cyprus-Israel Business Association, speaking about his father during an interview at his company in the Cypriot port city of Limassol on July 26, 2021. (Christina ASSI / AFP)
    This combination of pictures created on August 9, 2021 shows a certificate of honor for Prodromos Papavassiliou who helped Jews incarcerated in British camps in Cyprus after World War II; and the latter's son, Christakis Papavassiliou, the president of the Cyprus-Israel Business Association, speaking about his father during an interview at his company in the Cypriot port city of Limassol on July 26, 2021. (Christina ASSI / AFP)
  • The chief rabbi of Cyprus, Arie Zeev Raskin, speaks during an interview at a synagogue in the Cypriot port city of Larnaca on July 26, 2021. (Christina ASSI / AFP)
    The chief rabbi of Cyprus, Arie Zeev Raskin, speaks during an interview at a synagogue in the Cypriot port city of Larnaca on July 26, 2021. (Christina ASSI / AFP)

LANARCA, Cyprus (AFP) — After surviving the Holocaust, trekking the Alps in winter and crossing the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat, Rose Lipszyc clearly remembers her months incarcerated in harsh British camps in Cyprus.

“After all that, we were back behind barbed wire again,” 92-year-old Lipszyc said, speaking 75 years after British soldiers began imprisoning Jews on the eastern Mediterranean island, dark events whose legacy resonates today.

Lipszyc’s family, from the Polish city of Lublin, were among the six million Jews the Nazis massacred during World War II.

She escaped death using false papers, working as a forced laborer in Germany.

After the war, she walked to Italy. Then, joining an exodus of thousands of traumatized refugees dreaming of a Jewish nation, Lipszyc boarded a rickety boat in Venice bound for British-run Palestine.

“There were 300 of us squeezed into the boat,” Lipszyc said. “We were like sardines.”

A picture shows an old photograph of a British detention camp in Cyprus displayed at the Jewish Museum of Cyprus in the port city of Larnaca on July 26, 2021. (AFP)

But as the shores of Palestine appeared on the horizon, two British warships powered out.

“The English soldiers — who I would have kissed the feet of for liberating me in Germany — were leaping into our little boat with batons,” she said, her voice trembling.

She was taken 250 kilometers (155 miles) northwest to Cyprus, also then under British rule.

Between August 1946 and February 1949, more than 52,000 Jews taken off 39 boats were detained in a dozen camps in Cyprus, according to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and education center.

“The English weren’t starving us, and they weren’t killing us like the Germans,” Lipszyc said. “But it was so traumatic, that the very same people who had freed me just a short time ago now incarcerated me.”

The British wanted the cramped camps to be a “deterrent” aimed at “breaking the power of the ‘Hebrew resistance movement’ in Palestine,” Yad Vashem said. More than 400 people died of sickness in the camps.

A man holds an old picture of Jews detained by British soldiers in Cyprus washing clothes at the camp, at the Jewish museum of Cyprus in the port city of Larnaca on July 26, 2021. (Christina ASSI / AFP)

It is a history that Arie Zeev Raskin, chief rabbi of Cyprus, wants to “teach to the next generation.”

He calls it a “very important piece of the puzzle” between the Holocaust and Israel’s foundation in 1948.

When he discovered a farmer using one of the camps’ last remaining metal huts as a tractor shed, Raskin made it the centerpiece of the Jewish Museum of Cyprus he is building in the port city of Larnaca.

“The huts were boiling hot in summer, and freezing in winter,” Raskin said.

In the camps, some 80% were aged between 13 and 35, “among the more spirited and lively survivors of the Holocaust,” said Yad Vashem, which added that 2,200 babies were born in the camps.

Tally Barash was one of them. “They called me Bat Aliya, meaning ‘daughter of the immigration,'” the 73-year-old Barash said, recalling descriptions of life in the camps by her parents, Jews from Romania. “It was a very hard time.”

The chief rabbi of Cyprus, Arie Zeev Raskin, speaks during an interview at a synagogue in the Cypriot port city of Larnaca on July 26, 2021. (Christina ASSI / AFP)

Barash served as an Israeli soldier during the Six Day War of 1967. Today, decades after she was born in British detention in a military hospital, she runs a print shop in London, and is proud of her past.

“The museum will help keep memories alive,” she said.

Some Cypriots, also resentful of British rule, worked with Jewish militia forces. Key among them was Prodromos Papavassiliou, who after fighting fascist forces in North Africa with Britain’s Cyprus Regiment, was outraged at the camps, his son Christakis Papavassiliou said.

“He risked his life working with underground Jewish groups,” said Papavassiliou, a retired honorary French consul.

Prodromos helped hundreds of Jews, hiding those who tunneled out in orange groves and caves, until he could organize boats to smuggle them away from coves near the now-popular tourist resort of Ayia Napa.

His exploits were dramatized in the 1960 Hollywood epic “Exodus,” starring Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint, while the Israeli port city of Haifa named “Papa Square” in his honor.

Papavassiliou, president of the Cyprus-Israel Business Association, said that past had “helped forge close ties” between the two countries.

This combination of pictures created on August 9, 2021 shows a certificate of honor for Prodromos Papavassiliou who helped Jews incarcerated in British camps in Cyprus after World War II; and the latter’s son, Christakis Papavassiliou, the president of the Cyprus-Israel Business Association, speaking about his father during an interview at his company in the Cypriot port city of Limassol on July 26, 2021. (Christina ASSI / AFP)

The history holds another lesson, with “obvious parallels” to the migrant crisis today, said Eliana Hadjisavvas of Britain’s Institute of Historical Research, while acknowledging the “contextual differences” too.

“The history… reminds us that in the face of persecution and suffering, people will endure huge sacrifices in search of safety,” said Hadjisavvas, who is writing a book on the camps.

Lipszyc finally reached Palestine “just a week or two” before Israel’s May 1948 declaration of independence, and war erupted again.

Later, she moved to Canada, where the great-grandmother of four offered her life advice to AFP, speaking from Toronto.

“If you could live through what I lived through, then you would see that hate does not help you in life,” she said. “Hate only destroys.”

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