El Shatt: Memories of a Yugoslav Partisan refugee camp travelling from North Africa to Croatia
Abstract
- Abstract
- en From early 1944 until 1946, more than 25,000 refugees from Yugoslavia, mostly from the Dalmatian coast and islands, stayed in refugee camps in Egypt at El Shatt. Located on the shores of the Suez Canal, this complex of tented camps on desert sands was jointly run by the British military, Yugoslav Partisans and international humanitarian organizations. After the war, most of the refugees returned to their homes and only a five-pointed star-shaped cemetery overlooked by the statue of a grieving Mother remained on the spot. This article shows that unlike most refugee camps, El Shatt was not forgotten after its closure, but instead memorialized from the very beginning. Based on extensive research in United Nations, British and Croatian archives, we ask how the camps in El Shatt were memorialized in changing circumstances from their closure to today. How was their memory integrated into dominant historical narratives and practices, and what roles did local, intimate individual and family experiences and practices play in this? Reasons for not forgetting El Shatt start with the extraordinary documentation of these camps because they stood at the beginning of the UN-centred international humanitarian regime and the founding of Socialist Yugoslavia. For the continuous memorialization, however, it was important that the refugees returned as a large group to Dalmatia, the same region where they had come from. The local communities of memories provided the foundation for the abundant movement and communication of memories of El Shatt across different registers, spaces, genres, times and media.
Description
- Full text
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https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980251359585
Memory Studies
2025, Vol. 18(5) 1189–1213
© The Author(s) 2025
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DOI: 10.1177/17506980251359585
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El Shatt: Memories of a Yugoslav
Partisan refugee camp travelling
from North Africa to Croatia
Marijana Hameršak
The Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Croatia
Jochen Lingelbach
University of Bayreuth, Germany
Abstract
From early 1944 until 1946, more than 25,000 refugees from Yugoslavia, mostly from the Dalmatian coast
and islands, stayed in refugee camps in Egypt at El Shatt. Located on the shores of the Suez Canal, this
complex of tented camps on desert sands was jointly run by the British military, Yugoslav Partisans and
international humanitarian organizations. After the war, most of the refugees returned to their homes and
only a five-pointed star-shaped cemetery overlooked by the statue of a grieving Mother remained on the
spot. This article shows that unlike most refugee camps, El Shatt was not forgotten after its closure, but
instead memorialized from the very beginning. Based on extensive research in United Nations, British and
Croatian archives, we ask how the camps in El Shatt were memorialized in changing circumstances from
their closure to today. How was their memory integrated into dominant historical narratives and practices,
and what roles did local, intimate individual and family experiences and practices play in this? Reasons for
not forgetting El Shatt start with the extraordinary documentation of these camps because they stood at
the beginning of the UN-centred international humanitarian regime and the founding of Socialist Yugoslavia.
For the continuous memorialization, however, it was important that the refugees returned as a large group
to Dalmatia, the same region where they had come from. The local communities of memories provided
the foundation for the abundant movement and communication of memories of El Shatt across different
registers, spaces, genres, times and media.
Keywords
camps, Croatia, Dalmatia, Egypt, memories, refugees, Yugoslavia
Corresponding author:
Jochen Lingelbach, University of Bayreuth, Universitätsstr. 30, Bayreuth 95447, Germany.
Email: jochen.lingelbach@uni-bayreuth.de
1359585 MSS0010.1177/17506980251359585Memory Studies X(X)Hameršak and Lingelbach
research-article2025
Special Issue: Camp Memories. Silencing, contesting and
memorializing past encampments in Africa and beyond
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Memory Studies 18(5)
Introduction
In October 1944, Mate Biočina wrote a memo to the Yugoslav Central Refugee Committee
(Centralni odbor zbjega, COZ), the central authority administering the complex of camps in El
Shatt in Egypt:
We cannot and should not allow that the issue of building the cemetery of our refugee camp is approached
carelessly. This cemetery is to be a lasting monument to the suffering of a part of our people, which will
speak to future generations about their suffering, and which will take its honourable place on the pages of
our and world history. It is my heartfelt wish that you succeed in this matter, and I ask the dear God to assist
you in this endeavour.
DEATH TO FASCISM – FREEDOM TO THE PEOPLE.1
Biočina came from a family of stonemasons and was responsible for the cemetery in El Shatt. In
this memo and elsewhere, he insisted on the need to take care of the resting places for the hundreds
of deceased and argued in addition, that the cemetery should be a monument dedicated to the life
in exile in El Shatt as well. With this wish for a lasting imprint, the refugees implicitly opposed the
idea spelt out in a report on El Shatt by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
(UNRRA), who were officially running the camps, according to which: ‘The camp is desert and
will return to desert. There is no such place. It is but a latitude and a longitude’.2 The cemetery was
finished shortly before the refugees returned to Yugoslavia and renovated several times over the
next decades, indeed ensuring that something remained of the El Shatt camps and not everything
became desert again. The five-pointed star-shaped refugee cemetery on the eastern banks of the
Suez Canal remains in place until today and is an elaborate early example of Yugoslav ‘revolution-
ary memory’. It is thus part of a larger landscape of monuments built in memory and honour of the
socialist revolution and the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle during the Second World War
mainly in Yugoslavia itself (Horvatinčić and Žerovc, 2023). Until today, students, filmmakers,
individuals, diplomats and high-ranking state delegations visit the cemetery occasionally. As such,
it serves as a focal point for the memorialization of the transcontinental escape from fascist terror
during the Second World War.
El Shatt certainly found its place in the ‘pages of history’ as Biočina argued in his memo, even
though, until recently, refugees were short-changed in historical accounts (Banko et al., 2022). On
the question of why refugees are rarely part of historiography, Philip Marfleet writes: ‘Historians
construct narratives which continue to exclude those not allocated roles in the usual national dra-
mas’ (Marfleet, 2007). In contrast to this, El Shatt was firmly inserted into different histories. The
most prominent and foundational of these was the local Dalmatian history and the history of the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. As noted in 2007 in the catalogue accompanying the El
Shatt exhibition in Zagreb ‘this was no ordinary refugee camp’ but ‘represented a genuine part of
the country from which the people had come’ (Mataušić, 2007a: 93). In a similar manner, El Shatt
was perceived by contemporaries beyond the country’s borders. In 1944, an English writer told the
BBC after visiting the camp that the Partisans there ‘weren’t refugees’ but had ‘come to prepare for
the future of their own country; just as much a part of the war as the Partisans fighting in the moun-
tains’.3 A German communist poet who had been to El Shatt described it as ‘a centre of the Yugoslav
liberation fight outside its homeland’ and part of the ’battle against fascism’ (Fürnberg, 1960: 5).
The insertion of this exile experience into Yugoslavia’s foundational history shares some similari-
ties with the experience of Jewish displaced persons (DPs) after the Holocaust. Forced to stay in
DP camps in Germany and Austria some of the survivors used their time to prepare and fight for
Hameršak and Lingelbach
1191
the eventual migration to Palestine/Israel (see, for example, Baumel, 1997; Gatrell, 2013: 123). In
both cases, the period of involuntary encampment was understood as preparatory for the founding
of a new state leading to a spirit of activism and anticipation in the camps. And in both cases, their
ordeal became part of the state’s founding history.
Two strands of literature have dealt with the history of El Shatt thus far. One is more recent and
located within contemporary studies of refugee history, while the other goes further back and is
related to the Yugoslav and Croatian history of the Second World War. Recently, these two strands
have been slowly coming closer together, which is also what we aim for in this article. In the his-
tory of refugee camps and the UN system of relief established around the UNRRA, El Shatt is an
early example (Lingelbach, 2023; Proudfoot, 1956: 142; Woodbridge, 1950: II, 81ff). More pre-
cisely, El Shatt was one of the first refugee camps officially run by UNRRA’s first field mission
based in Cairo alongside camps for Greeks and Poles (Lingelbach, 2022; Robson, 2023). While the
history of El Shatt and the other UNRRA camps in the Middle East and Africa is overshadowed by
the organization’s much larger operations in post-war Europe, it formed a prelude that was taken
seriously by UNRRA officials at that time and documented accordingly. Recently an increased
interest in the history of refugees including a special focus on Europeans, who found refuge in Asia
and Africa during the Second World War, triggered an interest in El Shatt beyond national research
frameworks (Bieber, 2020; Mackinnon and White, 2023). Long overlooked in the historiography
of the UN-centred international refugee regime, the Middle East and African camps are slowly
getting more attention.
This complex of camps played a more prominent role in the Yugoslav and later Croatian context
where it served for decades as an example of outstanding resilience, discipline and creativity of
civilians in the Second World War under the leadership of Tito’s Partisans. In this context, major
historiographical works about El Shatt were released in the form of a series of newspaper articles
based ‘exclusively on archival materials’ published on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the
refugees’ arrival in the Sinai Desert,4 academic articles and commentaries (cf. Ćurin, 1974;
Mrduljaš, 1983; Palavršić, 196; 9; Plenča, 1965, 1967). In addition, edited volumes (Pivac, 1980),
catalogues of exhibitions including a pivotal one from 2007 (Mataušić et al., 2007) and recently, a
comprehensive full-length monograph was published (Radonić, 2023). Over the last decades this
research was broadened by insights into Allied sources and Egyptian government perspectives
(Ajlec, 2013, 2014), questions of refugees’ perception of Africa (Petrović Teodosijević, 2008),
discussions about the heterogeneity and contradictions inherent in the movement (Bratanić, 2011,
2016), the production of memories (Abramac, 2018; Mustapić and Dergić, 2023) or printed materi-
als (Hameršak, 2019a, 2019b).
