I had to burn my books to try to survive Gaza

Par hend salma abo heelow

I was raised in the love of books. I would never have thought of having to burn them to be able to make a meager meal.

When we were children, my brothers and sisters and I regularly spend our pocket money to buy new books. Our mother had instilled us a passionate love for books. Reading was not only a hobby, it was a lifestyle.

I still remember the day our parents surprised us with a library. It was a high and wide piece of furniture, with many shelves, which they had installed in the living room. I was only five years old, but I immediately understood the sacred character of this corner of the room.

My father was determined to fill the shelves with a wide variety of books: philosophy, religion, politics, languages, sciences, literature, etc. He wanted to have a collection as rich as that of the municipal library.

My parents often took us to the adjoining bookstore at the Samir Mansour library, one of the most emblematic in Gaza. We had the right to choose up to seven pounds each.

Our schools have also fueled this love of reading by organizing visits to book salons, reading clubs and round tables.

Our family library has become our friend, our comfort in wartime as in peacetime, and our life buoy during these dark and distressing nights, lit only by bombs.

Gathered around campfires, we discussed the works of Ghassan Kanafani and recital The poems of Mahmoud Darwish that we had memorized in the books of our library.

When the genocide began in October 2023, the Gaza blockade hardened until it becomes unbearable. Water, fuel, drugs and foods have been cut.

When the gas missed, people started burning everything they could find: wood from the rubble of houses, branches of trees, waste … then books.

Among our loved ones, this first touched my brother’s family. With a heavy heart, my nephews have sacrificed their school future: they burned their freshly printed school textbooks, whose ink had not even dried up, so that their family could prepare a meal. The books that once fed their minds now fed the flames, all to survive.

I was horrified by this autodafé, but my nephew Ahmed, 11, confronted me with reality. “Either we die of hunger, or we are sinking into illiteracy. I choose to live. Education will resume later, ”he told me.

His answer deeply upset me.

When we lacked petrol, I insisted on buying wood, even if its price made it unaffordable. My father tried to convince me: “Once the war is over, I will buy you all the books you want. But for the moment, let’s use these. I refused.

These books had been witnesses to our ups and downs, our tears and our laughs, our successes and our failures. How could we have burned them? I started rereading some of our books, once, twice, three times, memorizing their covers, their titles, even the exact number of pages, burning in them my fear that our library would be the next victim.

In January, after the conclusion of a temporary truce, kitchen gas was finally authorized to enter Gaza. I pushed a sigh of relief, thinking that my books and I had survived this holocaust.

Then, at the beginning of March, the genocide resumed. All humanitarian aid has been blocked: no food, no medical supplies or fuel could enter.

We were short of gas in less than three weeks. The total blockade and the massive bombing made it impossible to find another fuel source to cook.

I had no choice but to capitulate. Standing in front of our library, I took the volumes devoted to international human rights law. I decided that they had to leave the first.

We had been taught these legal standards at school, we were made to believe that our rights as Palestinians were guaranteed by them and that one day, they would lead to our liberation. And yet these international laws have never protected us.

We were abandoned to the genocide. Gaza has been teleported in another moral dimension, where there is no international law, no ethics, or value for human life.

I torn these pages in pieces, reminding myself how many families had been shredded by the bombs, like that.

I threw the torn pages into the flames, looking at them transforming into dust, an anxious offering in memory of those who had been burned alive: Shabaan al-Dalouh, burned alive during the attack on the Al-Aqsa hospital, the journalist Ahmed Mansour, burned alive during the attack of a press tent, and of the countless others whose names we will never know.

We then burned all the books and summaries of pharmacology belonging to my brother, a graduate in pharmacology. We cook our preserves on the ashes of his relentless years of work.

But that was not enough. The seat became increasingly suffocating and the flames devoured the shelves one after the other. My brother insisted to burn his favorite books before touching mine.

But it was impossible to escape the inevitable. We quickly arrived at my books. I was forced to burn my precious collection of poems by Mahmoud Darwish, the novels of Gibran Khalil Gibran, the poems of Samih al-Qasim, the voice of the Resistance, the novels of Abdelrahman Murifie who were dear to me and the Harry Potter novels that I had read during my adolescence.

Then came my books and my summaries of medicine.

As I looked at the flames consuming them, my heart was burning too. We tried to give meaning to this sacrifice by preparing a more generous meal: béchamel pasta.

I thought it was the ultimate in my sacrifice, but my father went further. He dismantled the shelves of the library to burn them as firewood.

I managed to save 15 pounds. These are history books on the Palestinian cause, the stories of our ancestors and the books of my grandmother, which was brutally murdered during this genocide.

Existence is a form of resistance; These books are proof that my family has always existed here, in Palestine, that we have always been the owners of this land.

The genocide pushed us to do things that we would never have imagined in our darkest nightmares. He forced us to mutilate our memories and break the unbreakable, all to survive.

But if we survive, if we survive, we will rebuild. We will have a new library with us and we will fill it again with the books we love.

April 29, 2025-Al-Jazeera-Translation: Chronicle of Palestine