IN STEREO

First, I’ll tell you an old story about Battir. In ‘48, when the occupation came and there was expulsion of people and destruction of homes, they displaced all the village’s people. Nobody remained at Battir. Like their neighbours too, in these areas where there’s [still] nobody. But one person stayed there; his name was Hassan Mustafa. After all the people went, he started to go to the houses, put candles in them and air-dried laundry, [to give the impression] that there were still people in the village, that they didn’t emigrate. And he started bringing them back one by one until all the area’s people came back. Otherwise, Battir would [still] be an evacuated village. Basically, they’re all farmers. And the Roman terraces and also the springs and the [water] channels, this is what helped the village people to be motivated in agriculture and to preserve the land. In the Ottoman times, a French company made the train. What exists now is diesel, before that we had the steam locomotive. It was the area’s people who worked on the train. Some of them were drivers, and some of them were the guardians of the train, and there were some of them who worked on it. And the train was also a livelihood for the village – it encouraged them to cultivate, to plant and harvest, because the train was linking Jaffa and Lod, and it passed Battir and went to Jerusalem, bringing all the vegetables. So it had a station, the train station was in Battir. All the village’s people were working on the train, planting in all the land… They took all the fresh vegetables and got on the train and went to Jerusalem. And the reason why there was a station in Battir is that it has seven water springs. The stream locomotive was there because it always needed water. It was the main station; they filled the tankers in the train. – Mohammad