Building on both strands of literature and archival sources, in this article we address the history
of the memorialization of El Shatt in the international, the local Dalmatian and national Yugoslav
and Croatian contexts. In doing so, we leave out important, but for us inaccessible, perspectives
related to the perception of the camps: the perspectives of locals and residents in the direct vicin-
ity and cities of Egypt as well as other groups, such as British and African colonial soldiers, dip-
lomats, embassies’ local employees, Croatian citizens in Egypt, or citizens of other former
Yugoslav countries. We start with the historical episode of its existence in the first part, before we
focus on the production of the sources, providing the raw material for its continued memorializa-
tion. We argue that El Shatt’s importance as the starting point of new developments led to meticu-
lous and variegated documentation by both already mentioned camp administrations: UNRRA
and COZ. Pivotal moments in the memorialization are connected with UNRRA and international
humanitarian organizations’ involvement in the maintaining of refugee camps in Africa and the
Middle East, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Yugoslav socialist state-building and chang-
ing international relations in the context of the political configurations of the post-war
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Memory Studies 18(5)
era, including the Non-Aligned Movement, the Israel-Palestine conflict and shifting geopolitical
alliances. Throughout, personal memories and localized memorialization were of utmost impor-
tance. It was crucial for the memorialization that the refugees returned as a group to Dalmatia, the
same region where they had come from. Their memories could thus live on locally and, as we will
show, support and boost the rich, long-lasting, transcontinental travelling of El Shatt memory. All
this enabled the memory of the Yugoslav refugee camp to travel from the Second World War to the
present day, or as suggested by the title of this article, from Africa or North Africa – the terms used
by the refugees for the El Shatt area – to present-day Croatia, as one of Yugoslavia’s successor
states.5
Following Astrid Erll’s (2011) notion of ‘travelling memory’, we will try to trace the multi-
layered and changing memorialization of refugee displacement in El Shatt by looking for mne-
monic movements across space, time, media, languages, states, as well as axes of individual and
collective, national and transnational etc. Our focus will thus be on the mnemohistory of El Shatt,
as we trace the ways it was constructed and reconstructed over time and across different geogra-
phies and communities. If memory, according to Erll (2011: 15), ‘fundamentally means move-
ment’, what happens to memory that involves movement across seas, to other continents, to the
desert, under the command of several authorities, during the war, in search of refuge and safety?
How does the traffic between local and national, individual and state, personal and collective levels
of remembering, as well as the circulation among social, medial, and semantic dimensions, operate
(Erll, 2011: 15) in the flight of refugees from the eastern Adriatic to Egypt and back again?
From the Dalmatian coast to the Sinai Desert
To understand the memorialization of El Shatt we first need to know how people from Dalmatian
villages and towns came to Egypt, how they lived there and what their further trajectory was. They
did not escape on their own, but their movement was a planned evacuation initiated in late 1943 by
Partisans who gained control of the area after Italy’s capitulation in the same year. To escape the
arrival and reprisal of German troops, civilians were evacuated to the island of Vis that was still
held by the Partisans with British support (Bieber, 2020: 303; Mataušić, 2007a; Plenča, 1967;
Radonić, 2023: 11–86). Typical for that era and seen as a lesson from the chaotic Fall of France
where refugees had been ‘clogging . . . Allied communications’, their evacuation was part of mili-
tary operations.6 It was no humanitarian endeavour, but a strategic necessity to get the civilians
away from the military area. The British Navy, in close cooperation with Tito’s Partisans, evacu-
ated people via Southern Italy, already controlled by the Allies, to Egypt where the British military
had a strong presence and a refugee administration in place.
Refugees were settled in different camps in Egypt, all of which are often, especially in Yugoslav
historiography and twentieth-century popular culture subsumed under the single term ‘Zbjeg’
(Eng. flight, exile or refuge) or, as it is today, ‘El Shatt’ (cf. Mataušić, 2007b: 102–103). To be more
precise, more than 6000 refugees from Yugoslavia stayed in Khatatba, north of Cairo, 2000 in
Tolumbat, near Alexandria, and 400 in El Arish, a port city on the Mediterranean side of the Sinai
Peninsula.7 Tolumbat was mainly for the ‘political bad hats’, and divided into five sub-camps: one
for ‘neutral’ Yugoslavs, two for Chetnik royalist Yugoslavs, one for Greek ‘trouble-makers’ who
had refused to be transferred from Nuseirat to Moses Wells and one for refugees of other nationali-
ties.8 In Tolumbat there was less self-organization and British and international officials were more
involved with the internal management in contrast to the other largely Partisan-run camps. Later,
under UNRRA, the royalists were moved to El Arish (opened in September 1944) and Tolumbat
became a convalescent camp for the sick from El Shatt.9 However, the vast majority of around
Hameršak and Lingelbach
1193
25,000 refugees from Yugoslavia stayed in the complex of camps at El Shatt, located in the Sinai
desert next to the Suez Canal.
El Shatt was set up in an area where the British military was strong and had special rights as they
safeguarded their interests in controlling the Canal as a strategically vital connection to the Indian
Ocean. The British still held a powerful position in formerly colonized Egypt making the whole
situation quasi-colonial. Hosting Yugoslavs in El Shatt was part of larger efforts of British imperial
refugee hosting and could build on the already established refugee administration in Cairo, the
Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration (MERRA), responsible for hosting Greek and
Polish refugees throughout the British colonies in East and Central Africa, India, Palestine, Syria
and Egypt (Lingelbach, 2023). When El Shatt opened in early 1944, the MERRA-run camp Moses
Wells was already hosting Greek refugees since July 1942, located less than 15 miles away.10 El
Shatt had been used as a military camp before and since all the MERRA camps were supplied by
the British military and many of its technically civilian staff were in fact British or South African
military personnel, the site was ideal. The accessibility for transport at this main shipping route
close to a ferry and the railways might be another factor leading to the decision. El Shatt was thus
rather isolated from Egyptian society but integrated into the British military complex. The close
integration even led to incidents where the British Air Force accidentally dropped bombs on El
Shatt. In May 1945, this resulted in the death of two refugees.11 The isolation of these and other
camps from the Egyptian population centres was another factor making them seem perfect to
British and Egyptian officials,12 echoing approaches of today’s peripheral placement of refugee
camps (Turner, 2016).
The camps at El Shatt were administered by a mixture of British, ‘international’ and Yugoslav
officials. They were set up and supplied by the British military coordinated under the MERRA,
financed by the British Foreign Office. It was a civilian organization but supplied and staffed by
British army members and thus characterized as ‘para-military’ (Woodbridge, 1950, II: 83). While
the British camp commandant had the supreme authority, everyday life was internally and in many
aspects autonomously run by the Yugoslav camp committee. In fact, the refugees arrived in already
organized groups under the Central Refugee Committee, COZ (Plenča, 1967: 350; Mataušić,
2007b: 103) and promptly organized the bureaucracy which ‘was a kind of government in minia-
ture’, as pointed out by Katherine Mackinnon and Benjamin Thomas White (2023: 15). The overall
responsibility for El Shatt and the other camps changed in May 1944 from MERRA to the UNRRA
Balkan Mission, but its staff and procedures remained largely the same.13 It only grew in size and
additional ‘internationals’ from the emerging UNRRA and voluntary associations joined in the run-
ning and support of the camp. However, in contrast to other camps for European refugees, there
were, according to official sources, only a few Egyptian workers employed and UNRRA’s Chief
Welfare Officer, estimated the ‘refugees performed 98% of the manual labour in the camp’.14
Whatever the actual numbers, it was a contrast to other European refugee camps in Africa where
thousands of colonized labourers did most heavy work (Lingelbach, 2020a: 232–235, 2022).
When the refugees arrived, El Shatt was still under construction and consisted of only a few
brick buildings for the central facilities and British military tents for accommodation. As described
in the literature (Mataušić, 2007a, 2007b; Plenča, 1967), it was divided into three – later four – sub-
camps.15 With only burlap floors first, the tents were gradually improved with cement grounds. The
camp hospital was enlarged and schools and recreational rooms were established in improvised
connected tent constructions. The refugees ran a range of workshops from toymaking to cobblers,
dressmakers and barbers as well as discussion, reading, writing, painting, theatre, singing and other
groups.16 With basic needs secured, the presence of intellectuals, teachers, and artists among the
refugees, along with organizational and political autonomy, as well as the need for self-definition
and representation, provided a foundation for vibrant social and cultural activities in the camps.
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Memory Studies 18(5)
After the war, UNRRA started repatriation transports back to Yugoslavia and the refugees gradu-
ally left El Shatt. Starting in 1945, they returned to Dalmatia and until August, some 15,000 had
already left the camp (cf. Mataušić, 2007c: 123). However, it took until March 1946 for the remain-
der to be repatriated, leading to anxiety among those remaining longer.17 El Shatt was closed, but
it was never forgotten. On the contrary, after the first decades of relative silence about El Shatt, the
refuge in the Sinai Desert became a rich point of reference, evolving in various contexts, from
historical works to popular culture.
Documenting new beginnings
As Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995: 26) puts it, history writing begins in ‘the moment of fact crea-
tion’ that is the making of sources. The original documentation and personal memories form the
base upon which archives, historical narratives, history writing and memorialization can be built.
They form, what Aleida Assmann (2006: 220) calls the ‘archival memory’, the stored material that
can be retrieved and brought into the wider circulation if it fits the circumstances. In contrast to
other refugee camps, El Shatt was meticulously documented during its time of existence already.
Moreover, this rich material is still accessible today in the archives in Split, Zagreb, Belgrade,
London, New York and Washington and is increasingly available online. The main reason for the
surprisingly good documentation of the camp is that El Shatt stood at the beginning of two histori-
cal projects: the UN-centred international humanitarian system emerging during and after the
Second World War and the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the
same period. Officials involved in these projects were aware of their position and took care of
documenting their activities accordingly, leaving rich archives behind. In this way, they were
involved in the memory making of El Shatt lasting until today.
