Callie Lefevre '09 sat down to breakfast and broke into tears. The carefree vacationers around her, the lavish breakfast before her — it was just too much to handle after what had happened.
Her friends were still trapped.
Only hours earlier, Lefevre and her friend, Emily Norris '09, had arrived in Cyprus. The two young women had fled to the island nation from Beirut, where they had been studying Arabic for the summer. They had been evacuated by bus to Damascus, where they then caught a flight to Cyprus.
Norris and Lefevre were just two of several Princeton students trapped in Beirut when the Israel Defense Forces began their bombardment of Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah attacks across the border.
They joined thousands of Westerners traveling or living in the region who, over the course of the past three weeks, would seek a means to get out of the war zone.
This is the story of their journey.
The stirrings of war
It was supposed to be a day like any other. On Thursday, July 13, about two weeks into their six-week language program at the American University of Beirut, Norris and Lefevre were to go to class as they always did.
Though the sounds of bombs that woke Norris that morning were, of course, unsettling, they didn't seem to pose any direct threat, she recounted. People agreed that it would pass soon enough. It was the Middle East, after all. Violence was cyclical here. Just as the artillery shells and fighter planes came, they would eventually go away.
Lefevre also wasn't worried. Having been in Beirut two years earlier when a similar situation occurred and then quieted down, she went to class in a cheerful mood, ready to enjoy another day in Lebanon.
On campus, class proceeded as usual, until the students slowly realized the gravity of the looming crisis that was steadily unraveling around them. One professor did not arrive to class because the building he lived beside, home to Hezbollah's al-Manar television station, was bombed.
"Hopefully he's still alive," Norris said. Neither she nor any of her classmates had heard from their professor since July 12, the day before the bombing began.
Still, Lefevre remained unconvinced of the threat of imminent danger. "Leaving seemed ridiculous to me," she remembered thinking. The university was a safe haven for the students in Beirut and anyone living off campus was told to move onto its grounds.
To Lefevre, this was just going to be another event that would add to an already incredible story of her time in Lebanon.
"I felt like we were living in the safest place in Lebanon," she said.
Though it still appeared safe to venture out to the hookah bars that night, the students' jokes and conversation were betrayed by an undertone of nervous laughter. Feelings were mixed. Some believed the growing conflict would end soon; others hoped that family farther south would be protected from the increasingly bold air strikes.
Then, Lefevre said, "it all started to change so quickly."
Waking up to bombs again on Friday morning was "probably the most frightening feeling in the world," Norris said.
Nevertheless, both young women went to class again that day. Students were there, but their professors were not. In a school meeting they were reassured that classes would begin again on Monday.
To calm everyone's jitters and pass the time, Norris suggested that they all watch a Disney movie in Arabic. They turned on "The Lion King."
Later that day, in an email sent to Nancy Coffin, her first-year Arabic teacher at Princeton, Lefevre said the break from class made the experience feel more like a North American snow day, and not the beginnings of a war in the Mideast.
Hopeful that the situation would resolve itself, Norris and Lefevre went to the beach with friends that afternoon and dinner in the evening. On the beach the girls suntanned and passed time while they admired the beauty of Beirut.
As night fell, the usually busy streets of cosmopolitan Beirut became quiet. City residents watched curiously from their doorways, wondering why a group of American students were milling about in search of a restaurant. It was as if the onlookers knew what was about to happen, the girls said.
As their waiter left to put their orders in, dinner was disrupted with the thud of more bombs. The group jumped out of their seats and bolted out of the restaurant. The students' terror was dulled by the reaction of the Lebanese around them.
"People started making fun of us because we were scared. They were not as affected by the bombs as we were," Norris said. "They were totally desensitized."
While they were picking up pizzas to bring back to campus, the Domino's store they were in and other shops suddenly turned dark as a blackout occurred. Already tense from their evening out, Norris and Lefevre arrived back at campus to realize that the disturbing events were not over.
"It was an absurd feeling," Norris said. The normalcy of eating pizza with a group of friends — an almost eerily calm experience — would be suddenly interrupted by the thunder of more bomb blasts. This time they were closer.
Around 10 p.m., Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah announced in a televised speech that at that moment Israeli warships were being bombed. The students ran up the stairs from the common room to look out their window at the harbor below, where some ships were anchored.
The actual attacks against IDF ships happened farther north, but within minutes, Norris said she could see and hear fireworks and celebrating in the streets outside the university.
The war was real now.
"You could feel the thickness in the air. My heart was beating twice the normal speed for the next 72 hours." Norris said.
