Salwa Naser was six when she left her family’s house in Ajami, a few steps from the sea in Jaffa. Her father, a figure in the port, sent his Syrian wife and their nine children out by boat as the fighting closed in; her mother walked them down to the water in the middle of the night, among dozens of other families doing the same. Out at sea the boat stopped and they watched the city burning. “That’s when my mother really started crying,” she recalled. The family went on to Beirut and then to Damascus, moving between neighbourhoods and schools, and finally settled in Hajjar al-Aswad on the edge of Yarmouk camp, where Salwa married a young man from Jaffa at sixteen.

She left Syria for Beirut in late 2012. Shortly after she reached Shatila a neighbour sent her a photograph of a pile of rubble that had been her home. She now lives in a single breeze-block room beside her son’s apartment in the camp, and her only document is her father’s British Mandate passport — she was too young in 1948 to have papers of her own. “What kind of luck is that,” she said. “We fled one war only to find another. Where are we supposed to go from here?”

Sources

• Nakba survivors share their stories of loss and hope — Al Jazeera, 19 May 2016