Documenting the beginning of the UN humanitarian system
In the history of the UN-centred international refugee regime, El Shatt was part of a larger system
of refugee camps throughout the Middle East run by UNRRAs very first field mission. It was here
that UNRRA could demonstrate and practice a new way of international cooperation in the care for
the displaced. The Cairo-based Middle East Mission of UNRRA emerged out of the British impe-
rial refugee regime around MERRA which itself grew out of refugee relief efforts in the British
Embassy and military officials in the Middle East (Lingelbach, 2022). When UNRRA absorbed
MERRA and its camps in May 1944, it was the first mission where the organization could do prac-
tical work apart from planning and preparing for the moment when they would finally enter the
liberated territories. It is not surprising that during the heightened days of the war, many looked
sceptical at this new organization set up in Washington and supposed to rebuild the war-ravaged
liberated territories and take care of the millions of displaced persons after the war (see Reinisch,
2011; Robson, 2023; Salvatici, 2012; Woodbridge, 1950). Its proponents saw UNRRA as the van-
guard of the new international order to emerge from the ruins of war. Herbert Lehman, UNRRA’s
Director General told recruits in a speech in Cairo in June 1944: ‘We are also pioneers in demon-
strating that whole-hearted cooperation between nations and peoples can be made to work. You
probably realize that UNRRA is the first operating international organization’.18 In contrast to
earlier intergovernmental institutions around the League of Nations, UNRRA was not only policy-
making but also working on the ground. The UNRRA camps in Egypt and Palestine were the sites
where this new world in the making could be shown and experienced first.
The importance of El Shatt and the other camps for UNRRA’s publicity and history led to a
systematic compilation of documentation. UNRRA sent historical records officer Elizabeth King
Hameršak and Lingelbach
1195
Simeon from the United States to Cairo to document the mission’s activities and establishment.19
While the records of the British imperial refugee relief activities under MERRA were rather
sketchy and haphazard, Simeon went to great lengths to document its coming into being. From late
1944 to early 1945, she compiled a detailed account, based on official and private documentation
and conducted interviews with British officials to document the emergence of the UNRRA mis-
sion.20 Her reports and documents were explicitly produced to provide lessons for the future devel-
opment of the international system around the emerging United Nations.21 These documents were
either directly sent to the UNRRA headquarters in Washington or later transferred and eventually
taken over by the UN Archives in New York. In recent years, important parts of it were digitized
and made available online for everyone, including the descendants of former refugees.
Next to the internal UNRRA documentation, there was a constant production of news items to
display the organization’s achievements. UNRRA’s Cairo mission had a public relations officer
who produced press releases and photographs and guided reporters to the camps, noting: ‘The
Yugoslavs with their forthright methods of self-government are always a big news pull for corre-
spondents and photographers, and there has consequently been a stream of visitors going into the
camps with passes authorized by this division’.22 Reportedly, Arab, English and French newspa-
pers showed a great interest in the camps. The PR division’s job was to showcase UNRRAs
achievements in caring for the displaced and El Shatt was the best-organized and presentable to a
global audience sceptical of this new international organization. One example of the reporting is a
front-page article in the New York Herald Tribune titled: ‘U.N.R.R.A Camp in Egypt Sets Pattern
to Help Distressed European Peoples’.23 Including three photographs of El Shatt, the article
describes the camps for Greek and Yugoslavs in Egypt as ‘dress rehearsal for a greater drama to
come when Western Europe is liberated’ and the organization’s ‘first venture’. While acknowledg-
ing the Partisan self-organization, the larger story was the UNRRA support for Europe’s displaced.
In the Yugoslav and Croatian context, the foreign press interest and writings about El Shatt were
regularly cited as a sign of the broader international significance of the humanitarian and refugee
structures developed there and as a recognition of the role of Tito’s Yugoslavia.
Voluntary organizations assisting the refugees in El Shatt produced additional sources in their
reporting. The Mennonites, for example, sent relief workers to the Middle East who reported regu-
larly to their congregation back in the United States. They worked under UNRRA leadership and
closely with the British military but had their own views on ‘smoking, drinking, dancing and clean
language’ in contrast to soldiers and others in the camps.24 The Quakers operating the ‘Friends’
Ambulance Unit’ wrote about their experiences in El Shatt in their newspapers, to headquarters and
later also in memoirs (e.g. Wriggins, 2004). Additional voluntary organization staff came from the
Near East Foundation, British and American Red Cross or Save the Children and worked under
UNRRA in the camp producing their own paper trails.25
The Allied media and information departments produced a range of visual documents, films and
photographs, some of them circulating until today. For example, photographer Otto Gilmore took
pictures of everyday life scenes in El Shatt in September 1944 for the US Office of War Information.
Via the Library of Congress website, they are freely available online and some were in 2014 exhib-
ited in Split, the regional centre of Dalmatia.26 An important documentary film, combining British,
international and Yugoslav interests and perspectives was ‘The Star and the Sand’ produced by
British director Arthur Calder-Marshall with support from UNRRA and the Partisan Refugee
Committee. 27 The British camera crew shot the film on location in late 1944 and distributed it via
British, Canadian and US government channels.28 Reportedly, Calder-Marshall was a pre-war
member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the film was full of praise for the industrious-
ness of the Partisans and the support by the British and UNRRA. Already in August 1944, another
film on El Shatt was shown in the UNRRA headquarters in Washington as part of an ‘All-UNRRA
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Memory Studies 18(5)
Evening Program’ for up to 850 employees and guests.29 In February 1946, as part of a farewell
event prepared by Yugoslav refugees in the American University’s Ewart Memorial Hall in Cairo,
the Calder-Marshall movie was shown after dances and songs performed by some 250 – mostly
children – refugees.30 Scenes from the same movie feature in most of the later produced documen-
taries about El Shatt in Yugoslavia and Croatia, sometimes significantly altered. In Aleksandar
Stasenko’s (1987) movie ‘Zbjeg’ many scenes are taken from this movie, but accompanied by a
substantially different narrative.31 Where in the original film, UNRRA’s achievements were pointed
out, for example in the scenes from hospitals, Stasenko’s film praised the self-organization and
skills of the refugees, illustrating how the travelling of memory across time, space and populations
can take unexpected directions.
There are many other examples of the travelling memory of El Shatt involving international
actors and former refugees. Particularly interesting are the attempts of non-Yugoslav soldiers or
medical workers to get in touch with former refugees they had met in El Shatt. In 1965, a British
soldier wrote directly to ‘Marshal Tito’ to express how he missed his Yugoslav friends and offered
to donate a collection of ‘very interesting photographs’ he took in El Shatt.32 In 1981, two nurses
who probably worked for UNRRA in the camp placed a newspaper advertisement in an attempt to
get in touch with their former students.33 Two years later, one of them arrived in Split from the
United States to meet with her former student ‘girls’ some of whom were already grandmothers at
the time. Their emotional reunion was covered by the local newspapers.34
Documenting Yugoslav socialist state-building in exile
El Shatt was also a training ground and showcase of the achievements and prospects of the Partisans
and Yugoslav antifascists led by Josip Broz Tito. From the beginning, they conceived and evalu-
ated life in El Shatt, as spelt out in 1946 in a commentary about the return of the last group of refu-
gees, as a ‘constant preparation for returning to . . . the homeland. Everyone was aware that it was
necessary to learn a lot in order to preserve the hard-earned freedom’.35 El Shatt was an ideal train-
ing ground for the post-war socio-political order because, in contrast to the situation at home,
where the war was still ongoing, only in the safety of Egypt ‘could a social community develop
similar to the one the communists aimed to create in Yugoslavia after the war’ (Radonić, 2023: 3).
In the ‘microcosm of early Yugoslav state-building’ in the sand (Bieber, 2020: 302) an impres-
sive number of registers, reports, memos, and other administrative documents related to all aspects
of life in the camps were created and brought to Yugoslavia after the war. First, the material was
stored in various archives, but in 1952, most documents relating to El Shatt were transferred to the
State Archive in Split, which remains until today the referential point for this topic. Documents
were handed over in an unorganized state and were carefully examined, selected, ordered and
inventoried in the next few years. The last major reorganization of this archival material took place
in 2021, underscoring its importance and relevance until today. It is now stored in a separate col-
lection titled ‘Yugoslav Refuge in Egypt’ (HR-DAST-23), consisting of 454 volumes and 99
boxes.36 During the organization of this ‘archival memory’ (Assmann, 2006), the principles of
provenance and original order were applied, meaning that documents were classified according to
their original serial numbers or chronologically, and based on whether they pertained to the central
administration of the camps or its sub-bodies, like the camp and district committees with adminis-
trative, economic, educational, cultural-informational and other departments (Mataušić, 2007b;
Plenča, 1967). Working with this material, researchers gain insights into El Shatt’s systematic and
extensive administrative apparatus and the importance placed on documenting every aspect of life
in the camps. For example, correspondence between COZ and British authorities is saved and
stored in this collection next to a memo about a boy who, during a visit to the nearby American
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military base, left ‘two blankets and a small package’.37 In the following decades, the original col-
lection grew through private donations, but also through materials from ‘dissolved’ institutions,
such as the Museum of the People’s Revolution in Split, which, like other comparable museums,
was dismissed and repurposed in the 1990s following the end of the Yugoslav socialist project. In
a bitter irony of fate, the collapse of institutions that were built on the foundations of El Shatt
resulted in the enrichment of the camp’s central archival collection.
