Al-Lajjūn – Jenīn District
Khadīja Ḥassan Maḥmoud,
speaking from Umm el-Faḥem, 2011
I was born in Umm el-Faḥem in 1933 and can remember as far back as the Ottoman-era rule, when the Turkish were in the country. In early life our home was in al-Lajjūn, where we worked in the fields, planting and harvesting our crops. In 1937 I was married, and because my husband worked in the railway station in Haifa, we moved there and we lived in the city between 1937 and 1948. But when the strafing runs of the airplanes started bombing Haifa near the mosque and the station, we fled back home. Before long, the fighting reached our village of al-Lajjūn. In those days I helped bring water to our fighters. But we lost the village, and the family was forced to move again, to Umm el-Faḥem, where we have lived ever since.