“YOUR grandmother put your one-year-old aunt at the side of the road and left.”

These words fell on our ears like an earthquake. Is it possible for a mother to abandon a piece of her heart?

The Nakba gangs carried out atrocious massacres on the Palestinians, stabbing the wombs of pregnant women and executed people.

Our grandparents heard what was happening in the surrounding villages and knew they could not defend themselves against heavily armed soldiers.

So they fled their homes and villages in large crowds, carrying only their souls in their hands.

Terror spread among the Palestinians, and the scene was getting harsher and more bloody. The slower they escape, the more the scene reddened.  

Among them were my grandfather, his elderly parents, his wife and their infant daughter.

My grandfather’s parents were taking turns riding on the mule. As the road was very bumpy, the feet of the mule got stuck in the sand, so they stopped and fell behind.

It was not just the mule that lost its strength but also my grandmother’s body, exhausted after carrying her young daughter all the way.

My grandfather started to worry about her, so he ordered her to leave my aunt and to continue walking with the group. But she couldn’t do such a thing and told him that she would rather die with her daughter.

After a long and loud argument, my grandfather grabbed my grandmother and forced her to keep on walking, leaving their baby behind them.

They travelled a long distance, but in the middle of the road she stopped and broke down into tears, screaming that she would never leave her only daughter alone.

My grandfather warned her that they would not wait for her. But she did not care and ran to the place where she left her daughter, ignoring her husband’s calls and defying inevitable death.

This sadly was not an isolated case. Hundreds of Palestinians were forced to leave children behind, unable to carry or even feed them due to a lack of food, extreme poverty, exhaustion, and the enormous suffering they went through.

Fortunately, my grandmother managed to catch up to the group with her daughter, defying the severe fatigue that penetrated her limbs. Eventually they reached Gaza City then settled in Deir al-Balah camp, where they faced a new wave of poverty and deprivation.

Deena Hamdan, 21, is an English literature graduate, freelance writer and translator. She lives in Nuseirat camp, central Gaza, which was set up to accommodate 16,000 refugees fleeing the southern areas of Palestine during the Nakba and is now home to more than 80,000 people.

Deena is part of a collective of young Palestinian writers called We Are Not Numbers (wearenotnumbers.org).