Besides written documents, thousands of photographs from El Shatt were unloaded when the
refugees landed at the eastern Adriatic ports. Some of them, especially those made by the El Shatt
Photo Section found their way to museums and archives in the homeland. Established already in
April 1944 as part of the refugees’ cultural and social activities, the Photo Section acted as an
expression of the ‘will to remember’ (Nora, 1989: 19). It documented key events such as exhibi-
tions, theatre and folklore performances, sports meetings, excursions, the work of schools, hospi-
tals, and soap production facilities, as well as portraits and everyday scenes (Ivanuš, 2007). Besides
documenting crucial moments of life, the goal of the Photo Section was, as summarized by Ante
Palavršić, ‘to use the recorded material to inform the Allies and the rest of the world about the
peoples of Yugoslavia and their flight’.38 Some printed documents, for example, an elaborate col-
oured primer (Hameršak, 2019a) had a comparable goal, as did other sections or groups active in
El Shatt such as theatre or choir. The publication of the primer was ‘a cultural event’ for El Shatt39
and meant to be an example for contemporaries and a reminder for future generations. Decades
later, print in El Shatt in general and especially the coloured primer had a prominent role in repre-
senting the life and work of refugees in El Shatt in the exhibitions and documentaries. Theatre and
choir performances by refugees were also strategically staged to show the resilience, culture and
potential of the Yugoslav people under Partisan leadership to both the Allies and the local elites in
Cairo and Alexandria (cf. Mataušić et al., 2007: 101; Plenča, 1967). Some of these representational
activities, such as exhibitions or theatre performances turned into mnemonic activities immediately
with the return to Dalmatia. The ballet troupe and one of the six theatre groups from El Shatt, for
example, were supposed to perform directly upon their arrival in Split in May 1945 to celebrate
their return.40
An especially interesting example of representational efforts used later for memorialisation is
the so-called ‘Great Refugee Exhibition’ or, as it was officially called, the exhibition of ‘Yugoslav
Folk Arts and Artisan Trades’. The exhibition toured in Cairo and Alexandria in 1944 and 1945,
and upon repatriation in Zagreb and Split (Pavičić, 2007). On a floor space of 1800 square metres,
there were more than 1200 exhibits of all kinds: handcrafts, toys, photos, books and prints, posters
etc. Some of the objects preserved in museums today could have been part of this exhibition.
Examples are handmade bags with an ‘El Shatt’ inscription (cf. Mataušić et al., 2007, exhibit 171)
or a decorative pillowcase with the more explicit inscription ‘Memory of El Shatt’ (cf. Mataušić
et al., 2007, exhibit 822), a tapestry with dates, the name of a refugee and El Shatt camp (cf.
Mataušić et al., 2007, exhibit 842) or dishes engraved with ‘El Shatt’ and ‘People’s Liberation
Army’ (cf. Mataušić et al., 2007, exhibit 277). These objects are instances of vernacular memoriali-
zation and signs of the awareness of refugees for the historical significance of the moment and the
desire to preserve its memory. Many of the surviving memorabilia from El Shatt followed the same
function, like flags with embroidered references to El Shatt, flight, etc. (Mataušić et al., 2007,
exhibit 122), or children’s toys such as a wooden airplane with engraved scenes from life in the
desert featuring palms, tents and the sun (Mataušić et al., 2007, exhibit 221).
The memorialization of El Shatt through exhibitions continues to this day. Apart from local or
travelling exhibitions organized from the 1960s to the 2010s (Makarska, 2003; Podgora and Split,
2014; Split, 1984; Zadar, 2006), a major exhibition was set up in the Croatian capital Zagreb in
2007. The Zagreb exhibition was generally recognized and as such reported in media as the return
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Memory Studies 18(5)
of topics related to the Partisans into museums after the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s
war.41 Nevertheless, this exhibition’s focus on the prominent artists and intellectual figures in El
Shatt and on the artistic and artisanship achievements today seems to be a departure from the politi-
cal framework of the People’s Liberation Struggle that was at the forefront of Yugoslavia’s mem-
ory landscape. By shifting its frame from the founding of the socialist state to the achievements and
resilience of individuals and collectives, the Zagreb exhibition, despite bringing back the antifas-
cist fight into museums and featuring a red five-pointed star on the invitation, also contributed to
the depoliticization of El Shatt remembrance which until recently dominated the memorialization
after the break-up of Yugoslavia.
On the site in Egypt, the only visible structure reminding visitors of the tent city is the cemetery.
The refugees were buried in several cemeteries, but the El Shatt cemetery took on a crucial memo-
rial role as envisaged by cemetery administrator Mate Biočina, cited at the opening of this article.
In the beginning, people who died in El Shatt were buried in the nearby Greek refugee cemetery,
but in May 1944 the central refugee cemetery was established close to the camps where it still
stands today (Radonić, 2023: 425). By the fall of the same year, discussions had already begun on
how to organize this cemetery as an architectural whole with an explicitly articulated double goal:
commemorating the deceased, many of whom were children, and leaving a material trace of the
huge, elaborated refugee settlement in the desert. According to the El Shatt press at the time, the
idea was that by
building the cemetery, we will repay our dead and earn the respect of those whose land we will forever
leave them in. We will show that even in the hardest times, we knew how to honour the sacrifices in the
fight for human rights and the freedom of our peoples. Let the El Shatt cemetery be our sanctuary. (Naš list
1945, cited in Radonić, 2023: 435)
From the beginning, the Yugoslav post-war press acknowledged this dual function of the cemetery.
As stressed in a newspaper article from 1946, refugees in Egypt ‘in their pursuit to leave a trace’ in
the desert ‘dedicated special attention to the cemetery. Everyone worked hard at this task, espe-
cially those who had left their children in the sand. They reinforced each grave, and built a wall so
that the sand would have a harder time covering the cemetery’.42
A lot has been written about the construction of the cemetery, from the making of plans to the
supply of building materials. As contemporaries have noted, the construction materials were partly
provided by the Allies, partly stolen, and partly improvised, as in the case of the central statue
called Mother (later Grieving Mother, Mother Dalmatia, Mother Yugoslavia or Mother Homeland).
It was allegedly made from a mixture of clay brought from the Suez Canal and rations of margarine
(Radonić, 2023: 436). Based on the plans of architect Helen Baldasar the construction of a
240-m-long outer wall around the cemetery was done in the shape of a five-pointed star, with a
monumental statue of the Mother, made by sculptor Ante Kostović, placed on a several metres-
high pedestal in the centre of the cemetery. The cemetery wall—increased in height during the
renovation of the cemetery in 198543—also gained a strong demarcating function. Today, almost
anyone can see on online satellite images a five-point star-shaped cemetery that stands out in the
Sinai Desert, next to the banks of the Suez Canal. Echoing emblematic Dalmatian cemeteries that
are usually located on the hills and surrounded by cypresses, making them additionally tending
towards heights, the gigantic statue of the grieving Mother stands out from afar. The statue’s height
was meticulously planned by the sculptor, with ‘an English officer, looking from the ship in the
canal, calculating the height that would ensure the monument could always be seen from the ships’
in the Suez Canal (Kostović according to Radonić, 2023: 436).
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1199
Built with significant energy, time and material investments, El Shatt cemetery differed signifi-
cantly from the ‘immediate monuments’ as Sanja Horvatinčić (2023: 119) calls the simple, mini-
malistic, memorial markers originating during state of emergency or war periods. At the same time,
the cemetery had parallels with early post-war monuments which ‘were very much in keeping with
the traditional, religiously influenced European funeral culture for memorializing the war dead,
which dates back to at least the start of 19th century’ (Karge, 2023: 97). However, in contrast to the
focus of these early monuments on mourning, local and individual experiences, the El Shatt cem-
etery was early on envisaged as a monument to the antifascist struggle for which the dead gave
their lives (for the memorial function of refugee cemeteries, see also Lingelbach, 2017: 88).
Visiting the cemetery became part of the standard itinerary for groups before they left for repatria-
tion. As written in the last issue of Naš list (Eng. Our Newspaper; published daily in El Shatt),
before the last group left the Sinai Desert ‘people of flight, members of the people’s government
and National front gathered to bid farewell to our deceased’.44
Political and social memory
El Shatt was from the beginning firmly inserted into the history of Yugoslavia and its foundational
narratives. In other words, it was part of what Aleida Assmann defined as ‘political memory’ that
institutions, like states, ‘make’ for themselves to construct an identity (Assmann, 2006: 216). El
Shatt was never memorialized in the same spectacular way as some other historical events of the
Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle, in particular Partisan battles like Sutjeska or Neretva.
However, as we show in this article, and contrary to claims that the camps were forgotten, margin-
alized or silenced, El Shatt was consistently present and addressed as a foundational site of
Yugoslav history and the struggle for freedom. Its memorialization travelled and changed but
showed a remarkable resilience and adaptability to different political circumstances. Also, unlike
other emblematic places of the People’s Liberation Struggle of ‘general Yugoslav significance’
such as places of the mentioned battles, or Jasenovac and Kragujevac, El Shatt was far from the
homeland and difficult to visit. Although detached from the majority of the population in terms of
geography and experience, El Shatt played a significant role in what Paul Connerton (2004: 8, 51)
called ‘shared memory’ or a ‘new beginning’.
As formulated in one of the latest editions of the Encyclopaedia of Yugoslavia (Guberina, 1986),
the refuge in the Sinai Desert was seen as an ‘integral element’ of the People’s Liberation Struggle.
