PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 73

with them, and we spent the winter there, convinced
that it was just a short-term measure and that we would
be going home in the spring. In March, some foreigners
working for the Red Cross 23 came to see us to suggest
some “international solutions”: they gave us the choice,
if you can call it that, between staying in Jericho or
moving to one of the camps near Jerusalem. My father
asked to go to Arub, a camp between Hebron and Beth-
lehem. The dwelling was tiny, but it was a permanent
structure. He built an extra room. There was an empty
plot just next door and my mother wanted to plant veg-
etables, fruit trees and olive trees, to improve our diet.
But my father was livid and pulled up all the seedlings.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted. ‘If
you plant here you’ll take root yourself. We must never
forget that we have to get home again.’
He wanted to go home, whatever the cost. None-
theless he died in Arub in 1957, nine years after the
massacre of Al Dawayima.
I did not stay long in Arub. I got married very young –
I was twelve – and I went back to Jericho where the fam-
ily of my husband, Shehadeh Mohammad Hudeib, had
taken refuge. He was a distant cousin of mine and was 20
years old on our wedding day. He worked in the quarries,
breaking stones for construction companies. His mother
had spotted me when I was little, had thought me pretty
and wanted me for her son. No one asked me my opinion
and that made me extremely angry, but I was never able
say so. But as I grew older I got my revenge – men were
scared of me and none dared cross me.
There were many children who were on their own in
the camp in Jericho. Among them were Saif and Ibra-
him whose mother had been killed in the cave near Al
Dawayima and whose father had died before that. The
children lived on their own and were taken care of by
the community. They were strong as olive trees, walk-
ing barefoot even in winter. My sister made clothes
for them and we gave them food. Both of them were
able to get an education thanks to Unwra, and got
grants to go and study abroad. One became a doctor,
the other an engineer. Not all the orphans had their
strength, nor their good fortune.
In 1967, when the Six-Day War broke out, I was in
the camp and my husband was away working in Aqaba.
The person in charge of our sector asked Unwra to take
the women and children across the Jordan to safety, but
the transport never came, and the Israeli planes were fly-
ing overhead. People were running around looking for
their loved ones. I could not find my two sons, Ziyad,
nine, and Mohammad who was only two. I had my sev-
en-week-old baby daughter in my arms and was becom-
ing hysterical. Suddenly I spotted my boys through the
crowds; they were both with my neighbour. From afar
she signalled that they were staying with her and that
reassured me because I could not run very fast. In front of
the police station, close to the entrance to the camp, some
Jordanian policemen advised us to take the footpaths and
not the tarmac road, which had just been bombed. I went
with the crowd; in any case I did not really have a choice
because it was like the surging sea, with people shoving
and shouting and panicking. A Land Rover appeared out
of nowhere with a load of banana leaves in the back half
covering a Jordanian soldier. He said, ‘Come on, come
on! We’ll save you!’ and people just crammed into the
pick-up. I was just about to clamber in when I saw my
neighbour, and she did not have my boys with her any
more. I roared at her: ‘Ziyad, Mohammad?!’
She put her hands around her mouth and shouted
back, ‘The park, the… park…’ and pointed with her
finger.
I thought I would die. But the Jordanian soldier
took pity on me. He made everybody get out of the
pick-up and roared off to the park to go and fetch my
children. But he came back empty handed – an explo-
sion had blown the road away. The crowd swallowed
me up and the bombing was getting worse. I was like
a zombie, I had no idea where I was going, just swept
along in the flow, without my two boys. I was hoisted
up into a vehicle full of munitions. I shouted out, ‘Two
boys, have you seen two little boys?’
But I was not the only one, by a long way. Lots of
parents were looking for their children. Lots of children
were looking for their parents. Everyone was shouting.
And we knew, we who had been refugees since 1948,
what all this meant, because we had been through this
before, 19 years earlier…
I was overwhelmed with worry. What if… what if
they were dead? It was as though the whole misery of
the world had descended on me and I could hardly
breathe, so heavy was my heart. Seeing me in such
a state, my cousin Ismail, the son of my uncle the
mukhtar, who found me in Amman in Jordan, helped
me look for my boys. I did not have much hope, but
we walked everywhere through the Jordanian capital,
describing them to people and asking questions, until
one evening we met a young boy who had seen them,
Rushdieh
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