BAHR EL-BAQAR: Pictures of dead children, a destroyed school, and memories of shock and loss have become synonymous with Bahr El-Baqar since 1970, when the school was destroyed by an Israeli air raid.
What do parents expect when they wave goodbye to the children in a dewy early school morning? I was looking for an answer as the cab rushed towards my destination across the rows of palm trees coloring the ochre desert, preparing my mind and pen for flashbacks of a 40-year-old butchery.
I came here to this village to rekindle the memory of slain schoolchildren who would have been 48 years old by now had they survived the raid, only to uncover a far worse one.
Bahr El-Baqar School in Sharqiya was destroyed in an Israeli raid on April 8, 1970. The three-classroom school housed 150 students, 30 of whom died. Over 50 were severely wounded, many were left with disabilities.
In the city, the survivors and the families of the victims battle with traumatic memories intertwined with a grim reality of crippling bureaucracy and corruption. The museum displaying the bloodied belongings of the murdered students and an undetonated Israeli bomb, among others, made headlines last January, as employees claimed that many items have disappeared. The building itself is reportedly about to collapse.
As Ahmed Demeri and I made our way towards the Martyrs’ Memorial across a dirt lane line with stray dogs and grazing donkeys, he told me that he had lost his friend Ahmed on April 8, 1970. The teacher died as well. As far as he could remember it was his math teacher.
Demeri has become the village’s celebrity in a grubby dark-brown galabiya with a government yearly aid of something between LE 400-500 paid in two installments. Being the village’s go-to-guy whenever the media’s interest in the attack is rekindled, he sounds as if he is reciting a script rather than recalling the pains of the past.
He kept displaying his surviving scars, his list of interviews with TV satellite channels, and what was recently mentioned in the Egyptian press about his bid to sue the state of Israel.
But his account of an incident that’s often used as a symbol of Israeli aggression gives him nothing more than 15 minutes of fame every now and then. Receiving state aid is a struggle in itself; every six months he has to present a few documents that can cost him LE 80 between tips, bribes and blackmail.
Among these documents is the letter and the tag of admission and leave of 8-year-old Demeri from the hospital in 1970.
Abdel-Aal El-Sayed, the virtually deaf father of the martyr Ahmed, Demeri’s bench-mate, said he has to go through the same procedure to get his annual aid from the government: LE 150-300 that isn’t always regular. He recounted a blackmail incident when a government employee claimed El-Sayed owns 10 hectares of land and an apartment-building, which would deny him the right to aid.
He asked for a pension from the government as security for his wife when he dies; the 40-year-old trauma has kept him in the room we were sitting in since the death of his eldest son.
He went on to recall when he saw a chalky hand stretched out from the smoke rubble, and picking it gently up to discover it was Demeri’s and not his son’s.
Against all that grimness we somehow managed to laugh at the presents the government occasionally offered them; Chinese clocks and framed verses of the Quran, both looking down on us against the grey cracks running down the length of the walls.
It isn’t just the memories that are troubling the families. Two of El-Sayed’s four daughters complained from the bitterness of the water in their village and the water casks they have to buy for a LE 1.25 each that are incidentally also bitter. That immediately reminded Demiri of the death of his brother and sister due to kidney failure, and his other sister who is currently on a dialysis machine.
El-Sayed spoke proudly of the tears of then Vice President Anwar Sadat as he swept aside the LE 20 Sadat was offering him 40 years ago and asked nothing of him except vengeance.
Om Emad, another celebrity at Bahr El-Baqar, who has been a regular guest at a number of TV satellite channels, spoke of her physical pains.
She had lost her son Mamdouh in the Israeli raid, the piercing incessant uproar of which she still remembers vividly. They had carried his 8-year-old body to the house and his mother recalls how she first saw him: his head covered with debris and blood.
She has hypertension, is diabetic and is desperate for any medication that the monthly LE 300 pension can help her buy.
She has been sending requests to the government asking for aid on behalf of her martyred son, not to mention another son who died in an accident almost 10 years afterwards, trying to explain how the pension she receives shouldn’t be an excuse to stop further financial aid.
But like most of those damaged by the April 8 massacre of children and teachers, her utmost wish is to go on Hajj pilgrimage before she dies. The wizened old woman is sure it would cure her of all her maladies.