As such it was mentioned regularly in collections of documents, broader narratives or multivolume
documents on the history of the People’s Liberation Struggle in Dalmatia and personal accounts
and memoirs of high-ranking Partisan leaders (e.g. Jakšić, 1980; Krstulović, 2013; Velebit, 1983,
2016), intellectuals, politicians and cultural workers active in Egypt (e.g. Barbić, 1975; Franičević,
1983; Nola, 1988; Palčok, 1951). In line with the understanding of the refuge in Egypt as a training
ground for the future, throughout the entire period of Yugoslavia El Shatt was perceived and
addressed as ‘Yugoslavia in miniature’.45 In that context, it is not surprising that the cemetery was
managed by the Yugoslav and later the Croatian embassy and became a place of regular official
visits and commemoration. Already a few weeks after the final group of refugees left for Europe,
the Chief of the Yugoslav Military Mission in Cairo laid down a flower wreath to make sure that it
remained a Yugoslav memorial site.46 Almost 10 years later, while passing through the Suez Canal
on his journey to India, Josip Broz Tito went out onto the main deck when his official vessel, the
Galeb (Eng. Seagull) approached the site where El Shatt used to be. According to the press, the
flags on the ship were lowered to half-mast, a salute was ordered, and the ship’s crew, facing El
Shatt, rendered military honours while the ship’s band played a funeral march.47 Thus, although
Tito did not visit the cemetery, he and his crew paid tribute to the dead from a distance or, more
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precisely, in sight of El Shatt. Exactly 30 years later, amid renewed interest in El Shatt – about
which more will be said – it was proposed, without mentioning Tito, the Galeb, or the year 1955,
that all Yugoslav ships passing through the Suez Canal should pay tribute to the deceased and the
cemetery.48
Except for the time of the Israeli takeover of the Sinai Peninsula during the Suez Crisis of
1956/1957 and between the Six Day War in 1967 and Operation Badr in 1973, when Egypt regained
most of the east bank of the Suez, there were always Yugoslav visits to the cemetery. In the periods
of ceasefire, Yugoslav diplomats from Cairo and officers of the Yugoslav People’s Army, who were
in Sinai as part of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), were also regular visitors to the
cemetery. These visits were reported in the Yugoslav press49 and whenever possible references
were made to the officers’ personal and family connections with El Shatt.50 As the cemetery was in
a military zone, they had to be organized. In general, these visits to the cemetery were related to
Yugoslavia’s revolutionary calendar. In the first decades, prominent visiting days were Veteran’s
Day and the Day of the Uprising of the People of Croatia, both in July. On these days, visits to
graves, the unveiling of monuments and other commemorative acts were done in the homeland to
honour the memory of the fallen soldiers and victims of the Second World War. At least in 1974,
wreaths featured the Yugoslav flag.51 Later, in the 1980s, Victory Over Fascism Day in May was
established as a memorial day in El Shatt.52 The commemoration involved an on-site ‘history class’
for the pupils of the correspondence school for the children of employees of Yugoslav companies
in Cairo. As part of renewed economic and political relations between Egypt and Yugoslavia in the
1980s, the Yugoslav President visited Egypt in 1986 and paid homage to the El Shatt cemetery as
well.53
Tito never visited El Shatt, but Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser came to Yugoslavia in
1958 and participated in the commemoration of the historical Bitka na Sutjesci (Case Black) at the
Tjentište memorial together with the Yugoslav political leadership and some 70,000 people. With
Nasser’s presence, as one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement, at this commemoration
‘Yugoslav foreign policy was justified as a continuation of revolutionary thought and struggle for
the new world’ (Đorđević, 2023: 348). The rebuilding of El Shatt cemetery, which was destroyed
by grenades during the fighting between Egypt and Israel, was also done in the spirit of the Non-
Aligned Movement and the ‘nonalignment business’ that went with it (Spaskovska and Calori,
2021). In the 1980s, after Israel’s withdrawal from the entire Sinai Peninsula, Hosni Mubarak’s rise
to power and the renewal of Yugoslav-Egyptian relations, a significant number of Yugoslav citi-
zens arrived in Egypt with Yugoslav infrastructure companies, giving a push to rebuild the ceme-
tery. Following a series of articles in the Yugoslav press and in response to repeated appeals from
the Yugoslav ambassador in Cairo and a war veteran organization from Dalmatia, the central gov-
ernment in Belgrade secured funds and accepted a plan for the renovation of the cemetery. Based
on the motto ‘Jubilees are not always a reason for celebration, but they are an opportunity for
remembrance’,54 the cornerstone of the renovated cemetery was laid down in 1985 and its opening
was several months later.55 The renovated cemetery was in line with the dominant socialist doc-
trine, so the cross was no longer placed at the entrance of the cemetery. Instead, an Egyptian flag
was embedded on one side of the entrance and a Yugoslav flag on the other, symbolizing the
renewed friendship between these two central founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement,
as pointed out in the press at the time.56
After the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the responsibility for the cemetery passed on to Croatia.
Official visits continued but they were no longer based on the narrative of El Shatt as ‘Yugoslavia
in miniature’ or a perception of the camp as an integral element of the People’s Liberation Struggle.
Instead, the focus was placed on the hard life in the desert, the enduring memory of flight, the
resilience and adaptability of the refugees in difficult circumstances. In the first years, during the
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1201
war in Croatia (1990–1995), visits of Croatian diplomats from Cairo continued to be on Victory
Over Fascism Day, while the focus of speeches and messages shifted to the ongoing war, refugees
in Croatia and military attacks by former comrades.57 With the new Croatian ambassador appointed
in the mid-1990s, regular visits to the cemetery started to be at the Catholic All Saints Day – tradi-
tionally observed by visiting cemeteries. In these years, visits to the El Shatt cemetery featured in
the Croatian newspaper on the same page with the laying of wreaths at the central cemetery in
Zagreb, the memorial cemetery in war-devastated Vukovar or the newly established Croatian
memorial site at Medvedgrad castle. The wreaths laid on the pedestal of the statue of the Mother
took the shape of the Croatian coat of arms, the lighting of candles became an element of official
commemoration and a Catholic mass was organized.58 In short, Croatian media of that time erased
references to Yugoslavia. The same happened in the context of the last renovation of the cemetery,
which took place in the following decade. The cemetery now has the name Hrvatsko spomen gro-
blje (Eng. Croatian Memorial Cemetery), the Croatian flag is integrated into the wall and on the
pedestal of the statue of the Mother stands a cross. Croatian delegations, including several Croatian
presidents and prime ministers, visited the cemetery, paying tribute to the deceased and the mem-
ory of El Shatt. The last official visit was as recently as 2025, preserving the memory of El Shatt
and ensuring its presence in the media, official narratives and the public sphere.
Besides the mentioned official channels and initiatives, the memory of El Shatt was developed
and sustained through mundane, vernacular, everyday interactions and situations, forming what
Aleida Assmann called the format of ‘social memory’ (Assmann, 2006: 213). In this format, mem-
ories are intergenerationally transmitted through a variety of elements and dimensions, even per-
sonal names. In line with traditional patterns of naming in outstanding circumstances, some of the
481 children born in El Shatt got specific names, such as Zbjegan (male from Flight), Zbjeganka
(female from Flight), Elšatka (female from El Shatt) or Sinajka (female from Sinai). These anthro-
ponyms inspired by the toponyms evoked and revealed circumstances of one’s coming to the
world. Apart from the names, the most important local, vernacular transmission of memories were,
of course, oral narratives about life in refuge, personal experiences and anecdotes that used to cir-
culate widely, especially in Dalmatia. The memory and postmemory, meaning the memories passed
on through the generations (Hirsch, 2012), of El Shatt, are recently attracting the increasing atten-
tion of researchers (Abramac, 2018; Mustapić and Dergić, 2023; Radonić, 2023), as well as film-
makers (Ivan Ramljak movie from 2023) who are trying to capture today’s echoes of past
experiences.
Objects that refugees brought back with them to Dalmatia played a prominent role in memory
transfers as well. Many objects stayed in the old homes after their owners moved elsewhere leaving
behind handcrafted objects, memorabilia from the refugee camps – such as those presented at exhi-
bitions – utilitarian items like a blanket, a piece of clothing, or photographs. For example, a school
friend spontaneously shared with us several photographs, saved in her grandparents’ home, after
she heard we were writing about El Shatt.59 These photographs show the Sphinx, a couple in love,
a girl in front of a tent, refugees with local residents, a group of young people with a British and a
Yugoslav soldier. Other images show the same group laughing with the British soldier’s cap on the
head of one of the girls in the group and young men at the cemetery in the desert. The significance
of the photographs is also revealed by the fact that when in 1985 a group of former refugees went
to visit El Shatt some of them embarked on their journey with yellowed photographs as cherished
treasures they kissed and tucked close to their hearts.60 In contrast to this almost divine attitude
towards photographs from El Shatt, Radonić (2023: 490) observed that some former refugees, even
years after returning, ‘would cut out their portrait from a group photo and paste it into a personal
document . . . They had no other option, as they had no other way to obtain their own
photograph’.
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A digitized collection of more than 300 photographs of the cemetery done by the Photo Section
is archived today in the Croatian state archive in Zagreb.61 Each of them serves as a reminder of the
grief and personal losses of the El Shatt refugees, especially the photos that show people of differ-
ent ages, supposedly family members gathered around the tombstones of loved ones. Children and
women are dressed in their best clothes and men in uniforms, often with hands clasped and eyes
with a distant gaze ahead or below, frozen in movement and expression. Several photographs show
women dressed in black traditional clothes in a posture identical to that of the statue of the Mother
in the centre of the cemetery. They all stand or kneel with the right arm holding the left arm at the
elbow. These and other cemetery family portraits were taken with the idea of providing a memory
of the dead. Upon the return home, these photos were supposed to secure the connection with the
deceased, buried thousands of kilometres away.
Photographs also reveal that graves and tombstones at El Shatt’s central refugee cemetery were
initially as diverse as graves in any civilian cemetery. They had plaques or crosses in all possible
sizes and materials, some made of wood and others of stone, some with inscriptions in Latin script,
others in Cyrillic, some only with the names of the deceased, others also with dedications from
those who had erected them, for example, a grieving mother, mourning parents, a grieving mother
to her son. Some had palm leaves, flowers in tins, flower wreaths or paper flowers placed on the
graves. Archival sources show that the authorities made plans for identical tombstones,62 but it
seems that the image of rows of identical tombstones, which we associate with the cemetery today,
is actually a result of the 1985 restoration when individual graves became, as formulated by Zlatko
Dizdarević, ‘white soldiers in line’.63 The unification of graves fostered a transformation of the
cemetery from a place of individual mourning to a site of collective remembrance. In the latest
renovation of the cemetery, which took place 20 years ago, plinths were removed and the human
remains were transferred to the ossuary. Through this transfer, the cemetery became a site of col-
lective remembrance.
El Shatt in popular culture
Popular culture has been an important domain of remembering El Shatt ever since the publication
of the famous comic series Partizani (Eng. Partisans, Đorđe Lebović and Julio Radilović Jules,
1977/1978). The first episode of this comic series about the adventures of a British soldier in
Yugoslavia during the Second World War was ‘Convoy for El Shatt’, although the episode itself
focused on the evacuation, not the time in the camps. The 1983 Split Festival of Popular Music,
where the song El Shatt was performed, perhaps best illustrates how the camps became anchored
in the popular culture of the country that was experiencing economic and cultural flourishing,
embracing consumerism, and to paraphrase the title of Igor Duda’s (2010) book, found prosperity.
