Recording the Memories Before they Die

I’m immersed in a story about the Palestinian camps. I recently spent an entire day in Beddawi looking for eyewitnesses that still remember ‘al-Nakba’; the ‘catastrophe’, as they call the flight in 1948.

Beddawi; one of the 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon

It’s been almost 60 years now since the foundation of the State of Israel, and time is running out. That was painfully obvious, because after a day long search, I could locate only one, and she was just ten when she left Palestine in 1948. It is very sad. We have tons of eye witness accounts from WWI combatants, and Holocaust survivors are filling museums with their testimonies, but I must say there is not that much on the Palestinian exodus in 1948.Kids in the camp. This is the fourth generation born outside Palestine.

In the end I did find a lady, but she was ten years old, and does not remember more than the house and the trees in the garden. Maybe she remembers more, but you’ve got to find someone who happens to be eloquent as well.

The lady in the middle was 10 when she fled Majet B'Kroum (Northern Israel)

There are no memories of Palestine on the walls in their houses. No pictures (they either left everything behind or they had no cameras), but no maps either. They do know the geography of Palestine though; they learn it at the UNWRA camp schools. What surprised me though is that very little seems to be passed on to their children.

Inside the camp

Or they pass very selective stories on. When talking with the very old, the generation that fled, they remember they had a small house, some land, nothing luxurious, but they made a living and were content.

This guy had the Nabatiyeh camp (destroyed in 1973 by the Israeli Airforce), fled to Tell el-Zaatar (destroyed by christian militias in 1976), fled to Sabra (survived the 1982 massacre) and then fled, after fighting between the PLO and moslim militias, to Nahr el Bared in 1986, which he had to leave last year. He now lives in Beddawi. His fifth camp. He is 58.

When you get to the young kids, the 12 year old, and you ask them about the land of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, they tell you stories of how huge their mansions were, and how extensive their lands. They only know Palestine from TV

Their vision of the kind of life they led in Palestine seems slightly distorted.

The ones hat are stuck in the camps in Lebanon these days are the ones that a) were poor in Palestine, and b) that are moslim. The Christian Palestinians all did get a Lebanese passport, and thus were able to make a decent living, instead of surviving on the UNWRA hand-outs. (note; there is one small camp in Dbayeh with a number of christian Palestinians, numbering around the 4000). And those with an education or some money all somehow managed to start again somewhere else in the world.

Inside the Beddawi camp

I was once in Washington with a journalist, and I was absolutely overwhelmed by the number of highly educated and wealthy Palestinians we visited there. But nobody liked to speak about their flight.

Shebab in the barber shop

This oral history, this collective memory, is something that is slowly dying. In 20 years from now, not one of the refugees will remember Palestine as it really was. An entire collective memory will have been erased.

The Nakba Archive has recorded over 450 eyewitness testimonies with Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. It is pretty impressive. At the 2008 Palestinian Film Festival in London (April 18th – May 1st) there are two short films that deal with these testimonies. One is called ‘Collection of Testimonies from the Nakba Archive (Lebanon)’ from Diana Allan & Mahmoud Zeidan and the other is called ‘Women's Testimonies of the Nakba’ by Raneen Geries. This is a link to an interesting video on the making of that film ‘Collection of Testimonies from the Nakba Archive (Lebanon)’. If you are in Holland, The Tropen museum has an exhibition on ‘Palestine 1948; Remembering a past homeland’.