REFUGEES
REFUGEES by Esther Eillam
Refugees – The first time in my life I met refugees were people who came from Europe to Palestine during and after WW II. They were called ‘refugees’, had pale faces, and wore heavy clothes. They did not laugh.
In 1948, Jewish people, most of them poor, fled from the periphery, were there were attacks of the Arab army onTel-Aviv. I became a friend of a boy from such a family. The circumstances: I was known in the neighborhood as a strong girl, and once in the street a girl that claimed this title called me for a fight. She failed to conquer me, and after a while, when I left a friend’s home, I met a friend of that girl who told me that this girl wanted to talk to me. I went with her to the backyard, and found there a gang of girls that started to hit me. There was also a boy there, with torn clothes, and they told him to whip my legs with a metal wire, promising to give him chocolate. After they let me go I ran home, with pains in my legs, crying hard. I realized that I also cried because of their cheating, and strangely because they used this miserable boy. After some days I saw this boy passing near my house, an apartment building. I was afraid of him, but my will to make a connection with him made me to call him. I asked him if he wanted chocolate, and we started to talk. After buying the chocolate on credit, we went to the roof were he lived with his family in a small room (a ‘laundry room’). They were displaced people because of the war. We made kites from sheets of paper and flew them from the roof.
All my life I have been told that the Palestinians left their places because they were afraid of the Israeli army. After many years I got the information that many Palestinians had been expelled.
Esther Eillam / one of the founding mothers of the feminist movement in Israel.