In this song, the refugee odyssey in the Sinai Desert is conveyed through the following slightly
pathetic melodies, simultaneously modernizing and reifying a heroic historical episode from the
Second World War:
Vjetar nosi pijesak, svi bi hranu-vode, grme li to
negdje topovi Slobode? Nigdje u daljini ni travke ni
žita, al čuje se ime, ime druga Tita. Svaki pedalj
zemlje junački on brani i mi smo s vama braćo
partizani.64
The wind carries sand, all crave for food and water, is
that the thunder of Freedom’s cannons somewhere
yonder?
Nowhere in the distance, neither grass nor grain, but
one name is heard, the name of comrade Tito.
Every inch of land he fiercely defends, and we stand
with you, brothers Partisans.
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1203
In the comic, as well as in the popular song, the official mainstream interpretation of El Shatt
was transferred, giving it additional popularity, but without any significant changes in the narra-
tive, the leading actors, or themes. In contrast, popular media, especially journalistic publications
from the same period, proved to be a generator of new perspectives and actors.
It is interesting to note that the first widely resonating call for the renovation of the devastated
cemetery in El Shatt was published in Start, a popular magazine that was widely read throughout
Yugoslavia.65 In 1974, Start reported on the completely devastated cemetery, with hundreds of
damaged graves and the decapitated statue of the Mother in the centre of the cemetery. The article
was illustrated with plenty of photographs and the first in a series of calls for action that would
culminate in the early 1980s when the fate of the ‘killed cemetery’66 became top news in the
Yugoslav press. The Split-based, regional Dalmatian newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija (Eng. Free
Dalmatia) provided the most persistent coverage of the topic. Following up on the series of articles
and reportages, this newspaper organized a charter flight from Split to Egypt on the occasion of the
opening of the renovated cemetery in El Shatt. In this context, in 1985 Slobodna Dalmacija also
initiated a readers’ competition for free travel places to visit the opening of the cemetery. Flights
and competitions were framed in line with the official discourse and questions focused on the his-
tory of the People’s Liberation Struggle and accompanied by narratives about El Shatt as an
extraordinarily difficult and complex task, the fulfilment of which required political and diplo-
matic maturity from the military and civil bodies of the People’s Liberation Movement, courage
and exemplary self-discipline.
The newspaper competition provoked an enormous interest and almost 20,000 people applied
for the 20 free travel places. The organization of a collective visit to El Shatt cannot be understood
only in the context of the 1980s expansion of transcontinental travelling from Yugoslavia or as an
echo of ‘dark tourism’ to sites of suffering as widely discussed in memory and tourism studies (see
Miles, 2024 for a recent example). While later repetitions of the competition with visits to El Shatt
or Southern Italy were more aligned with these phenomena, the first organized charter flight to
Egypt was strongly related to individual experiences among the former refugees from El Shatt,
who started sharing their perspectives in letters to the editors. The idea of organizing a collective
visit to Egypt emanated from a letter to the editor by a mother who had buried her son in El Shatt.
Her letter, published in Slobodna Dalmacija and formatted as an article under the title ‘Take us
there’ was illustrated with 40-year-old family photo portraits at the cemetery – resembling the
ones described in the previous section. Her biggest wish, she shared without results with the vet-
erans’ organizations and others two decades ago, was to visit the cemetery in El Shatt and part
with her son.67
For decades, the public memory of El Shatt was dominated by accounts of distinguished mem-
bers of the camp authorities, teachers, artists and other respectable actors of the camp’s universe.
The newspaper competition and the opening ceremony of the renovated cemetery with hundreds of
former refugees in attendance paved the way to bring a greater variety of individual perspectives
to the public. The preparations for the journey, the farewell at the airport, the flight and especially
the opening ceremony at the cemetery received extensive media coverage. In this, accounts of
‘ordinary people’ and especially former refugees came to the centre of media interest. Among them
is the following account of the oldest participant in the journey who was 76 years old at that time:
‘Since I returned from El Shatt 40 years ago, I have constantly thought about how I would visit the
grave of my daughter Marija, who died there when she was 6.5 years old. In these years of mine, I
have even overcome my fear of flying just to fulfil this wish’.68 Other accounts bring emotions,
details of everyday life, perspectives and materialities of the former refugees to the fore as well.
Names of the deceased, many of them children, their personal stories, as well as the stories, hopes
and wishes of their beloved ones were shared with readers. Scenes from the cemetery itself and less
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from the official opening and commemoration dominated the newspaper articles and accompany-
ing illustrations.69
In these articles full of pathos, sadness and farewells, the cemetery was not predominantly
approached as a site of collective memory. It was not only described as a ‘monument full of pain’
that will ‘forever connect El Shatt with Yugoslav history’70 or as a ‘persistent reflection of the
artistic strength of our [Yugoslav] people and a convincing symbol of the cult of the deceased sons’
and an ‘enduring testimony of one Golgotha but also of a great victory’.71 Names of the deceased
were not merely mentioned as ‘eternal witnesses to the great adventure and the remarkable success
of the El Shatt camp’,72 but instead as the names of sons, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers,
friends and comrades. The reporting emphasized this personal remembrance and less the collective
nature of the memorial. Therefore, as highlighted in several articles, many former refugees who
came to the opening ceremony of the renovated cemetery were disturbed by the fact that the new
uniform graves did have no names inscribed on them.73 Nevertheless, since the new tombstones
were put in the place where the old tombstones used to be, they still marked the places of the buried
remains of the deceased. Grieving relatives did their best to locate the graves of their loved ones
and leave a letter, a postcard, or some soil or pebbles brought from home, suggesting the attribution
of agency to the deceased (Harper, 2010: 318) and making a bridge between the continents, the
living and the dead. Two documentaries about El Shatt from the 1980s followed this line of repre-
sentations, featuring emotionally charged scenes from the opening of the restored cemetery that
transformed El Shatt from a monument of heroic history into a site of personal grief.74
Visits to the cemetery took place in the last decade of Yugoslavia. After the dissolution of
Yugoslavia, El Shatt lost its position in the foundational narrative, but it was not forgotten. Apart
from being, as mentioned, largely nationalized and stripped of its Yugoslav and Partisan legacy, El
Shatt was integrated into the broader Croatian memorial landscape, with occasional diplomatic and
presidential visits until today regularly reported in the national media. In addition, it continued to
be an integral part of local, family and personal memory cultures and popular culture in the broad-
est sense. Individual accounts of life in El Shatt started to flourish in the decades after the break-up
of Yugoslavia. Some were fictional (Bremer, 2013) but most were autobiographical, especially the
memoirs of refugees who were children in El Shatt (e.g. Božanić-Milić, 2007; Nižetić, 2007; Srhoj,
2000). Some of the autobiographies voiced explicitly anti-Yugoslav and anti-communist attitudes
(Talaich, 2019) and were written by former refugees who did not come back to Yugoslavia after the
war but were resettled abroad.
The fusion of individual experiences, now in the form of postmemory of the second or third
generation and popular genres continues until today. A recent example is the 2023 released song
‘Chile’ by Gdinjko, featuring El Shatt in the chorus with the fictional but for many Dalmatians also
autobiographical line: ‘Je li znaš, je li znaš u El Shattu mi se rodila mater?’ (Eng. Do you know, do
you know, my mother was born in El Shatt?)75 The same applies to two recent documentaries about
El Shatt made by Croatian filmmakers, El Shatt: Blueprint for Utopia by Ivan Ramljak and Chasing
the Sun: El Shatt by Ana Bilankov, both realized in 2023. Although based on different poetic and
political scripts – one portraying El Shatt as a utopian place where socialist discipline and self-
organization were achieved under the dire circumstances of war, and the other exploring connec-
tions between the history of Yugoslav refugees and today’s migrants crossing the Mediterranean
– both documentaries mobilize elements of local, personal and family history. Both are rooted in
archival research, utilize the rich photographic archive of El Shatt and feature the cemetery as a
memorial site and material trace of life in the camps, revealing its mnemonic resilience and rele-
vance until today. In the comic El Shatt: Fragments, likewise published in 2023, author Helena
Klakočar combines her family history, which was partly in El Shatt, with her own experience of
Hameršak and Lingelbach
1205
exile in the 1990s. The memorialization of El Shatt is thus ongoing and lends itself to comparisons,
referencing and connections to manifold histories.
Conclusion
A last moment leading to a renewed interest in El Shatt is connected to the reactions to the so-called
‘European migration crisis’ of 2015. The arrival of larger numbers of refugees in Europe led to an
increasing interest in refugee history in general, accompanied by a revived interest in earlier refu-
gee movements from Europe to Africa (Lingelbach, 2020b; Michailidis, 2018; Shilliam, 2016).
The mass movement of refugees from the Middle East through Croatia in the period of the Balkan
corridor (e.g. Bužinkić and Hameršak, 2017; Kasparek and Speer, 2015), made the El Shatt story
an obvious reference point for some who pointed out that refugees were simply fleeing in another
direction than before. One commentator in Slobodna Dalmacija made this connection in 2015
when discussing the fears prevalent in Croatia as larger numbers of Muslim refugees arrived in the
country. Describing Laith, a fictional, exemplary Arab refugee he wrote: ‘I, for example, see in
Laith’s eyes the gaze of my late grandmother, and in his embrace, my mother and her brothers,
when – not long ago, a little more than 70 years ago – they fled from the barbarism-ravaged Europe
by ship to the Egyptian refugee camp El Shatt, just a gunshot away from the Syrian desert’.76
Former El Shatt refugees themselves drew the same parallel when they were interviewed by Gabi
Abramac in 2015 arguing that they ‘should be helped and offered refuge just as they once were in
Africa’ (Abramac, 2018: 106). Given different meanings according to the prevailing topics and
interests over the decades, El Shatt became, as Branko Radonić summarized,
an important point of collective memory for Dalmatian women and men in the second half of the 20th
century and the first decades of the 21st century, especially on the islands and in the coastal areas, from
where most of the refugees came. Although some details of this historical event have been forgotten, a
significant number of Dalmatians still know the toponym ‘El Shatt’, with which the noun ‘refugee camp’
is often associated. (Radonić, 2023: 1)
In terms of the natural conditions, as a tented camp in the desert with few permanent buildings, El
Shatt was predestined to be forgotten. However, through the construction of the cemetery, local,
vernacular memorial practices, the reuse of written and visual materials made by the refugees,
humanitarian and other actors and constant visiting and rebuilding of the cemetery, quite the oppo-
site happened. El Shatt became a central trope in Yugoslav, Croatian and especially Dalmatian
wartime history. Throughout, the memory of El Shatt was firmly anchored in the history of
Yugoslavia and its foundational narratives, but unlike the remembrance of other events from the
national liberation struggle, it did not fade into oblivion after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Having
in mind that Yugoslavia disintegrated more than three decades ago, it is obvious that the Yugoslav
memory framework and foundational narrative were not the only reasons for the persistence of El
Shatt in popular Croatian memory until today. Moreover, since El Shatt did not, unlike many other
founding events of Yugoslav history (cf. Horvatinčić and Žerovc, 2023), fade into oblivion after
the country’s dissolution in war, one could say that El Shatt is remembered despite its role in that
history. However, even this would be an oversimplification ignorant of the historical complexities.