Evacuation becomes imminent
Nancy Kanach, dean of the University's study abroad program, made sure that Lefevre, Norris and their families were aware that they could soon be evacuated. The University had contracted with International SOS, a London-based private security consulting firm.
Though given the option of waiting for the U.S. embassy to arrange their exit, Norris and Lefevre decided on Saturday to leave with SOS because they would be able to get out of Lebanon sooner.
For both of them, however, the decision to leave Beirut was an anguished one.
"I kept praying all the time," Norris said. "I was praying for the people who were dying because I knew that I was safe."
"I felt like a first-class citizen on the Titanic," Lefevre added. She was going home. Her close Lebanese friends and the other college students she studied with were not.
Saturday was a day of waiting. Evacuation plans were scheduled and canceled and scheduled again, as bombs raged on the roads from Lebanon to Syria.
A call Sunday morning informed the girls that their seats on the SOS bus were taken. Frustration and anger continued to build as it seemed like leaving the country might be impossible and they would have no choice but to stay as the bombing grew worse.
While Norris was out in search of food, Lefevre, who was with family friends in Beirut, received a call at 2:30 p.m. saying that the two girls would be able to leave with SOS — a mere 30 minutes later on a bus scheduled to depart at 3 p.m.
"I never ran like that in my life," Norris said. She got a call from Lefevre and rushed back to the University.
They could only take a backpack and purse, leaving behind the rest of their belongings. There was no time to pack and no time for goodbyes.
"Leaving Beirut was one of the saddest things I've ever done. I felt like I was abandoning everyone," Norris said.
A taxi drove them to a hotel where a group of people were shuffled onto seven buses. Students from Georgetown and Dartmouth joined them as did employees of Merrill Lynch and Halliburton. A few tourists were also on board.
They rode along a coastal road from Beirut to Tripoli that was heavily bombed the day before. Their Lebanese driver offered a running narration, describing in detail the destruction on the sides of the road as they passed by.
The convoy didn't encounter any bombs along the way. The officials in the United Nations vehicle they followed had managed to arrange for an hour-long ceasefire by Israel.
The Syrian border
It was dark — nine or 10 at night — when they crossed the Lebanon-Syria border.
Norris and Lefevre saw children standing alongside tanks and other fortifications, selling chewing gum. In the background, piles of rubble were all that was left of structures that once punctuated the scene.
Inside Syria, the evacuees were forced to bribe guards to get visas faster. In the hustle to get out of harm's way, ordinary courtesies and the orderly conduct of business were forgotten.
"So many things were happening so fast. It was a sensory overload," Norris said.
That was followed by another three-hour bus ride to the Damascus airport, where the group got onto a Jordanian airplane. An hour later they arrived in Cyprus. The sun was beginning to rise. It was now Monday morning.
Knowing that they had now arrived in safety did not yet calm what Lefevre described as the "evacuation vacuum." The rushing from place to place had produced a whirlwind of emotions.
"We had so much planned and hoped to spend more time with people in the weeks to come," she said.
The two were put into a hotel filled with vacationers and given a generous breakfast. That was when Lefevre broke into tears, as she saw the table filled with food and realized her friends would not have such luxuries available to them. Even worse was knowing that there were seats on the buses and plane that could have been filled by evacuees, but were not.
Tuesday afternoon, the girls flew to London, where Norris was finally reunited with her father.
One of the first sites they saw in London was a demonstration in front of Parliament for Lebanese solidarity. It was a strange feeling, Norris said, to watch a demonstration after being amid the war only days before.
"It was cathartic to know that people were aware [of the conflict] and showing feelings for Lebanon," Lefevre said.
After the evacuation
Norris and Lefevre expressed anger and frustration at the media's portrayal of the carnage in Lebanon. While in Beirut they could see firsthand the difference between what they said was CNN International's softer portrayal of the damage than that of al Manar or al Jazeera.
"CNN drove us nuts because there was such a bias in the reporting," Lefevre said.
In one report, Norris remembers the scene of a busload of people who were killed by a bomb on a road to Syria, after being turned away by the United Nations. In Lebanon, she saw the horrible image of a baby blown in half. In England, the image was blurred. And in America, similar pictures are almost nonexistent, she said.
"'Devastating' doesn't even cover it," she said. "Your heart bleeds for them."
Lefevre and Norris vow that they will one day return to Lebanon. They fell in love with the city and people of Beirut, they said, and nothing will change that.
"I fell in love with Beirut," Norris said. "We feel their pain."
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