Nakba #16 - Sara Aydi

1937 “I was an only child. My father died when I was four years old. My mother remarried his cousin. They had four more children.” 1947 “I got married when I was fifteen. My husband, Mahmud, was eighteen. It was shortly before al-Nakba.” 1948 “Israeli aircraft bombed the houses in our village. My mother was at home cooking and baking bread. She closed all the doors. Our house survived, but the neighbors’ houses were hit. Luckily, no one was home. My mother’s new husband and the other male relatives were not at home. They had worked in the fields the day before and slept outdoors, under the open sky. The women took us children to the caves outside the village. We spent the night there. Names were carved into the cave walls. A few days later, fighting broke out between Jewish forces and Palestinian and Arab forces. Many villagers were tied up and executed. I remember all their names. Jewish soldiers also died. The attack lasted twelve hours, from midnight until noon. The night after that, everyone fled. My mother managed to bring a little money. We walked north—we walked and walked. There were many dead bodies along the roads. There had been a grenade attack. We just kept walking. My mother carried a bag of clothes on her head and held my one-year-old brother, Rashid. She held two other small siblings by the hand. Suddenly she said to me, ‘Your brother is dead.’ Rashid had been wrapped up and had suffocated. It was too much for my mother to manage. We passed Eilabun and eventually reached my mother-in-law’s village. But she did not want to stay and told me to follow her, and I did. It was very hard to leave my mother, but I felt forced to follow my mother-in-law. We walked for two days and two nights. At four in the morning, we sat under a tree to rest. It was me, my mother-in-law, and her six children. We were hungry and thirsty. We knew no one, so my mother-in-law had to beg for a little bread. She ate some of it and gave the rest to her children, but I got nothing. After a while, she wanted to continue, but I could not go on. My mother, her new husband, and some other male relatives caught up with me. They had food and water loaded onto a camel. After resting, we continued walking through the night. In the morning, we reached Dayr al-Qassi near the Lebanese border. Just as we were about to lie down under a tree, an Israeli aircraft appeared. It circled above us and attacked. Many people were killed, and we fled for our lives across the border into Lebanon. We slept under olive trees. Eventually, we reached Beirut, where we were allowed to stay in a school. Three families shared one room. After one and a half months, when the school term began, we were forced to leave the building. A bus picked us up and drove us to Joub Jannine in the Bekaa Valley, and from there by bus to Damascus in Syria. We were given shelter in a mosque on what was called Jewish Street. We stayed there for six years. Then we were given land where we could build our own house. We lived there for forty years. Life began to settle.” 1996 “When Israel attacked Lebanon, we moved to Egypt. Then I went to my son in Poland. All my other children moved to Sweden, and then I followed them. I arrived here five years ago. I do not feel at home anywhere.”