Testimony of Shoshi Shemesh and Rachel Cohen, daughters of Salman (Shlomo) and Shozette:
We immigrated to Israel at the start of 1951: Mom and Dad, Grandma, and five brothers and sisters. At first, we settled in Tzfat. After a few months, our parents submitted a request for family reunification, so that we could be near our aunt, our mother’s sister, who had a heart illness and lived in the Kiryat Ono transit camp. Our parents submitted the request for it, apparently to the person in charge of the transit camp, and then we were given permission to relocate to live next to our aunt, for humanitarian reasons. There were eight of us that arrived to the tent in the Kiryat Ono transit camp: parents, 5 children, and our grandmother. In practice, Mom was caring for two families: for us, her children, and also for the children of her sick sister, and all of this while she was in advanced stages of pregnancy.
Shoshi: There’s this image, that I’m visualizing now, of Mom hauling buckets of water from the camp faucet back to our tent. She was a healthy and strong woman and really took care of everybody.
When Mom began to get contractions, and the time had come to give birth, she was taken in an ambulance to the Hakirya hospital in Tel Aviv, together with Dad. This was at the start of 1952.
When Mom was ready to give birth, a doctor came out to Dad and asked him: “How many children do you have at home?” My dad answered him: “Five.” And then the doctor said to him: “So do you want the child alive or your wife alive?” A situation was presented to him in which he had to choose between our mother or the baby. My father answered that he wanted his wife to remain alive.
Dad came home crying. A day later, when he returned to the hospital, he was told that our mother gave birth and that the baby had passed away. He didn’t see a body and didn’t receive any document that corroborated that the baby was deceased. After a few days they told him that Mom had been transferred to a different department. During one of those days, a doctor approached him and told him that they removed Mom’s uterus and that she needed to remain in the hospital for the time being. He learned about this only in the aftermath. No one in the hospital told him that they were going to perform this kind of surgery on Mom, when she was then only 35 years old and hospitalized there for a full month.
Over the course of several years, Dad fell into a depression over his deceased child, despite never having seen a body, never having received a death certificate, and never having been given a burial site. He never inquired into the status of the birth because he barely knew even a few words in Hebrew.
Following the surgery that Mom underwent, ever after she was released from the hospital, she laid in the house for months on end, powerless.
Later, once the saga of the Yemenite Children Affair began to appear in the headlines, our brother started to contemplate the matter, and claimed that we were among the families whose children were abducted. We, the sisters, did not want to believe it at first. We couldn’t believe that such horrific deeds could even occur in this country. After a few years, our sister-in-law, under pressure from our brother, began to dig into the matter and investigate through phone calls, and ultimately succeeded in accessing the HaKirya Hospital Archives in Tel Aviv. An appointment was scheduled for us to visit the archive, so that we could see for ourselves and situate what actually happened to our mother. We were there for hours, and to our astonishment, in the diaries of the birth department, our mother’s name did not appear at all. Afterwards we received the diaries of other departments in the hospital, and we then located the registration that showed that Mom was hospitalized in the gynecological department between the dates of January 10, 1952 to February 2 of the same year, which was the exact time period in which they performed the hysterectomy, after the birth. However, in the hospital archives there is no mention or registration of the birth itself. As if it never happened and never was, and as if Mom never gave birth to a child.
When Mom was ready to give birth, a doctor came out to Dad and asked him: “How many children do you have at home?” My dad answered him: “Five.” And then the doctor said to him: “So do you want the child alive or your wife alive?” A situation was presented to him in which he had to choose between our mother or the baby. My father answered that he wanted his wife to remain alive.
Over the course of several years, Dad fell into a depression over his deceased child, despite never having seen a body, never having received a death certificate, and never having been given a burial site. He never inquired into the status of the birth because he barely knew even a few words in Hebrew.