Today is World Refugee Day.
My grandmother, Hela, lived through the Farhud and became a refugee from a land her ancestors had called home since it was known as Babylon. She finds it difficult to speak about that time, but she shared this story with me.
My grandmother was at her favorite café, like always.
Suddenly, she heard screaming. She turned her head and saw a man screaming, "Kill the Jews," in front of a woman with eight children. One was just a baby.
To my grandmother's horror, he began shooting. One by one, he shot the little children as their mother screamed. He saved her for last.
The café owner grabbed my grandmother and hid her in the backroom until my great-grandfather came to fetch her. They went to a neighbor's house, a kind Muslim family who were equally sickened by the frenzy of hate.
All night there was screaming and crying. Glass shattering. My grandmother could not sleep.
The next day, she watched as a disabled Jewish teen was brutally raped. She watched as the man finished and then broke a glass bottle so he could rape her with that, too.
My grandmother did not speak for the rest of that day. She could only weep inconsolably.
My grandmother adored Iraq — the streets she grew up in, the neighbors she was friends with. But she was not safe in Iraq after the Farhud, nor was any other Jew.
This is my history, and the history of most of the Jews living in Israel today. A majority of us are the descendants of Jews who were violently expelled from the Middle East and North Africa and made refugees in lands they had lived in for centuries, or even millennia.
