No Relief From War : Elderly Refugee Now Safe in U.S. but She Hasn’t Really Left Beirut

She sees America through a cataract blur. Indeed her vision often takes her inward. When she hears of violent death, she sees in her mind’s eye three men shot dead on a Turkish road more than 70 years ago, when she was not yet 4 years old.

She is about 75 now, a refugee from Beirut, from the many wars and violent death in Lebanon and the Middle East.

She escaped her war-torn home six months ago and now lives with a daughter in this placid New York City suburb. But for Eugenie Poladian there is no relief from the war. A car backfired down the street and she froze, thinking it was another bomb.

“Nana,” as her grandchildren call her, left a city where even the dead were not safe. The gravedigger’s family tends the cemetery, reburying remains exhumed by the shelling.

A tiny woman with thick glasses and wispy gray hair, she said quietly in her native tongue: “I married and made a family and now all is vacant. My friends are all gone. It is emptiness.”

Her husband, a fabric merchant, died in 1958. They had three daughters, the one she lives with, one in Canada and one who is still in Beirut.

Outside this daughter’s home, the winter-barren trees line a street of modest two-family brick houses. Inside are the rich and warm colors of Oriental carpets that Poladian learned to weave as a child on wooden looms.

Poladian grew up without mother or father, passed on from one well-meaning family to another--Muslim, Christian, Arab and Armenian--her benefactors all part of the Middle Eastern mosaic, from missionary to nomadic sheik.

Of the last weeks before her family engineered her escape, she said: “Every day brought a new problem. Every day someone tried to take your house.”

Intruders, she said, would tell her: “This is too big a house for an old woman. Get out.”

But she stayed, and the neighbors--Shia, Kurd and Christian--would cook and bring her food. And when the shelling came, she would invite them in, because her house, on a lower floor and sheltered by higher buildings around, was safer from the mortar and artillery than others. Once, she said, there were so many crowded into her apartment that “we were sticking together.”

Some of her friends who left their apartments for long periods returned to find that the locks had held but looters had sawed off the bottom of the door below the locks. On the streets, revenge replaced law.

In Beirut, a daughter who lived across the Green Line in East Beirut took her life in her hands to visit her mother a few miles away.

Every day Nana braved the 50 slow steps to go to Mass in her church. Once there, she was certain she was safe “in the house of the Lord,” despite the fact that the cross on the steeple was a target for shelling. The rocket-pocked church survived, but the school next door is constantly being rebuilt.

It is hard for Poladian to separate the wars: Israeli versus Arab, Arab versus Arab, Christian versus Muslim. The family who took over her apartment were Arabs from the south of Lebanon escaping the violence there for the violence of Beirut.

One day a young man bringing her money from her family was wounded on his way to her house by a sniper. She grieved because she felt responsible.

Poladian first fell victim to Middle Eastern violence as a

small girl during fighting between the Turks and Armenians. Her father, an Armenian, was conscripted to work on Turkish railroads and the family never heard from him again.

Then on a forced march in 1915, when many Armenians died under the whips of Kurdish guards, the barefoot little girl holding onto her mother’s skirts saw three men shot down. When the march reached a watering hole, the group bolted and in the confusion Eugenie’s mother disappeared.

She never saw her mother again, though she spent seven years searching.

Her mother’s few valuables were sewn into Eugenie’s underclothes, and these helped sustain her.

Today Poladian is anxious to get her green card to stay in the United States, and she is learning English, which means learning a new alphabet. She practices small words with her daughter and son-in-law. She walks to a small store a block away to buy cigarettes. She smokes heavily, a Middle Eastern habit.

Grew Up Quickly

She talks of weaving carpets at 10, helping a doctor at 13. Before she was 20 she had delivered 30 babies. Then she married and bore her own. Those were the happy days. But even then she could sense the unrest among her Arab neighbors.

When the time came to leave, the most difficult part of the journey was from West Beirut to East Beirut. Somehow they did not molest the little old lady with the shuffling gait, pushing a shopping wagon down the street with all of her belongings in two suitcases. On the plane, isolated by her language, she wore a sign with her name and destination and a request for help, not unlike the immigrants of another day.

Now she spends much of her day in the kitchen of her daughter’s apartment. “By eating,” she said, “you don’t die.” Cooking seems to be therapeutic. So are her grandchildren. She serves strong, sweet Arabic coffee on a shiny tin-plated tray. And her daughter says she smiles a lot.

When she was asked about crime in New York, Poladian shrugged inside her bulky black woolen sweater and said, “It is not so bad as in Beirut.”

When her son-in-law teases her about being slow, she looks at him with her crinkled face and retorts: “What do you expect? I am old.”

Someday, she said, she would like to return to Beirut.

“All I want is to die and be buried next to my husband,” she said. “But I don’t know if the tombstone is still there because of the shelling.”