We fled on foot. We had only the clothes on our back.
Eight years old when her family fled Ayn Karim on the western edge of Jerusalem in 1948; the family moved to the United States in 1958, and she now lives in a suburb of Los Angeles with the key to the house framed on her wall.
Leila Giries was eight when her family left Ayn Karim, the village of almond trees on the western outskirts of Jerusalem where neighbours greeted her by name in the street. What she remembers is families rushing to pack, prayers said in a truck of refugees driving along a cliffside road, and her mother cauterising an open wound with a burning piece of cloth after she stepped on a nail. “The sky was lit up with the fire of the guns,” she told Al Jazeera. “It felt like the end of the world.”
After years in Jordan and Iraq — where, she says, she had to stand up in school in Baghdad and say that she was a refugee — the family moved to the United States in 1958. A US passport eventually let her go back and look, which most Palestinian refugees cannot do. The visits have not consoled her. “I can’t keep Palestine out of my heart. As long as I’m alive, I will go back,” she said. “But now when I visit Ayn Karim, it’s not the same. My family is not there. … When I walk down the street, nobody knows me. They did not just rob me of my land, they robbed me of my memory. Everything I loved is gone. I see my old home and it is just a pile of rubble.”
Sources
Source
Quoted exactly as published by Al Jazeera — Al-Nakba. Visit the archive for the full testimony.
Al Jazeera — Al-Nakba