The bombs from the Israeli planes fell quickly and in waves. There was fighting in the streets. My mother sought shelter in the bunker with her family. She was thirty-four years old and about to give birth to her third child in the refugee camp of Ein el-Hilweh, which means God’s beautiful eye.
It was the middle of the first Lebanese War, where the Israeli army marched into South Lebanon in 1982. The most brutal fighting between the Israeli army and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) forces happened in Ein el-Hilweh. The extensive damage to the city has been compared to the devastating bombings of German cities during World War II.
My mother was born in 1948, the same year the State of Israel was established. She was born on the run and without citizenship. Along with tens of thousands of other refugees, her family fled to Ein el-Hilweh, which looked like a war zone back then and unfortunately still does. When you say Ein el-Hilweh, you also say barbed-wire fence, checkpoints, oil drums, sandbags, soldiers, tanks, armed militia, terrorists, freedom fighters, and organizations like Fatah, PLO, and Hezbollah. All Middle Eastern conflicts have found a home in Ein el-Hilweh. Everyone who lives here dreams of escaping, and throughout her childhood, my mother heard stories about the promised motherland of Palestine.
But the dream died, and instead, she grew up in the dusty slum of Ein el-Hilweh, where eighty thousand people live on two square kilometers (.772 square miles). She became a beautiful woman with light skin and loose hair, a woman who insisted on staying thin and dressing elegantly, even as the family lived in wretched poverty. People considered her a snob because she came from an intellectual family, but she was proud of her heritage, even though it brought her little to no happiness. Her father, who was a wealthy editor, had left her mother for another woman, and he rarely kept in touch. As a little girl, she kept hoping that her father would swoop in and rescue her from the camp, but it remained a dream.
The refugee camp was her reality. It was there that she met her husband, who was handsome, intelligent, and had a steady job. They were never head over heels in love, but they both felt that their marriage was a good arrangement. Her first two children were born in 1979 and 1980, and on September 21st 1982, during an intensive bombardment, her third child—me—had his umbilical cord severed while in the bunker. She didn’t dare leave. Instead, some of the boys who had also sought refuge down there ran up and fetched the local midwife to deliver her child. The bombs fell so relentlessly over Ein el-Hilweh that I spent the first three days of my life in that bunker.
My mother told me she was afraid she was going to die at first, but I turned out to be the easiest of all of her deliveries. She thought she had to go to the bathroom, but out I came!
From my early childhood, my older sister, Sarah, and I were inseparable. We also had a multi-handicapped, older brother named Mohammed, and as our mother spent most of her time looking after him, Sarah, who was only three years older than me, was left in charge of taking care of me. I followed Sarah everywhere. We would even run away during bombardments. We didn’t care. We always left and went to our grandma’s house. It was just the two of us and Grandma. We loved her more than we loved our mom and dad. From her roof, you could pick figs right off the tree.
My father didn’t belong to any of the Palestinian resistance groups, but as a man, he was inevitably part of the war against Israel. He was arrested on several occasions when the Israeli soldiers marched into the camp, and at one point, he was sent to prison. The prison was built into a mountain and was known as “He who enters has disappeared, and he who escapes is reborn.”
Most people never returned. But when my mother realized where he was, she carried Mohammed to the mountain and told the soldiers, “If you kill my husband, then you must take my son and raise him! Because I cannot do it alone. I cannot afford to raise him.”
She told me that two Israeli soldiers got into a fight about what to do. One of them didn’t care, but the other one did.
My mother appealed to his humanity. I think he took pity on her. It was quite a brave thing to do because no one dared speak to them. But she had to because if my father didn’t return, her financial basis for living would disappear along with him. In the end, she got to take my father home.
My father had once been to Germany, and he and my mother often talked about running away there. But they postponed it several times because he had a steady job. He was good at building sewers. In the refugee camp, the Red Cross hired him to lay pipes and drains that led the water away from the houses and prevented flooding when it rained. The Red Cross paid decent wages, and due to that, our family was doing reasonably well financially.
The war wasn’t going anywhere. Even though my dad had a job, I don’t think it was enough for him. He couldn’t secure a future for us, and we had no status in Lebanon. Even today, Palestinians can’t obtain Lebanese citizenship and become part of the society, so my parents decided to flee the country.
Back in 1986, fleeing a country was different. You were not crammed into a truck and driven across Europe. One winter day, the family hopped on a plane from Beirut to Berlin. The plane was filled with Palestinian quota refugees whom Germany had agreed to receive. My parents, Sarah, me, and our two younger sisters, Ayat and the newborn Alaa, all went. We had to leave Mohammed behind with our family and intended to get him once we were settled in the new country.
Once we got to Germany, we checked in at a hotel, and, seeing as our father spoke German, the family expected to build our future there. However, he also had friends and family in Denmark, and he called them up from Berlin. They all told him that they were doing well in the north. My father figured that he knew no one in Germany, and even though he spoke the language, he chose Denmark instead. On the day the decision was made, my mother was completely in the dark and knew nothing about Denmark herself.
Three days after arriving in Berlin, we got on a bus filled with fellow Palestinians and headed for Denmark. My mother is the one who recounts the journey. She lives in a 645-square-foot apartment in Askerød, and several blood clots have reduced her to a frail, nervously fidgeting, headscarf-wearing shadow of the beautiful woman with the uncovered hair whom I remember from my childhood. She actually doesn’t want my story to be told. She’s afraid that it will cause more damage than good, and she fears revenge from those who believe that words are more powerful than swords.
In the stairwell close to the door, someone has written Bloodz next to a drawing of the Grim Reaper. This was meant for me. It’s saying, “When you leave the gang you helped found, there’s going to be some retribution.” Outside the building, a dumpster riddled with dents from bullets indicates that I have a past that is impossible to escape no matter how much I want to. At the time when my mother was interviewed for this book, those shots were fired only eighteen months prior. They were meant for me as punishment for leaving the Bloodz, so my mother was understandably afraid.
She knows that my story will open the wounds of her own life, which has never been a truly happy one. Even so, she tells her story in quiet Arabic because I asked her to. Because she has always done everything, she could for me. However, she declines to have her actual name mentioned, so she will be referred to solely as “my mother.” I love and honor her because she has always been there for me, no matter how much pain and anguish I’ve caused her over the years.