Establishment of Jadu concentration camp in Libya

The Jadu concentration camp in Libya was established in February 1942. Jadu was a former army camp, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Its commandants were Italian, and the guards were Italian and Arab policemen. Out of the twenty-six hundred Jews sent there, more than five hundred died within 3 months, of weakness and hunger, and especially from typhoid fever and typhus. Water shortages, malnutrition, overcrowding, and filth intensified the spread of contagion. Inmates buried the dead in a cemetery on a hill outside the camp. In January 1943, the camp guards left. Several weeks later, British soldiers arrived, but many of the prisoners could not be moved due to their poor physical condition. The first Jews returned to their homes from Jadu in the spring of 1943, and the last group of prisoners only left Jadu in October 1943.