In Otto Gilmore’s photos of the El Shatt refugee camp in Egypt, stout bamboo tentpoles are a prominent feature. Gilmore, a photographer with the US Office of War Information, visited in September 1944, when the camp had been operational for several months and was nearing its maximum population of over 25,000 people. It was made up of three subcamps set a few kilometres apart, plus a few satellite installations like a labour camp and transport depot. The site was a former British army rear camp, chosen to accommodate evacuees from Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia because it had some important infrastructure already in place: road access, a few brick and concrete buildings that could house camp services, and, crucially, water towers. But it quickly outgrew these origins, sprawling out in a sea of tents—mostly EPIP tents, ‘English Personnel Indian Pattern’, a military tent used for British soldiers in the Indian Army. (Tents of this model had accommodated refugees a generation earlier at Baquba in occupied Mesopotamia at the end of the first world war.) The camp’s explosive growth in the early summer of 1944 meant that by the time subcamp 3 was being erected, and additional water towers built to supply it, the supply of EPIP tents had run out and the camp was completed with smaller 180lb tents that got hotter in the sun. Tents were the basic unit of construction at El Shatt. They accommodated most of the military and humanitarian personnel working there as well as the residents themselves, though the camp staff lived in individual tents while the residents shared doubled tents, about 18 people in each. Bigger internal spaces, for use as hospitals, churches, or schools, were created by putting more tents together. Gilmore took photos of all of these, and in many of them you can see the hefty tentpoles that held up heavy canvas outers and many layers of internal lining. But that’s not all they were used for.
El Shatt was a site of hive-like industry and great material scarcity. The residents had brought little stuff with them, and clothes, shoes, and other basic necessities were in short supply. Workshops of all kinds were quickly set up, partly to give residents something to do but also to produce the things they needed. Residents also worked informally to make things for themselves. Some raw materials, as well as finished goods like clothing, came from military surplus. The arrival of the evacuees in spring 1944 was nicely timed, because by then Egypt was no longer a theatre of active conflict itself—the war, and Allied armies had moved elsewhere, so stuff was available (including all those tents) that wouldn’t have been earlier. Military detritus was also an important resource: old tyres were cut down into soles for sandals, while empty petrol cans were the main source of metal for the workshops. There were found objects, like driftwood gathered from the nearby Suez Canal and turned into furniture or toys. And there were the tents themselves. For the residents, partial disassembly of the tents in which they lived could be the first step in the production process for any number of thing, from clothing—and even the tools to make it—to musical instruments.
Dragoslava Williams, née Stojanovic, lived at El Shatt as a child. She and her family, who had fled Yugoslavia in 1939 and crossed Europe and the Middle East during the war years, arrived in 1946, when the camp’s population had changed. The evacuees from the Dalmatian coast, politically mobilized (and semi-autonomously governed) by representatives of the Partisan movement, were on their way home. But her family could not return to communist Yugoslavia: her father had served in the Royal Yugoslav Army. So they stayed at El Shatt for two years, until they were resettled to Australia in 1948. Interviewed decades later, she recalled her father whittling a piece of a bamboo tent pole into a spindle for her so she could make knitting twine out of wool. Families in the camp would unravel the ‘soft, sock like fabric’ that the poles were covered in to embroider, knit, or crochet. Residents would sacrifice layers of the internal linings that insulated the tents to make clothes for themselves. Dragoslava’s father also whittled a recorder for himself, and would play Serbian folk melodies for her to dance to. The gendered division of labour here might seem too obvious, the father manufacturing a tool for his daughter to work with and an instrument for himself to play: no doubt he worked too. But as in other refugee camps around the world before and since, work at El Shatt was highly gendered, not just in the spaces where it was done (the ‘home’ tent or the communal washing table versus the workshop) but in the materials women and men worked with (fabric and thread versus metal and wood).
Anyone who has read more than one or two accounts of life in a refugee camp will have encountered the discourse or refugee entrepreneurialism—a stress on the busyness, industry, and (potential) economic productivity of refugees. It is the shadow of another discourse, of refugee apathy and lethargy, which it exists to combat: the active, go-getting entrepreneur as opposed to the passive, sit-and-wait recipient of humanitarian handouts. At El Shatt, the discourse of refugee entrepreneurialism focused—and continues to focus in historical accounts—on the range and quality of goods that residents were able to produce from scant, scavenged, or ad hoc materials. Beyond whatever truths about living and working at El Shatt claims like these may contain or conceal, they’re worth thinking about for the work that they themselves are doing. For former residents, stressing how active and ingenious ‘we’ were—’so resourceful and talented that the English were in awe what we had made’—was perhaps a way of offsetting the loss of agency of being stuck in a camp. (It surely reflects the truth that life in the camp was tedious.) But the emphasis on industry and ingenuity in contemporary sources written by camp officials, as well as their later recollections, was also a way of representing the Dalmation evacuees not merely as ‘refugees’ but as allies, indeed Allies: Yugoslavia was ‘the only occupied country to field an above-ground organized anti-fascist team’. This ‘team’ was the Partisan movement, which under Allied supervision more or less governed the camp. Making object (shoes, shovels, guitars, sculptures) out of the stuff of the camp was a metaphor for making a state out of a scattered and occupied people: ‘building Yugoslavia in the sand’.
Sources
Otto Gilmore’s photographs can be viewed on the Library of Congress website. Descriptions of life at El Shatt are taken from UNRRA records at the UN Archives, including the ‘History of the Middle East Office‘ produced by the Office of the Historian as well as documentation on the camp. The interview with Dragoslava Williams is linked in the text. The quote from the former resident ‘M.V.’ is from Gabi Abramac, ‘Dalmatian WWII Refugees in El Shatt, Egypt: Narratives of Sanctuary and Suffering’, in Anisa Hasanhodžić and Rifet Rustemović, Being a Refugee. A European Narrative (Vienna, 2018) pp85–106. The quote about the ‘above-ground organized anti-fascist team’ is from ‘Information requested by refugee camp unit Bureau of Areas on EL SHATT CAMP, by S.K Jacobs, Field Organiser UNRRA, Cairo, Egypt’, p37, in this folder of the UNRRA records. And ‘Building Yugoslavia in the sand’ is from the title of a recent article by Florian Bieber.
Acknowledgments
This post is part of my work towards a book with Katherine Mackinnon, whose excellent research identified most of the sources here. It builds on the earlier work of Baher Ibrahim, which produced this very useful research guide [PDF] to refugee settlement and encampment in the Middle East and North Africa, 1860s-1940s.
Singular Things 