Reasons for El Shatt’s memorial resilience need to be found in the interplay of different political
and social, national, supranational and local practices, ideas and efforts, as well as individual and
collective mnemonic practices or meeting points between political and social memories, family
anecdotes and popular culture. In Erll’s (2011: 14) terms, it was the ‘fuzzy trajectories of cultural
remembrance and forgetting’ we tried to outline in this article.
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Memory Studies 18(5)
Over the decades, memories of El Shatt travelled and were nurtured and crafted in ever-chang-
ing ways in different contexts and among different groups. The contrast between the camps’ loca-
tion in the desert and the coastal homes of the refugees as well as the homogeneity of the population
who nearly all came from Dalmatia and returned collectively to the same region contributed to the
local prominence of the memories. In contrast to other refugee groups, they were not dispersed
after the war. It is exactly this community of over 20,000 repatriated people that fostered and sus-
tained the communicative memory of El Shatt across regions and generations until today. Oral
narratives, names of children born in Egypt, material objects handmade in the Sinai desert and the
visits to the El Shatt cemetery created a web of references, sites, peoples and narratives that secured
the prominent memorial position of the experience despite radical historical changes. The political
inclusion of El Shatt into the national narrative was of great importance, but without local, ver-
nacular, oral and popular culture enactments of mnemonic practices it would have been forgotten
after the dissolution of Yugoslavia and its political structures and ideologies that had kept this
memory alive.
Acknowledgements
We started to work on this article during our fellowships within the research group ‘Internalizing Borders:
The Social and Normative Consequences of the European Border Regime’ at the Center for Interdisciplinary
Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University 2023–2024. We are grateful to the group conveners and fellows for the
fruitful discussions and exchanges that helped lay the foundation for our collaboration.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publica-
tion of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication
of this article: M.H.’s work on this article was carried out as part of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore
Research (Zagreb, Croatia) project Poetics and Politics of Ethnography Today (European Union –
NextGenerationEU). J.L.’s work is the outcome of research conducted within the ‘Africa Multiple’ Cluster of
Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German
Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy EXC 2052/1–390713894.
ORCID iDs
Marijana Hameršak
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8102-6784
Jochen Lingelbach
https://orcid.org/0009-0005-0690-0266
Notes
1. Državni arhiv u Splitu (State Archive in Split, hereafter DAST), Jug. zbjeg u Egiptu, HR DAST 23, 28,
COZ, Zdravstveni odjel, Higijenski odsjek 1944–1945. g, Groblje, No. 580, Report for October 1944.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English were made by the authors.
2. United Nations Archives (hereafter UN), New York City, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA) (1943–1946), Balkan Mission and Middle East Office, Middle East
Office. S-1313-0000-0043-00001—Office of the Historian, ‘United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration. History of the Middle East Office’, p. 55. Online: https://search.archives.un.org/
uploads/r/united-nations-archives/8/3/e/83ed3f9c1d2e7a300fd2008a7f50ed566c62c3ff35a2f3e23b9f1f
cde722041a/S-1313-0000-0043-00001.PDF. The notion that El Shatt is not a place, but a latitude and a
longitude, is often repeated in the literature. See, for example, Mataušić, 2007a: 93; Bieber, 2020: 298;
Mackinnon and White, 2023: 11.
Hameršak and Lingelbach
1207
3. UN: S-1253-0000-0733, ‘Life at El Shatt’, transcript of a talk given by Arthur Calder-Marshall to the
BBC Home Service on 11 January 1945.
4. Hrvatski državni arhiv (Croatian State Archive, hereafter HDA), Vjesnikova novinska dokumentacija
(Press documentation by Vjesnik), VND-2031, MO-222, 2211, Palavršić A (1974) ‘Život niknuo na
pijesku’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 24 January.
5. To be geographically precise, the Sinai peninsula is part of Asia, but since we focus on the refugee per-
spectives here, we decided to use their words.
6. UN: S-1021-0028-05, Monographs – country and area missions and offices – Balkan Mission – BM1
– ‘Origin of the Balkan Mission’ by Elizabeth King Simeon, 15 September 1945, 44. In this case, it was
the explanation, why some refugees were transferred further South from Egypt during the Alamein cri-
sis, but it addressed a general approach towards refugees seeing them mainly as a potential obstacle for
military logistics.
7. Khatatba housed 6294 refugees as of 8 September 1944. UN: S-1253-0000-0692, ‘Second Report on
Khatatba Camp for Yugoslav Refugees’ by Ida McNare, American Red Cross, Khatatba, 9 September
1944.
8. UN: S-1021-0028-05, Monographs – country and area missions and offices – Balkan Mission – BM1
– ‘Origin of the Balkan Mission’ by Elizabeth King Simeon, 15 September, 119
9. See Note 8, 125.
10. UN: S-1253-0000-0694, ‘‘Note on Refugee Camps near Suez’ by Mr. Schreeve, 19 January.
11. In the evening of 4 May 1945 a British airplane accidently dropped a bomb on the camp leading to pro-
tests from UNRRA officials. UN: S-1244-0000-0028, H. van Zile Hyde, UNRRA MEO to AOC-in-C,
Royal Air Force in the Middle East, 10 May 1945. In some recollections, refugees voiced the suspicion
that royalist Yugoslav pilots might have dropped the bombs on purpose.
12. The British Ambassador in Cairo wrote to the Egyptian Government: „[Moses Wells’] isolated position
ensures that the refugees are far from the public eye and a minimum source of embarrassment to the
Egyptian authorities. The National Archives of the United Kingdom: Public Records Office (hereafter
PRO): CO 323/1845/23, Lord Killearn [Ambassador Miles Lampson] to Amin Osman Pasha, Minister
of Finance, Cairo, 28 December 1943.
13. Most MERRA staff was taken over by UNRRA, including its senior official, and the British ‘set the
pattern’ for the latter organization. UN: S-1021-0028-05, Monographs – country and area missions
and offices – Balkan Mission – BM1 – ‘Origin of the Balkan Mission’ by Elizabeth King Simeon, 15
September, 1.
14. UN: S-1253-0000-0733, ‘Report from visit to El Shatt with Mr. Fred Daniels’ by Hansi Pollak, Chief
Welfare Officer, Camps Division, 12 January 1945, p.4.
15. UN: S-1129-0000-0957-00001, ‘Welfare in the Middle East Camps, 1944-45. An analysis of experi-
ence’, by the Welfare Division, Bureau of Services, UNNRA, Washington, June 1945, p.20.
16. UN: S-1253-0000-0733, William Taylor’s Report, El Shatt, 10 January 1945, p.3.
17. UN: S-1253-0000-0674, ‘UNRRA MEO Revised Repatriation Statistics’, 15 October 1946.
18. UN: S-1253-0000-0728, ‘Remarks by Director General at Training School’, Personnel Division to All
Members of Staff, 8 June 1944, p. 3.
19. UN: S-1015-0001-13, Elizabeth King Simeon, UNRRA Cairo to Grace E. Fox, UNRRA Washington,
1 January 1945. King Simeon had studied at the Quaker Bryn-Mawr College, spent a year in Germany
before the war and worked in the intelligence section of the US War Department.
20. UN: S-1015-0001-13, Elizabeth King Simeon, Cairo to Dr Grace E. Fox, UNRRA Washington, 27
February 1945.
21. For example the memorandum by Joseph Van Vleck enclosed in UN: S-1253-0000-0717, Neville Miller,
Senior Deputy Chief Balkan Mission, Cairo to M. Menshikov, Deputy Director General, Bureau of
Areas, UNRRA Washington, 9 February 1945. Or the lengthy report on camp welfare compiled after the
closure of the Middle East camps: UN S-1129-0000-0957-00001, ‘Welfare in the Middle East Camps,
1944-45. An analysis of experience’, by Welfare Division, Bureau of Services, UNNRA, Washington,
June 1945.
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Memory Studies 18(5)
22. Margaret Gilruth, Public Relations Division, Balkan Mission, Cairo to Mr. Morse Salisbury, Director
of Public Relations, UNRRA, 1 January 1944. Gilruth was UNRRA’s PR officer in Cairo and had the
assistance of Sarah Samy, a young Egyptian journalism graduate of the American University in Cairo.
23. The New York Herald Tribune, 23 July 1944: ‘U.N.R.R.A Camp in Egypt Sets Pattern to Help Distressed
European Peoples’.
24. Mennonite Weekly Review, 17 May 1945: ‘Our Mennonite Relief Work in the Middle East. Recent Visit to
Scenes of Sacred History in Holy Land of Great Inspiration to Relief Workers’ by SF Pannabecker, p. 4.
25. UN: S-1253-0000-0733: Report ‘El Shatt Camp’, 10 May 1944.
26. See https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2005675128/. Some of the images are also used in this blog text:
https://mashable.com/feature/european-refugees-in-egypt.
