The Sama'n family live low down in the old Arab quarter of Haifa, towards the Port. Marie is just old enough to remember the Nakbeh. She is unmarried and lives with her mother. Her sister Rosa who lives close by is visiting with her two daughters. It's Easter and leftist Palestinians keep the feast traditions like everyone else, with visits and the date-filled cakes called 'ma'moul' that should be made at home.

The Samaan family is originally from Sohmata, and it's Wajih Sama'n, president of the Ibna' Sohmata association, who guides me to their home. Most destroyed villages in Galilee have formed committees like that of Sohmata, that undertake commemorative activities such as annual visits, repairing mosques and churches, or exhibitions of artifacts from before the expulsions. One of Marie's nieces criticizes the Ibna' Sohmata for being undemocratic and excluding women from the directing committee. Tension between generations is never far away in Palestinian families anywhere in their diaspora, raised above normal by crisis.

Expelled from their village in 1948, some of Sohmata's people took refugee in Lebanon, others went to the nearby village of Fassuta.3 Marie's father soon moved to Haifa in search of work. He was a communist party member, a connection that at the beginning of Israeli rule helped some Palestinians to find jobs. Marie worked for the party from an early age, distributing pamphlets and later with the Harakat al-Nissa'i (Women's Movement). The neighbours gossiped but her father supported her.

She gives a good narrative, a story of

poverty, hard work, and party loyalty, unpretentious but rich in social detail.

Marie Samaan begins by saying:
"I remember that two weeks ago, I was watching the news, what was happening in Kosovo. It reminded me of my childhood in Sohmata, how they used to pass -- the Arabs, the refugees - when the planes bombed their houses, how they ran away from the planes and from the bombing. And how they carried their possessions on animals. I was young, I asked my mother, 'Why are they putting their clothes on cows, mother?' We weren't used to seeing animals carrying...My mother said, 'They are refugees, my child'. That generation didn't have cars in which to escape, not like today. I remember when I was young I went down to see how people were walking, and I walked with them, without anyone (accompanying me) - a child, walking with the people. One of the people of the town saw me walking. After three kilometers he brought me back- we had reached a village called Beit Hossi, Sura'een, high up. He returned me to my family. I was walking with them thinking that everyone has to walk. He brought me back. I said to my mother, 'I thought you were walking'. She said, 'No my child'. I remember when they shelled us we used to sleep between the olive trees. We stayed there all the time. People left their houses, and took the women and children down to the olive trees. They ate and drank there. Until the airplanes came and bombed the houses. Then they hid us in a cave, a cave full of water. I was very bothered by the water and the crowding of the people. There was nowhere for a girl to hide herself. A man came and pulled me by my hair which was long and threw me outside, and said to my mother, 'Your daughter was about to drown"