This is my life...

Iran-Ahvaz 1979,

The war between Iran and Iraq was already on, King Reza was gone, and Ayatollah Khomeini had the power on Iran after the revolution in 1978. My mother is pregnant with me and Iraq was bombing my city. My family’s flee out of the city. The bus was still not out of the city when my mother start yelling it is time, the baby is coming. So the driver of the bus turned back to the city and drove to the hospital. This was how my grandmother described my birth to me. She said that they were just at the entrance of the hospital when I was born. She said I was in a hurry.

There you are she said. Blond and very small and you were very sick. They had to tack you many times to the hospital cause of your health. When you were just two years old you the doctors gave up on you. Your mother went completely crazy. She stole you from the hospital and took you to the river. There she Baptist you and prayed to God to heal you. Your mum has a strong believe in God and so God answered her prays and you were healed.

Your father and the others were looking for you and they saw your mother baptizing you. Your father slapped your mother and took you away from her and runs to the hospital. The hospital was just two blocks away from the river. When your father gave you back to the doctor, the doctor as all of the people were surprised. You were healed and no one had an idea how this could be possible. So the doctor asked your mother what did she do to you and she said I gave him half of my heart to stay alive. Everyone in the hospital was crying and amazed. They lived a wonder between all of the death soldier and victims of the war. That’s where the strong bond between you and your mum comes from.


The war Iran and Iraq
However, the official war began on September 1980, there was attacks from both countries in the year 1979. That’s how my family described the start of the official war between Iran and Iraq.

It began in the night when Iraq sent his aircraft flying very low over the province Khuzestan. The sound was very loud and the window were breaking down. Everyone woke up in fear of an unknown situations. Was that an earthquake everybody asked themselves. Looking outside they saw low flying airplanes humming over the city and suddenly the bombing started. Hopelessly they gathered themselves and tried to flee.

Back then my father and mother lived at my uncle’s house. The flied together with their car. While they were in the car driving a bomb hit the street and the waves of the explosions hit the their car. My father had his hand outside the window hanging when the explosions throw the car on its side and dragged it meters until its stopped. My father’s hand was smashed flat and my cousin’s head was split in two. Injured and in pain they close my cousin’s head with a headband and they tried to hold my father’s hand together. They get rushed to the hospital and both get that night operated. First they wanted to amputated my father’s hand, but my father rejected that. They fixed what they could fix that night. His hand didn’t really had any function. My cousin was very lucky as her head got stitched together. She survived it.

My father did 3 more operations after that. One doctor before he operates him made my father promise him not to attend any other operation after this operation. The reason for it was that the doctor could regain some function in his hand but it would be an illusion to think his hand would function normal after almost being amputated.  My father can move his fingers and almost make fist. He writes and work with it but the damage to his hand is very visible.

As if the war wasn’t hard enough, there was a lot of family war going on. My oldest uncle as the head of the tripe had a big fight with my mother. He gave an order to the family not to give us shelter nor help us financially. My father with the age of 16 or 17 and my mother with the age of 23 or 24 years with two little boys of 2 and 1 years old had to leave under a bridge to have shelter from the rain. I will never forget the tears my mother had when she told that story. My father started to work at the locale market and my mother started sowing close. Rented a room somewhere and started their hard life. I was almost 3 years old when they moved to another city called Bandar Mahshahr.


Bandar Mahshahr 1982(small city in Khuzestan province of south Iran),

I was 3 years old when my parents moved to a small city in the southern province Khuzestan. I was completely new in this city and had no friends. I saw children playing football so I went to play. I asked if I could play with them. They said because I was an unclean Jewish bastard wasn’t allowed to play with them. I got very angry and got into a fight. My mother came and separated me from them.

A minute later the neighbor kid with whom I had a fight for some reason he thought that I’m for the Perspolice football team and so he wrote on their home wall Esteghlal team on. I was actually for his team but after he wrote that I radically changed my favored team and went for the Perspolice team. This two team are the most strong teams in the country and they are known as Red team (Perspolice) and blue team (Esteghlal).  Since then we became known in the neighborhood as the red and blue strong members. We never played on the same team even when we played on the street. We were classmate so we saw each other every day at school and outside the school. Regularly on the way from school and sometime on the way to school we ends up fighting each other. In all those fights I was always forced to it. They would surround me with couple of them and they force me to fight. They would bet on who’s going to hit the first punch on the head. I did win mostly but then I get an unsuspected hit from someone else from behind. If I’m lucky someone sees us and separate us from each other and if not then we both end up going home with a bleeding nose.

When I look back the funny thing is that we at school had to sit next to each other. We were both very short and had to sit upfront and most of the time when there is a language class starts we had to dialect with each other. On English class we were the best two on the class. 

Our parents were regularly called to pick us up. My mother told me not to listen to them and it’s not true what they said about being unclean. I had to be careful when I’m playing outside from the police and people that I don’t know. My mother told me that this government has a special prison for children from my family. Each time I went out was with the fear of being kidnapped.

The war between Iran and Iraq was still on. Regularly we had to flee from the city to the desert outside the city. The sound of the air attack alarm is still in my ears. Many times was a panic in my family because they had to pick up their kids from schools and sometime they couldn’t find their kids. Then the panic would start that they have been kidnapped. Sometime was an uncle of aunty that picked up the kid’s and the parents didn’t know and sometimes the kids were indeed kidnapped. Everyone is then emotionally and physically broken and done.