Abstract
Background
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) was the first country in the Middle East to report severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. Serosurveys are essential ...to understanding the extent of virus transmission. This cross-sectional study aims to assess the seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.
Methods
Between 19 July and 14 August 2020, 4487 households were selected using a random sample stratified by region and citizenship of the head of household (UAE citizen or non-citizen). A cluster sample of 40 labour camps was selected. Data on socio-demographic characteristics, risk factors and symptoms compatible with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) were collected. Each participant was first tested by Roche Elecsys® Anti-SARS-CoV-2 assay, followed, when reactive, by the LIAISON® SARS-CoV-2 S1/S2 IgG assay.
Results
Among 8831 individuals from households, seroprevalence was 10·4% 95% confidence intervals (CIs) 9·5–11·4, with higher seroprevalence in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain regions compared with those in Al Dhafra. In households, we found no sex difference and UAE citizens had lower seroprevalence compared with those of other nationalities. Among 4855 workers residing in labour camps, seroprevalence was 68·6% (95% CI 61·7–74·7), with higher seroprevalence among workers from Southeast Asia. In households, individuals with higher body mass indexes demonstrated higher seroprevalences than individuals with normal weight. Anosmia and ageusia were strongly associated with seropositivity.
Conclusions
The majority of household populations in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi remained unexposed to SARS-CoV-2. In labour camps, SARS-CoV-2 transmission was high. Effective public health measures should be maintained.
The Brandenburg State Archaeology Museum has been conserving and analysing relics of war and terror for 25 years, and as a result of this work archaeology is now an integral part of Nazi camp ...research (Kersting et al. 2016a; Theune 2018). Many camp sites have been investigated, including concentration camps and their subcamps, forced labour camps, and prisoner-of-war camps (Kersting 2020; 2022). While most objects of an industrial culture of the 20th century can be quickly assigned a function, functions do change. Such a shift is a characteristic of Nazi camp finds and reflects their context of bondage and deprivation. The identification of the functions of material remains enables their association with different spheres of life in the camp, so that both perpetrator and victim groups are documented archaeologically. Moreover, these finds serve as tangible evidence to refute any relativisation of the crimes.
Abstract
This article treks through the timeworn remnants of Czechoslovakia's Communist forced and correctional labour uranium camps in the Ore Mountains in the northwest Bohemian region of Jáchymov. ...These camps held tens of thousands of detainees, largely political prisoners convicted in sham trials or individuals sent there for re-education. Conditions were deplorable. Throughout the 1950s, the young Czechoslovak Communist regime compelled detainees to hard, life threatening labour and subjected them to maltreatment and arbitrary violence. This article traces some of the visible, invisible or overgrown artefacts of the former camps, as well as public as private memories about what happened there. It reflects on the current memoryscape of these forgotten places of human suffering and describes the aesthetics of these aging sites of atrocity.
Full text
Available for:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, PRFLJ, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Adolf Island Sturdy Colls, Caroline; Colls, Kevin
2022
eBook
Drawing on more than a decade's worth of historical, forensic and archaeological research, this book presents the first detailed investigation of the lives of the thousands of forced and slave ...labourers sent to Alderney under Nazi occupation.
The “Riese” project was a huge construction project initiated by German Nazi authorities, which was located in the northeast of the Sowie Mountains (Ger. Eulengebirge) in southwestern Poland. ...Construction of the “Riese” complex took place in 1943–1945 but was left unfinished. Due to the lack of reliable sources, the exact intended function of the Riese complex is still unknown. The construction was carried out by prisoners, mostly Jews, from the main nearby concentration camps, KL Gross-Rosen and KL Auschwitz-Birkenau. Thanks to the discovery in the National Archives (NARA, USA) of a valuable series of German aerial photographs taken in February 1945, insight into the location of labour camps was obtained. These photographs, combined with LiDAR data from the Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography (Warsaw, Poland), allowed for the effective identification and field inspection of the camps’ remains. The location and delimitation of the selected labour camps were confirmed by an analysis of the 1945 aerial photograph combined with LiDAR data. These results were supported by field inspection as well as archival testimonies of witnesses. The field inspection of the construction remains indicated intentionally faulty construction works, which deliberately reduced the durability of the buildings and made them easy to demolish. The authors believe that it is urgent to continue the research and share the results with both the scientific community and the local community. The authors also want to emphasize that this less-known aspect of Holocaust history is gradually disappearing in social and institutional memory and is losing to the commercial mythologization of the Riese object.
