My parents Razal (Amman) and Natan (Wahab) Magidi immigrated from Yemen in 1949 to the immigrant camp Ein Shemer with their eldest daughter Nagma (meaning “star”), who was six months old; there they were asked to leave the baby for examinations. They were asked to leave her and return the next day to pick her up. The next day when they came to get her, they came to the same room where they had left Nagma, but she wasn’t there. When they asked the nurses, “Where is she?”, they were told that it seemed she had been moved to a different room – they went and searched in another room – but in vain; nobody had any answers: Where was the baby?

There were two lists: one list for living children and another list for dead children. My parents asked them to check both lists to see if Nagma’s name appeared, but her name did not show up, neither on the list of dead children nor on the list of living children. My parents kept searching, and they couldn’t find anything…they did not see a body, nor did they receive a death certificate.

As the years passed, letters would arrive at the house for Nagma: draft orders, a television fee bill, voter card, and a while ago even an invoice from the National Insurance. My parents lived in uncertainty and a lack of information. My mother repressed it and convinced herself that perhaps her eldest daughter really had passed from this world, such that she became ill and lived on psychiatric pills until the day she died. My father did not believe this and continued to search for her... Once there was a rumor that a girl with a resemblance to our family was seen in Petah Tikva; my father went to search for her but came back empty-handed.

Another story I’m reminded of -- when I was 15, a military police rode up on a Vespa (at that time it was called a “traffic”) who saw me in the courtyard (thinking I was Nagma) and with no advance notice, screamed that he was coming to arrest me because I hadn’t responded to the draft orders, and he told me to get on the Vespa just like that, without asking to see my parents and inform them ... I screamed ... My father came outside to see what was going on and tried to explain to the officer that this was not the young woman he was looking for ... they disappeared Nagma, the very girl he was searching for; my father had to independently prove the year of my birth from my I.D. card... I remember that my father told him: “If you find that girl I permit you to take her to the Army”... – anyhow, this is just one story of many that attest to the State’s lack of sensitivity and lack of awareness regarding the affairs and hardship of Yemeni immigrants.

(Testimony of Sarah, sister of Nagma)