Dana El-Kurd

My grandmother ended up spending three years in an Aqaba Jabir refugee camp outside of Jericho because my great-grandfather had been wounded trying to defend the city, and they were waiting to see if they could return.

My grandmother has told me details about this time.

She talked about the makeshift school in the camp that only went up to the eighth grade.

So my grandmother repeated the year a couple of times and then eventually dropped out of school because she couldn't continue past the eighth grade.

Now, the rest of her siblings, especially upon their return to Jerusalem, were all fully educated as adults.

Many of them held advanced degrees.

My grandmother was the only one as the eldest who had paid the price of displacement in this way.

She was trained as a seamstress later on, but always lamented that she had to leave school early.

She also told me about her house in Ba'a, which is in West Jerusalem, a neighborhood in West Jerusalem, before it was taken during the Nakba.

This was a newer neighborhood with nice views of the city where middle-class Palestinian families were expanding their homes as their families expanded.

My grandmother's family had only moved into this house two months prior to the Nakba.

And she used to tell me how the house had been newly painted and it was made of beautiful stones.

Before she passed away, she would often cry over this house as if it had just been taken.

That house, by the way, still stands in West Jerusalem.

The last time I visited Palestine, my grandmother's younger siblings showed me pictures of themselves posing in front of their house, now occupied by Israelis.

Now, my grandmother's story is very typical.

They were lucky in that sense that they had property and family in other parts of the city on the eastern side, and they were able to continue.

We were able to continue.

That's how I was born in Jerusalem myself, because of that luck.

Now, on my maternal side, I don't know as much about them and their Nakba story.