Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (13 page)

In that moment, I wanted more than anything to take away my parents' fear and worry. I told them that I knew that we might die, and that it was okay. “At least we are dying together without any pain or torture,” I told them. “I would much rather die this way than be slaughtered in front of your eyes by the Palestinians."

We got very little sleep that night because the shelling was so heavy. By morning, just as we were falling asleep, we heard a car stop nearby and a door shut—we could barely hear it, so we weren’t even sure if that’s what we had heard. We got up and started screaming. I stood on the bed closest to the small window and yelled as loudly as I could while my mother took a chair and started banging it on the cement floor. We continued our desperate noisemaking for about fifteen minutes. Then we stopped to listen for whether someone outside had heard us.

There was no sound. Nothing. Complete silence. I fell on the bed crying. My brave resolve from the night before had vanished in the instant that a muffled car sound offered a slim hope. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. Please get me out of here."

My mother grabbed me and shook me. “You aren’t going to die, Brigitte. I swear to you that I will do anything to keep you alive. Someone is going to find us and get us out of here.” Then my father said loudly, “Stop. I hear something.” We stopped breathing. Then we heard steps on top of the shelter and a voice, muffled, calling, “Is anybody there?"

My father cried, “Help!” I joined him, screaming, “Help, we’re trapped!” My mother resumed banging the chair against the cement. We heard feet running quickly toward the entrance, and then a man’s voice saying, “Don’t worry. I know you are there. Is anybody injured?” We shouted, “No!” as loudly as we could. Then we heard him say, “I will be right back with help. I need to get some men to help me remove this sand and rubble."

Our rescuers used a break in the shelling over the next few hours to remove the sandbags and move the cement block. Finally free, we ran outside and hugged our rescuers. Tears of happiness poured from our eyes. Even the young men who had dug us out began crying. There were three of them: Chuck, Bassam, and Eli. It was a beautiful day in May, about ten o’clock in the morning. The sky was clear and blue, the bluest that I had ever seen.

I ran to the base of the apricot tree in front of the shelter, put my hand around it, and started running in circles, screaming, “We’re
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We are going to live!” The whole world looked different to me. The garden was blossoming and there were buds on the trees and bushes. My God, I thought, I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed this before. I am sure they came out at least two weeks ago. I also noticed butterflies—it seemed like tens of thousands of them, of many colors, bright yellow, dark orange, pink, and brown with black stripes— flying all over the garden and fluttering above the flowers. I noticed the sun. I hadn’t felt sunshine on my skin in at least a week. I just wanted to sit in the sun and let it warm me. Life took on a whole new meaning.

We sat down in the front of the shelter talking excitedly with our rescuers. Chuck, the young man who had found us, was an eighteen-year-old Christian militia fighter from our town. He was on his way up to the military base to meet friends. He told us that when he first passed our shelter he thought he’d heard something but ignored it, assuming he was imagining noises because he had been at the front lines all night. But about fifty meters past our place, he felt guilty. He thought, What if there is somebody there?—I better go back and check. And that’s how he heard us the second time.

After our rescue, every week or so Chuck would stop by to make sure we were all right. He was five years older than me, about six feet tall, very well built and very masculine. His hair was curly and black. He had big black eyes and eyelashes any girl would die for, let alone a thirteen-year-old hungry for contact with the outside world. He would sit and have coffee and give us an update on what was going on. Since he was in the militia and toured the town, he knew what was happening. He would tell us who had died, who was injured, which houses had been destroyed. Chuck would stay for an hour or two and then excuse himself. My parents would always send their regards to his parents.

After three years of isolation we were no longer alone.

It’s hard to imagine we have been living like this for three years. It’s now 1978. But time doesn’t really matter or mean much anymore. There is no reason to keep up with time or days or holidays. There is no change; there are no events to look forward to: no time I have to be in school, no time to be at a doctor’s appointment, no time to be at a social event. About the only thing time can tell us is when the shelling will begin, and it might be our time to die.

In theory, the Lebanese civil war ended in October 1976, with the Six Parties Summit. Delegates from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, the PLO, and, oh yes, Lebanon, represented by Syrian puppets, met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and then Cairo, Egypt. They conveniently forgot to tell the people shelling us.

The Six Parties agreement “ended” the Lebanese civil war by validating Syria’s virtual control over Lebanon. The agreement created the “Arab Deterrent Force,” a thirty-thousand-man army, to maintain order and establish peace in Lebanon. The Arab Deterrent Force was made up of twenty-seven thousand Syrian troops already in Lebanon, and small contingents from Sudan, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, and Libya.
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The Six Parties also reaffirmed the Cairo agreement of 1969, which gave the PLO virtual sovereignty and freedom of action in southern Lebanon.
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The Six Parties ended the Lebanese civil war only in their own minds. They didn’t end the violence we were suffering. They just gave Syria the authority to control the violence. In southern Lebanon, Hafiz al-Assad, president-for-life of Syria, controlled the violence by facilitating it. Despite the buffer zone protected by our SLA militia and Major Haddad, PLO artillery and rockets were still within range of communities in northern Israel, and certainly within range of us in Marjayoun. The PLO would fire artillery and rockets into southern Lebanon and Israel from positions within the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) zone. Neither the UN troops on the scene nor the UN itself did anything to stop them. We who could benefit from the UN’s taking action felt that they were all show and no go. The UN troops appeared to be some form of international effort to solve a problem, but they were actually making the situation worse. While not stopping the PLO from shelling us and Israel, they would become remarkably protective and indignant when either Israel or the SLA fired back at the PLO. The Six Parties may have fooled the world into believing that the Lebanese civil war had ended with their “agreement,” but for us, the war went on.

