Childhood memories from the giado detention camp in libya¹: Fragments from the oeuvre of nava t. barazani

Visual documentation of the Shoah (Holocaust) of North African Jewry, especially in Libya and Tunisia, is largely absent from film, television, and the visual arts in Israel. This contrasts sharply with artistic, media, and scholarly representations of the Shoah of European Jewry, based on film footage and other material collected during the liberation of concentration camps, as well as in battle. The second-and third-generation descendants of Jews who experienced the Shoah in North Africa, governmental and political representatives included, did not immortalize the lives of their elders, nor did they produce educational materials on the subject. Recent attempts have been made, however, to preserve war memories from “back” in North Africa. The Israeli artist Nava T. Barazani, whose parents immigrated to Israel from Libya, addresses the experiences of North African Jews during World War II. For her exhibition Giado, Mother’s Corner (2011), she recorded a video interview with her mother, who was interned with her family in the Giado detention and Forced Labor Camp in Libya in 1942. Barazani uses this interview as the basis for collages portraying the rape, abuse, hunger, and slave labor experienced in the camp. Her contribution is an important step toward developing a discourse on the history of the Jews of Libya and Tunisia, exposing their joint fate with the Jews of Europe.