When We Were Arabs by Massoud Hayoun

Author:Massoud Hayoun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2019-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

In Tunisia, ahead of the war, things were good for Daida’s family. Her father, Sami, had made enough money working for a European-owned winery to start his own small-scale wine-barrel factory with a young farmhand at the winery with whom the family had become friendly, Ali.

Then, in 1939, as they huddled around a radio they would later need to submit to the Jewish community leaders, the Boukhob-za family and Ali listened to the French president announce that France was at war, as were the people sitting around that table. Tunisia was plunged more deeply into the conflict than Egypt. Where Oscar only ever encountered German prisoners of war, wounded in stretchers at the hospital, Daida now encountered Nazis on the streets of Tunis.

As in Alexandria, wardens were assigned to make sure windows were entirely blacked out at night so that they weren’t targets for bombardment. Sami, the only Tunisian man in the building and the only blue-collar worker, agreed to build a shelter for the building’s tenants in a nearby vacant lot. Over the course of Tunisia’s half-year involvement in the war, the shelter was gradually enlarged to serve several neighboring buildings. When the sirens rang, Daida was charged with grabbing her youngest brother, Guigui, who was still a baby, as well as a knapsack that Kamouna had prepared for the family with chocolate and a change of clothes. She had to run to the shelter, where she sat crammed together with neighbors. For the first time, she came face-to-face with the Europeans alongside whom she’d always lived.

In the first few years of the war, the family contended with occasional air raids. They were terrifying, but they were not a constant interference in their lives. “I remember one night, we decided to stay home and a bomb fell about two blocks away. It felt worse than an earthquake—my teeth were chattering. It took me a good half hour to calm down with the help of my father,” Daida wrote. The next day, the apartment building a block away had crumbled. Daida vividly recalled seeing the drapery. The home had been opened to the world, like a life-sized dollhouse.

One morning in November 1942, Kamouna asked Daida to go to a grocer on the Avenue de Paris—what has since become Liberty Avenue—around the corner from her house, to buy a half kilo of salt. The grocer was opposite the French gendarmerie, the law enforcement headquarters. Just as Daida was stepping into the grocery, two men in strange uniforms pulled up to the gendarmerie, rang the doorbell, and began to speak emphatically with the officer who answered the door. Passersby whispered to each other in shock, “My God, those are the Germans!”

Daida had just witnessed the start of the Nazi occupation of Tunis. “I ran, I did not walk, my heart beating very fast,” she wrote. “I told my parents that the Germans are now in Tunis. From that day, the war was in our daily life.” The next day, the Nazis began to make a series of demands of Jewish community leaders.

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