Washing in the camp

This is one print from a folio of twenty nine prints executed in the German expressionist style. They were created in 1949 by Jewish internees at the Caraolos deportation camp in Famagusta. Over fifty thousand Jews on their way to Israel were kept for some time in Cyprus by the British authorities between 1946-1949. Despite their meager means, each one of twenty six internees printed one representation of their lives within the camp. All representations were circulated in twenty six copies, one for each of the artists. Numerous women engage actively in washing. No man appears in the process. The total institution of a detention camp did not dissolve the gender division of labour as informed by patriarchal ideology. Instead, it reproduced it. This is all the more peculiar if one considers that many of these internees belonged to the socialist branch of the Zionist movement. The latter were responsible for installing a collectivist spirit in the egalitarian arrangements of the Israeli kibbutzim in which many of such divisions had ceased to exist.