美国国家公共电台 NPR In A Bullet-Riddled Mansion, A Beirut Architect Envisions A Museum Of Memory

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Today the Middle Eastern country of Lebanon is relatively 1 peaceful, though a civil war raged there in the '70s and '80s. Often Lebanese people don't like to talk about what happened. NPR's Alice Fordham meets a woman trying to start that conversation with the story of a single building.

ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE 2: Lebanon isn't big on memory, especially not of its 15-year civil war which ended with a fractious truce 3 rather than clear winners and losers. Lots of people fear that if the war is discussed it will stir up the tensions again. So it isn't taught in schools. There's no war memorial and no museum. But one woman, architecture professor Mona Hallak, is trying to change that via a 25-year obsession 4 with a house that's an emblem 5 of the capital Beirut's elegant distant past and its violent recent history.

I meet her taking a group of students around the extraordinary mansion 6, a vast elegant edifice 7 four stories tall, whose yellow walls and fluted 8 pillars are ravaged 9 by thousands of bullet holes. It's nearly a century old.

MONA HALLAK: This building, it's 1924. You can still see the etching in the stone.

FORDHAM: It belonged to a rich Lebanese family.

HALLAK: Now in 1932, the building was finished. And they lived happily ever after until 1975.

FORDHAM: In '75, tensions in Lebanon boiled over into civil war. And the house was right on what became known as the Green Line, dividing East Beirut from the West.

HALLAK: The minute the war started, this became a real difficult spot. And everybody left the building. And militias 10 went in.

FORDHAM: Hallak shows us how balconies became hideouts for gunmen. The building was notorious during her frightening childhood when militias dominated the city. After the war sputtered 11 out in 1990, she came across the house again as a young architect, a destroyed building among many others.

HALLAK: There was a bullet in every square centimeter. But to me, I looked and I saw suddenly the sky, the blue sky through the building. There was this amazing hope in this building. There was - it was destroyed but beautiful. It was destroyed but peaceful.

FORDHAM: She takes us through the abandoned hallways, showing snipers' nests built into what were once airy salons 12. The first time she came, child memories of wartime flooded back.

HALLAK: So suddenly I, who lived the war, who hid under tables because I was - the thought that they would protect me from something, I really looked at my mother's face many times under the table because she would crawl with me. And I'm like, is it the last time I see you? And when I stood here, I had all these memories come back to me in this second. And I'm like, if I have all these memories, then somebody else will have these memories. So this is a place of memory.

FORDHAM: Since then, Hallak has been fighting to convert this into a House of Beirut, a museum of the history of the city, including the civil war - albeit 13 told very, very carefully.

HALLAK: But we're talking about no timelines, no facts, no names, no dates. We're talking about the human experience of war, what happens to you and to your city during war.

FORDHAM: After years of campaigning, she persuaded the Beirut authorities to confiscate 14 the house from its owners, who planned to demolish 15 it, and compensate 16 them. Gradually, funds were found to renovate 17 the building. And it now stands ready for exhibits and visitors to arrive. But the final paperwork to open it to the public from the Beirut governorate still isn't finished. It's been years.

HALLAK: I think that there will always be fear within the government, within the municipality that, what have we done? We really started talking about the war in an officially - building officially owned by the government. And they want to control what's going to be said.

FORDHAM: I put this to the governor of Beirut, Ziad Chebib. And he staunchly denied any political problems and said there were merely bureaucratic 18 hurdles 19.

ZIAD CHEBIB: Unfortunately, I cannot give you an exact date for it. But I can promise you that it will be very, very, very soon.

FORDHAM: And then even if the House of Beirut does open one day, will people visit? I speak with one of the students touring the building, Nancy Hawat.

NANCY HAWAT: I am young. And it felt so weird 20 for me. So for my parents and their generation, I don't think they will be happy to remember the war because it brings them back bad memories.

FORDHAM: She says though even if it's too painful for those who lived the war to visit, her generation will go. It's good to remember the war, she says, because we hope it will not come back. Alice Fordham, NPR News, Beirut.