The war forced us into a daily routine. Everything we did was influenced by the constant thought of keeping alive. Don’t get shot by snipers, blown up by shells, maimed by mines, suffocated by carbon monoxide from our coal heater, frozen to death by the cold, or weakened by lack of food or water. If there was anything else to fear, I guess it was being bored to death. Other than the war, there was nothing else going on. There were no people to visit, no school, no movies— nothing that would attract a large gathering of people. The fear was too great that a shell would hit and kill a lot of people located in one place. The Muslims and PLO had a random shelling philosophy: traumatize the general Christian population by randomly shelling the civilian areas. It was a constant form of terrorism. You never knew when you would die from a shell from the sky.

We were being shelled every day. Our nights in the shelter under heavy shelling were like sleeping through a huge thunderstorm. The explosions, like the lightning that hits your house or a tree in your backyard ten times over, would jolt us upright out of our sleep in terror or never let us sleep at all.

Chuck came over one day with good news of a new and exciting development. Our elders had decided to reopen the schools so we could continue our education, something central to our culture and values. We would go during the morning when the fighting usually stopped or slowed down dramatically. What a relief from our boredom. It had been two years of sitting in our bomb shelters without studying or learning anything other than how to stay alive. Now living in no-man’s-land would not be so bad. Not only would I get back to my studies, but I could see and socialize with my friends in town.

It was fun getting ready to go to school again. We would try to keep from being killed or wounded at night; then I would get up in the morning to go to school. Being able to take a shower would have helped a lot, since I had only two decent school uniforms in the shelter and alternated them every day; but we looked clean and well put together despite our lifestyle. Besides, come shells or high water in the shelter, we were going to continue our education. More important than anything else to our parents and leaders was that we be educated.

Our classes were held on the first floor of a three-story building so the floors above would give us added protection. Many days, just an hour after we got to school, the principal stormed into our class and informed us that shelling would start in fifteen minutes. He would order everybody to evacuate the classroom into the hallway. Some of the teachers who had cars would fill them up and drive us home to our bomb shelters. Many days I had to run home, sometimes crawling in ditches to avoid the bombs falling all around me. I used my books to protect my head from falling shrapnel. We missed many days because of heavy shelling, but we were determined to get an education.

I have to say that our quest for knowledge was tempered a bit by our circumstances. I would save studying for a test until the night before the test because I didn’t know if I was even going to be alive to take it anyway, so why bother? This was the attitude of all my friends.

In March 1978, six months after school started, the fighting began to worsen. We stayed in our shelter for six days straight. Finally there was a cease-fire, and we went up to the house to shower and change our clothes. Our morale was very low because of rumors that the Palestinians, with the help of the Syrians and Iranians, had been fortifying their bases and planning an attack on the town. We were terrified that our exhausted troops were too weak to protect us and that our town would fall into the Palestinians' hands if they attacked that night.

I was washing my face when I heard Chuck’s voice in our house. He was in a hurry. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon. He had stopped by to inform us that we were going to be attacked viciously that night in an attempt to take us over. He said, “Make sure you wear comfortable clothes and running shoes in case you have to flee. And if you flee make sure you run straight toward the Israeli border.” He comforted me, saying he would be back the next day as soon as he could to check on us, if he stayed alive. Then he added: “But if we are all to die tonight, I wish us all a merciful death.” And he left.

We were alone again. The silence that followed Chuck’s disappearing footsteps made us feel that death was in our midst. Fearing we were going to be slaughtered that night, I didn’t want strangers to see some poor dead girl in wrinkled old clothes who would be dumped in a hole. I wanted to look pretty when I was dead. Knowing that there would be nobody to prepare me for burial, I asked my mother if I could put on my pretty Easter dress. They might rob me of my life, but they would not rob me of how I wanted to look before I was gone forever. My dress was light blue with white roses all over it and beautiful lace around the neck and arms. I stood in front of the mirror crying as my mother combed my long hair and tied a white ribbon in it that matched the roses. I pleaded with her: “Please. I don’t want to die. I’m only thirteen.” My poor mother. Here was her only child, whom she had waited twenty years for, and all she could do was help grant her last wish to have some dignity in death. The sense of hopelessness and fear in my pleading must have been breaking her heart. She asked me to stop crying and assured me that Jesus would take care of us.

Here I was in the pretty dress that I had worn to happy occasions and Easter services, and now I was shaking in fear sitting in the dingy bomb shelter with the crashing and exploding noises outside. We huddled in the corner on our bed. Mama and Papa prayed to God to protect us. All I could do was cry.

This was the explosive opening of what was going to be a long night. How long would be determined by whether the Palestinians reached us and how long our troops could hold out. Papa said, “Brigitte, you are young. We have lived a long life. We are old and are going to die soon anyway. We can’t run if they come to kill us. But we will create a distraction while you run toward Israel and never look back.” I started crying harder and said, “How could you say that? How can I run and leave you? I have nobody but you. Why do I want to live if you are gone?” My father begged me to listen to him. I just prayed that it would never get to that point. We spent the night dreading that we would take a direct hit or that death would come bursting through the door to slit our throats.

Daylight finally arrived, and the bombardment quieted down. The quiet after a battle is always the most agonizing time for those who do not know what is going on. It can be good or bad depending on who won the battle. Soon we could hear the rumbling of a long column of tanks and trucks heading north. Heading north was good. South meant bad. After years in the bomb shelter, we could tell the difference between a tank, a truck, and an armored car just by the sound of their engines. We’d never heard so many sounds before, and they were different. My mother and I decided to poke our heads through the door to see if we could tell who was riding in these vehicles. There was a lot of activity. We saw tanks that we had never seen before and soldiers in uniforms we didn’t recognize. The soldiers didn’t look hostile, not like they were out looking for people. Another tank passed and I spotted Chuck sitting on the back. We knew we were going to be fine. The worst had passed, at least for a while.