I was raised to love books. I never thought I would have to feed them to a fire so I could have a meagre meal – but existence is resistance.
by Hend Salama Abo Helow, reposted from Al Jazeera, April 29, 2025
When we were children, my siblings and I regularly spent our pocket money on new books. Our mother had instilled in us a passionate love for books. Reading wasn’t just a hobby; it was a way of living.
I still remember the day our parents surprised us with a home library. It was a tall and wide piece of furniture with lots of shelves that they had placed in the living room. I was just five years old, but I recognized the sacredness of its corner from the very first moment.
My father was determined to fill the shelves with a variety of books—on philosophy, religion, politics, languages, science, literature, etc. He wanted to have a wealth of books that could compete with the local library.
My parents would often take us to the bookshop attached to the Samir Mansour Library, one of Gaza’s most iconic bookshops. We would be allowed to pick up to seven books each.
Our schools nurtured this love for reading as well, organizing visits to book fairs, reading clubs, and discussion panels.
Our home library became our friend, our solace in both war and peace, and our lifeline on those dark, haunting nights lit only by bombs. Gathered around fire pits, we would discuss the works of Ghassan Kanafani and recite the poems of Mahmoud Darwish we had memorized from books in our library.
When the genocide started in October 2023, the blockade on Gaza was tightened to an unbearable level. Water, fuel, medicines, and nutritious food were cut off.
When gas ran out, people started burning whatever they could find: wood from the rubble of homes, tree branches, trash … and then books.
Among our relatives, this first happened to my brother’s family. My nephews, heavy-hearted, sacrificed their academic future: they burned their freshly printed schoolbooks—whose ink hadn’t even dried — so their family could prepare a meal. The very books that once fed their minds now fed the flames, all for survival.
I was appalled at the book burning, but my 11-year-old nephew Ahmed confronted me with the reality. “Either we starve to death, or we fall into illiteracy. I choose to live. Education will be resumed later,” he said. His answer shook me to the core.
When we ran out of gas, I insisted that we buy wood, even though its price was skyrocketing. My father tried to convince me: “Once the war is over, I will buy you all the books you want. But let us use these for now.” I still refused.
Those books had borne witness to our ups and downs, our tears and our laughter, our successes and our setbacks. How could we possibly burn them? I started rereading some of our books — once, twice, three times — memorising their covers, their titles, even the exact number of pages, burying in them my fear that our library might be the next sacrifice.
In January, after a temporary truce was concluded, cooking gas was finally allowed into Gaza. I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that my books and I had survived this holocaust.
Then in early March, the genocide resumed. All humanitarian aid was blocked: no food, no medical supplies, and no fuel could enter. We ran out of gas in less than three weeks. The full blockade and the massive bombardment made it impossible to find any other source of fuel for cooking.
I had no choice but to concede. Standing before our library, I reached for the international human rights law volumes. I decided they had to go first. We were taught these legal norms at school, we were made to believe that our rights as Palestinians were guaranteed by them and that one day, they would lead to our liberation.
And yet, these international laws never protected us. We have been abandoned to genocide. Gaza has been teleported to another moral dimension — where there is no international law, no ethics, no value for human life.
I tore those pages into bits, recalling how countless families had been torn to pieces by bombs, just like that. I fed the torn pages to the flames, watching them turn to dust — an anguished offering in memory of those who had been burned alive: Shaban al-Louh, who burned alive when Al-Aqsa Hospital was attacked, journalist Ahmed Mansour, who burned alive when a press tent was attacked, and countless others whose names we will never know.
Next, we burned all the pharmacology books and summaries belonging to my brother, a pharmacology graduate. We cooked our canned food over the ashes of his years of hard work. Still, it was not enough. The siege grew more suffocating and the fires devoured shelf after shelf of books. My brother insisted on burning his favourite books before touching any of mine.
But there was no hiding from the inevitable. We were soon down to my books. I was forced to burn my treasured collections of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry; the novels of Gibran Khalil Gibran; the poems of Samih al-Qasim, the voice of resistance; the novels of Abdelrahman Munif that I held dear; and the Harry Potter novels that I had spent my teenage reading. Then came my medical books and summaries.
While I stood there watching the flames consume them, my heart burned as well. We tried to make the sacrifice feel worthy — cooking a more scrumptious meal: pasta with bechamel sauce.
I thought that was the peak of my sacrifice, but my father went further. He dismantled the library’s shelves to burn as wood.
I managed to save 15 books. These are history books about the Palestinian cause, the stories of our ancestors, and the books belonging to my grandmother, who was ruthlessly killed during this genocide.
Existence is resistance; these books are my proof that my family has always existed here, in Palestine, that we have always been the owners of this land.
Genocide has pushed us to do things we never imagined in our darkest nightmares. It forced us to mutilate our memories and break the unbreakable, all for survival.
But if we survive — if we survive — we will rebuild. We will have a new home library and fill it again with the books we love.
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