Mahmoud al-Hamdan, aged 105 from al-Shawawra near Bethlehem discussing the Ottoman period and World War I

POOR QUALITY AUDIO. Mahmoud al-Hamdan (105 years old, born 1900, from al-Shawawra) interviewed by Fadwa Abu al-Hour on 27 June 2005. He discusses the following: he was a young boy when World War I started; war destroyed so many things; when the locusts came they arrived from the villages to the east and destroyed everything in their wake; in al-Shawawra the people used to eat the chickens and the horses particularly in the year of the drought in 1916; diseases spread; there was only one doctor from Bethlehem who used to come to a specific place in Beit Sahour to treat people for free; people used to eat orange peel; the residents of al-Shawawra used to go to the Dead Sea to collect salt to sell. Original audio recording: cassette tape. Transcript: summary. In the original collection at Bethlehem University this cassette tape was categorised as FIle 3 of Box 12. This fileset exists as part of the Ottoman Empire and World War I collection within the Bethlehem University Oral History project of the Planet Bethlehem Archive.