Full text
Available for:
IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
In this article we propose the concept of taboo heritage as a way to describe a legacy of war so sensitive that it never undergoes heritage creation. Attempts at creation, such as heritage listing, ...renovation or excavation, are blocked by local authorities. We also examine the transition from taboo heritage to sensitive heritage, the next step along the 'heritage continuum', which we propose can only occur through the combined efforts of the passage of time, the role of activists and official authorisation. We take as our case study two of the British Channel Islands of Jersey and Alderney, occupied by German forces from 1940 to 1945. Labour camps were built in both islands, where the dead were also buried locally. We explore how the existing legacy of these events is still taboo heritage in Alderney, but has achieved partial progress in the transition to sensitive heritage in Jersey.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
In his contribution, the author deals with the issue of juvenile convicts in Slovenia who were serving their sentence of deprivation of liberty with forced labour and deprivation of liberty in the ...period 1945–1953. The emphasis lies on listing the penal institutions in which the juvenile convicts served their custodial sentence. Furthermore, the regime in such institutions is described. The author finds that until 1953 juvenile convicts served the two types of sentences alongside adult convicts in the same penal institutions and were subject to the same regime. Their situation began improving only after 1951, when they were separated from the adult convicts in the correctional facilities in Maribor and Rajhenburg. They were finally completely separated in July 1953, when they were relocated to the Radeče Correctional Facility where a special department was founded specifically for them.
The literary output of the Polish-Yiddish writers who survived WWII in the Soviet Union is mostly a literary mirror of the times of exile and wartime wandering. The two major themes that reverberate ...through these writings are: the refugees’ reflection on their stay in the USSR, and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. After the war, some of them described that period in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction, however, due to censorship, such accounts could only be published abroad, following the authors’ emigration from Poland. These writings significantly complement the texts produced during the war, offering plentiful details about life in Poland’s Eastern borderlands under Soviet rule as it was perceived by the refugees, or about the fate of specific persons in the subsequent wartime years. This literature, written in – and about – exile is not only an account of what was happening to Polish-Jewish refugees in the USSR, but also a testimony to their coping with an enormous psychological burden caused by the awareness (or the lack thereof) of the fate of Jews under Nazi German occupation. What emerges from all the literary texts published in post-war Poland, even despite the cuts and omissions caused by (self)-censorship, is an image of a postwar Jewish community affected by deep trauma, hurt and – so it seems – split into two groups: survivors in the East (vicarious witnesses), and survivors in Nazi-occupied Poland (direct victim witnesses). The article discusses on samples the necessity of extending and broadening of that image by adding to the reflection on Holocaust literature (which has been underway for many years) the reflection on the accounts of the experience of exile, Soviet forced labour camps, and wandering in the USSR contained in the entire corpus of literary works and memoirs written by Polish-Yiddish writers.
From the outset of the South African War both the British and Boer forces deliberately and directly targeted civilians during their military operations, thus heralding a harbinger of twentieth ...century “total war”. Well established in the historiography are the camps established by the British for internment of the Boers, later known as concentration camps. Less known are the so‐called “native” refugee camps, which functioned as forced wartime labour camps, and are today known as black concentration camps. Although civilian internment was not genocidal by design and purpose, the high loss of life and bitterness among the Boer descendants shaped the political narrative of twentieth century South Africa. Yet the black forced labour camps were far more lethal and designed along a completely different model to those where the Boers were interned. The memory of this experience has only in the last two decades entered historical discourse about the conflict, however. This article examines those camps which interned black civilians at Orange River Station, Taung, Vryburg and Brussels Siding. Situated approximately 300 kms apart at their southern and most northerly points, the sites of these camps were first identified by the author in the period from 2001 to 2008.
This article provides analysis of some less well-known aspects of the Republican exile in 1939 in the USSR, such as the incarceration in Soviet prisons and internment in forced labour camps of ...hundreds of Spaniards during the Stalinist era. Based on the memoirs of survivors, specialised literature and documentation from various archives, the text describes the purges against members of different collectives of Spaniards that arrived in the Soviet Union during and after the Civil War (1936-1939), the causes of their arrest and incarceration in the Gulag, life inside the Soviet concentration camp system, and the struggle for survival, freedom and repatriation to Spain.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
PDF
