We came to Israel, to the Atlit camp, on September 15, 1949. The next day on September 16, 1949, my mother took me and the baby Sham’a, who was born in Yemen and was three months old, to the bathhouse. There was a nurse there. She turned to my mother and said: “how will you manage to bathe with the both of them? Give me one and I'll hold her for you. That way you can bathe with the other one and then with the first.”

My mother gave her the baby girl and we bathed. When we left, there was no nurse and no baby. My mother said that the nurse might have taken her to the hospital or to be vaccinated. My mother's brother, who had been in the country for a while, looked with her all over Israel and in all the hospitals in the area and probably elsewhere, but they found no trace of the baby.

When Sham’a turned eighteen they came from the army to ask why she had not enlisted. My mother never talked about it and she was consumed by it. She used to say they took our girl and but would never say how. Two weeks before she died she told me the whole story.

Bracha Caalaf Zadok (Salah)