HEADQUARTERS FAMILY IN DANGER

At the beginning of the civil war the branch headquarters of Jehovah’s Witnesses was in a Moslem section of Beirut. Before moving from there to a safer place outside the city, the headquarters family had some scary experiences. On February 6, 1976, one family member described conditions this way:

“For about a month we didn’t even bother to go to bed in our rooms. When it was time to sleep we put mattresses in the little entranceway, as it was the safest room in the house. We all curled up there and slept in our clothes, since we never knew what the night would bring. When that phase of the fighting passed, the rightists tried to get control of strategic buildings on our side of town.

“Then it got down to real street fighting, from street to street and from house to house. It looked like the rightists would come up the street in front of us and the leftists behind us, so we decided to evacuate. However, there was no way to get completely out of the area, but there were safer houses, so we went to the home of a Witness about a mile (1.6 km) up the street from us. We stayed there for two weeks and then we were able to go back home.”

One night was especially harrowing for the headquarters family. It was a night that the main commercial center of Beirut was set aflame, and the section around the branch home was also marked for destruction. Witnesses at the branch give some of the details:

“About 10:30 p.m. we were startled by a burst of machine-gun fire right in front of the house. As two members of our family looked from the veranda, they saw five or six gunmen come out of the hotel directly in front of us​—then, suddenly, a loud explosion. What a racket when seven floors of glass windows and doors came shattering down in front of us!

“Then shop after shop was set afire, and gunmen drove back and forth in front of the shops adding fuel to the flames, making sure they burned. They shot at anyone who tried to put the fires out. The night sky was red from all the blazes.

“As we were watching the fires from one of the back bedrooms, we were rocked by another explosion. We rushed to the front of the house and saw that a bomb had exploded in a grocery shop in our building. Our own building was on fire! What worried us most was a gas-storage room in the building. If the fire reached it, it would probably bring down our building and the one next to us. All the neighbors on the street cooperated and we got the fire out before it did much damage.”

In December 1978 machine-gun fire and shell explosions were still echoing through the area where the branch office is located. During one 12-day period in the fall of 1978, the branch family had to spend eight days in a shelter in the lower part of the building while some 200 shells and rockets landed in the immediate vicinity.