27. The film is available online in the Imperial War Museum film collection: https://www.iwm.org.uk/col-
lections/item/object/1060022213 .
28. Library of Congress, Washington, DC: Katie Louchheim Papers, Box 70, Folder 7, UNRRA Weekly
Bulletin, 3 January 1945.
29. UN: S-0520-0187, ‘Tuesday, 22 August 1944: All-UNRRA Evening Program’, leaflet, n.d. The pro-
gramme gives the film title simply as ‘UNRRA Refugee camp for Yugoslavs at El Shatt, North Africa’.
30. s. n. (1946) ‘Jugoslavenski pustinjski grad El-Shatt uskoro će biti napušten’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 22
February, 3.
31. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jlb3NUpeqg .
32. Arhiv Jugoslavije u Beogradu (Archives of Yugoslavia in Belgrade), Collection 297 (SUBNOR), Folder
109 – materijal o međunarodnoj suradnji u duhu njegovanja rev. tradicija, 1954. – 71. The authors are
grateful to Sanja Horvatinčić for this reference.
33. s. n. ‘Mali oglasnik’, Slobodna Dalmacija, 2 July, 8.
34. Gazde S (1983) ‘Djelić mladosti iz El Shatta’. Slobodna Dalmacija 28 May, 7.
35. s. n. (1946) ‘U domovinu se vratila posljednja grupa izbjeglica iz El Shatta’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 30
March, 3.
36. Cf. https://www.das.hr/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/HR-DAST-23-Zbjeg-u-Egiptu.pdf
37. DAST: Jug. zbjeg u Egiptu, HR DAST 23, 1944, 1945 and 1946, 464 (old annotation). Memo No.
721/45, 3 January.
38. HDA: VND-2031, MO-222, 2211, Palavršić A (1974) ‘Kulturni život’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 7 February.
39. HDA: VND-2031, MO-222, 2211, Palaveršić [!] A (1974) ‘Slova od pijeska’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 2
February.
40. UN: S-1245-0000-0341, Telegram sent from Cairo to London, 26 April.
41. Cf. https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/868592.html.
42. s. n. (1946) ‘U domovinu se vratila posljednja grupa naših izbjeglica iz El Shatta’. Slobodna Dalmacija,
30 March, 3. A comparable motivation drove survivors who built memorials in German and Austrian
concentration camps (see Grandke 2025).
43. HDA: VND-2031, MO-222, 2211, Janevski O (1985) ‘“Majka” opet čuva pustnju’. Ilustrovana politika,
3 December, 20–21.
44. DAST: Jug. zbjeg u Egiptu, HR DAST 23, 87, COZ. ‘Naš list’ 501–758. Last issue (No. 758) of Naš list
14 March.
45. Sonjara E (1985) ‘S maslinom do Sinaja’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 23 November, 9.
46. s. n. ‘Banditski napad četničkih zločinaca’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 20 April, s. p.
47. Vesić D (1955) ‘Tito je uvijek s nama’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 25 May, 3.
48. s. n. (1985) ‘Politički odjek El Shatta’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 18 February, 5.
49. Cf. s. n. (1958) ‘Ambasador Đerđa posjetio El Šat’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 14 October, 1; HDA: VND-
2031, MO-222, 2211, Bošnjak, M (1974) ‘El Shatt- Trideset godina poslije’. Start, 31 July.
50. Cf. s.n. (1958) ‘Pripadnici odreda JNA položili vijenac na groblje u El Shattu’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 28
October, 2; HDA: VND-2031, MO-222, 2211, Kaščelan, S (1962) ‘Na dva kontinenta’. Komunist, 27
September.
51. HDA, VND-2031, MO-222, 2211, Bošnjak, M (1974) ‘El Shatt- Trideset godina poslije’. Start, 31 July.
52. Cf. Čelan, J (1986) ‘U El Shattu godinu dana poslije’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 13 December, 7.
Hameršak and Lingelbach
1209
53. HDA: VND-2031, MO-222, 2211, s. n. (1986) ‘Posjet El Šatu’. Borba, 6 February.
54. HDA: VND-2031, MO-222, 2211, Ribnikar D (1984) ‘Boginje donose smrt’. Politika, 20 April.
55. Cf. s. n. (1985) ‘Počela obnova El Shatta’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 10 May, 1.
56. Cf. Krnić, M (1985) ‘El Shatt – za sva vremena’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 25 November, s. p.
57. s. n. ‘El Shatt: oskrvnuto groblje 750 Hrvata’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 20 October, s. p.
58. s. n. (1998) ‘Cvijeće za El Shatt’. Slobodna Dalmacija 2 November, s. p.; s. n (1999) ‘Svijeće i u El
Shattu’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 2 November, s. p.
59. The librarian in Zagreb, when we borrowed a book about El Shatt, said that her grandmother was in
Egypt. There have been countless such stories when it comes to El Shatt.
60. Sonjara E (1985) ‘S maslinom do Sinaja’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 23 November, 9; Krnić M (1985) ‘Našla
ga je, na grob klekla . . .’ Slobodna Dalmacija, 27 November, 9.
61. HDA: HR-HDA-1737 – Zbirka fotografija Zbjeg u El Shattu (zbirka), 2. Groblje (serija).
62. DAST: Jug. zbjeg u Egiptu, HR DAST 23, 29, COZ, Tehnički odjel, 1944-1946. Memo No. 838/45, from
8th February 1945.
63. HDA: VND-2031, MO-222, 2211, Dizdarević Z (1985) ‘Svi su oni naši sinovi’. Oslobođenje, 28–30
November.
64. Dubravka Jusić song El Shatt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcqI1bnnjXU. Željko Sabol lyrics:
https://www.antifasisticki-vjesnik.org/hr/pjesme/8/El_Shatt/139/
65. HDA: VND-2031, MO-222, 2211, Bošnjak M (1974) ‘El Shatt- Trideset godina poslije’. Start, 31 July.
66. Krnić M (1984) ‘I groblja ubijaju, zar ne?’ Slobodna Dalmacija, 25 June, s. p.
67. Visković A (1984) ‘povedite nas tamo’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 21 November, sp. P.
68. Krnić M (1985) ‘Našla ga je, na grob klekla . . .’ Slobodna Dalmacija, 27 November, 9.
69. Krnić M (1985) ‘Našla ga je, na grob klekla . . .’ Slobodna Dalmacija, 27 November, 9; HDA: VND-
2031, MO-222, 2211, Dizdarević Z (1985) ‘Svi su oni naši sinovi’. Oslobođenje, 28–30 November;
Šunde S (1985) ‘Suze na pijesku Sinaja’. Danas, 3 December; Šeparović A (1985) ‘Di si mi, Suzo moja!’
Vjesnik, 27 November.
70. s. n. (1946) ‘Jugoslavenski pustinjski grad El-Shatt uskoro će biti napušten’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 22
February, 3. Palavršić A (1974) ‘Opet u domovini’. Slobodna Dalmacija 12 February, s. p.
71. Palavršic, Ante. 1974. ‘Opet u domovini’. Slobodna Dalmacija 12. 2. 1974, s. p.
72. s. n. (1946) ‘Jugoslavenski pustinjski grad El-Shatt uskoro će biti napušten’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 22
February, 3.
73. HDA: VND-2031, MO-222, 2211, Dizdarević Z (1985) ‘Svi su oni naši sinovi’. Oslobođenje 28–30
November; Krnić M (1985) ‘Našla ga je, na grob klekla . . .’ Slobodna Dalmacija, 27 November, 9.
74. Croatian Radio and Television Archive (HRT), Mladen Mateljan, Rajko Tomić, Bruno Tafra et al. (1985)
El Shatt: za sva vremena. Televizija Zagreb, Studio Split; & Aleksandar Stasenko 1987. Zbjeg 1943.
-1946. Televizija Zagreb. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jlb3NUpeqg
75. Gdinjko (2023). Chile, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPw9Ku3oZVk.
76. Krile D (2015) ‘Strah od barbara’. Slobodna Dalmacija, 21 August.
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Author biographies
Marijana Hameršak is a Research Advisor at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb. She
is the author of the books Pričalice (Taletellers, 2011) and Frakture dječje književnosti (Fractures of Children’s
Literature, 2021), and co-author of the book Uvod u dječju književnost (Introduction to Children’s Literature,
with Dubravka Zima, 2015). Hameršak has co-edited several edited volumes, with the most recent ones, being
Ekonomija i književnost / Economy and Literature (with Maša Kolanović and Lana Molvarec, 2022) and
keywords Balkanska ruta (Balkan Route, with Iva Pleše and Tea Škokić, 2024). She was the principal
Hameršak and Lingelbach
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researcher of the recently completed research project ‘ERIM – The European Irregularized Migration Regime
at the Periphery of the EU: From Ethnography to Keywords’ (HRZZ, 2020-2024).
Jochen Lingelbach is a Postdoctoral Researcher in African History at the University of Bayreuth where he
works on the research project ‘Africa in the Global History of Refugee Camps’ as part of the Cluster of
Excellence ‘Africa multiple’. His research focuses on the history of mobility, migration, refugees and the
relation of humanitarianism and colonialism. He is the author of On the Edges of Whiteness. Polish Refugees
in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War (Berghahn, 2020). His latest article,
Unequal refugeeness. Race, gender, and co-belligerence from Poles in colonial Africa to Ukrainians in
Poland was published in 2024 with the Journal of Refugee Studies.
Subjects
People & roles
Origins & context
- Title
- El Shatt: Memories of a Yugoslav Partisan refugee camp travelling from North Africa to Croatia
- Publication type
- Article
- Language
- English
- Journal
- Memory Studies
- Year
- 2025
- volume
- 18
- issue
- 5
- Page start
- 1,189
- Page end
- 1,213
- Status
- Peer reviewed
- Relation
- Open Access Publizieren
Identifiers & sources
- Source ID (eref-/epub-)
- eref-94660
- ISSN
- 1750-6999
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