In 1922, Benito Mussolini took power in Italy, and in 1938 his government began to promulgate racial laws that affected the Jewish communities in Italian Libya.

Jews could no longer intermarry with "Aryans", hold employment with the state or in any skilled profession, or enroll their children in public or private Italian schools.

[1] The race laws began to be enforced more strictly, and Libyan Jews of foreign nationality were deported to detention or concentration camps in Tunisia, Algeria, and Italy.

[7] A new concentration camp was erected for the internment at Giado, a former military post in the Tripolitanian Plateau of the Nafusa Mountains, roughly 153 kilometres (95 miles) southwest of Tripoli.

Renato Tesciuba, the official Jewish representative to the municipality, refused to prepare the list, citing "Levantine disorder" as the reason,[10] thus delaying the deportations.

The group was waiting in El Coefia to depart to the second stop on the journey, Agedabia, when the Polizia dell'Africa Italiana of Benghazi intervened and obtained the "temporary suspension" of the deportation order.

[7] Deportations began in May 1942, and through October Jews were brought on twice-weekly convoys of 8–10 trucks[8] from their homes in Cyrenaica to Giado following the posting of a summons in the synagogue.

[14] A wealthy Jewish merchant named Mordechai Duani, who had preexisting connections to the Italians, provided truck transport from Derna, Benghazi, Tobruk, Barca, Ajdabiya, and Apollonia to Giado.

[16] The camp's commandant was General d'armate Ettore Bastico, the governor of Libya and the commander-in-chief of Italian troops in North Africa.

[8] The prisoners at Giado were almost exclusively families of Libyan and Italian Jews from Cyrenaica, especially Benghazi, which contained one of the largest Jewish communities in Libya.

[8] The Jewish families formed a camp council, led by Camus Suarez, consisting of an elected capo from each of the ten barracks at Giado.

[5] The conditions of Giado were extremely poor and difficult, and it is known as the harshest of the Libyan labor camps where Jews were interned in World War II.

Daily rations constituted of 100–150 grams of bread, with a small weekly provision of "rice, macaroni, oil, sugar, tea and coffee".

[16] Maurice Roumani quotes a survivor who described the ration as "no more than a few grams of rice, oil, sugar and coffee made out of barley seeds".

Maurice Roumani quotes a survivor: Tens of families were concentrated in a space of four square meters and separated by bedding and blankets.

[17]Poor medical care led to an epidemic typhus outbreak beginning in December 1942, accounting for most of the camp's death toll.

Anat Helman notes that, of the 22 Giado survivors she interviewed as part of her research, "only the women mention the shaving of heads and their desperate attempt to evade this fate.

"[4] Prisoners who had brought valuables with them could barter their personal effects "at an exorbitant price"[4] with Arab merchants—initially surreptitiously, and later allowed by the Italian guards at the fence and inside the camp.

[13] Arab policemen were also on the Italian-commandeered guard force, and survivors describe regular inspections and visits from Germans (presumably members of the Nazi Sicherheitspolizei or Sicherheitsdienst).

The order was finally rescinded, for reasons unclear; Eric Salerno argues that the Italian officers feared prosecution as war criminals in the likely event of an Allied victory.

[24] The camp was liberated by British forces led by Jewish Brigadier General Frederick Kisch[28][29] on January 24, 1943, along with the smaller detention centers at Gharian and Yefren.

[18] Survivor Jean Nissim testified that an Italian in charge of the weapons depot had distributed guns to the Jews to defend themselves against local Arabs who threatened to break into the camp.

[5] The permission for the orphans was obtained from Britain by Rabbis Louis I. Rabinowitz and Ephraim E. Urbach, the two chaplains of the Jewish Brigade of the British Eighth Army in Libya.

The funds for the endeavor were raised by Renato Tesciuba, the leader of Benghazi's Jewish community who had refused to prepare a deportation quota for Italian authorities in 1942.

[4][5] Roumani writes that survivors of Giado "returned to find their homes ransacked and destroyed, their shops bombarded and in ruins, and hardly any aspect of community life left.

[13] Even under British occupation, antisemitism worsened, and following pogroms in 1945 and 1948, almost all of Libya's Jews immigrated to the newly-formed Jewish state of Israel.

[5] In 1978, the Koblenz Oberlandesgericht determined that imprisonment of Jews at Giado was not German-instigated, and thus that survivors of the camp were not entitled to compensation from the German government's fund for Nazi-era forced laborers.

In 2002, following the 1997 publication of a study by Dr. Irit Abramski-Bligh on the history of the Libyan and Tunisian Jewish communities during the Holocaust, survivors of Giado were granted recognition and eligibility to receive compensation from Germany.

The diary's editor, Shlomo Abramovich, won the Israeli Prime Minister's Prize for Encouraging and Empowering Research about Jewish Communities in Arab Countries and Iran for the book in 2022.

[10] Stanislao Pugliese writes that "[Italy's] role in the death process of Jews in Libya in the Giado camp and elsewhere not only deserves to be condemned but is also an important and neglected part of World War II Holocaust historiography.