Those lucky enough to have lived tell consistent tale of death camps

Sadness of survivors

Christopher Young, Southam News, Beirut

Those lucky enough to have lived tell consistent tale of death camps — The Gazette, 27 September 1982 — The Gazette · 27 September 1982

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Transcribed from the clipping

“BEIRUT — Survivors of Sabra and Chatilla had to be either lucky or smart. Arabia Hussein was a bit of both. A large woman of 32 but looking much older, she has eight children — and she and her husband managed to save them all. She is full of anger.

It is focused specifically on the Israelis, even though they did no killing, also on the Americans, the French and the Italians, the providers of the multinational force who went away and left the Palestinians to their fate, and on U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Israeli Prime Minister Begin personally.

The two names ring though the language barrier in Arabia’s flaming rhetoric as she tells what happened, suckling child no. 8 at the same time. While the world of international politics wrestles with how the Beirut massacre is to be investigated, survivors are telling a rather consistent story.

When I went back to the camps last weekend, a week after I had walked their silent streets past the bodies of the murdered people, I found the neighbors and kinfolk ready and anxious to talk about it. ‘That’s my home,’ said one old woman, waving her hand at a pile of rubble two-and-a-half metres high among some blasted trees.

‘I’m not sad for my house,’ she said, beginning to weep. ‘I’m sad for all the people who died.’ She burst into uncontrollable sobbing and could not continue. But let Arabia Hussein speak, because she is clear about times and days and because she embodies the tragic cycle of driven people and religious hatred that caused this tragedy.

Arabia was born and lived all her life in Chatilla refugee camp. Her parents were refugees from Palestine, and they ended up here, her mother pregnant with Arabia, two years after the first Arab-Israeli…”

Context added by this archive

A survivor given her name, her age, her children and her anger, and the reporter says why he is letting her speak at length. The clipping is cut before the end of her account.

Cite this clipping

"Those lucky enough to have lived tell consistent tale of death camps," The Gazette, 27 September 1982, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1982-018. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1982-018