My parents immigrated to Israel from Iraq in the fifties. In ‘52 my mother gave birth to a girl in the Dajani Hospital in Jaffa. The child was given a name: Samira Cohen (Mana). At about the age of three or four months the baby did not feel well. Mother took her to the hospital. They told her to go home and come back after a few days. Mother returned three days later, she walked by foot from Hatikva neighborhood. At the hospital they told her the child was dead and to go home. Mother wanted to see her and they told her, “There is nothing to see – we buried her.” They simply threw her out. Mother talked about it all her life. Until her death, she talked about it and did not stop talking about the girl. The father was the same way. We think about our mother, alone, not understanding Hebrew, being thrown out this way to go back home by foot with the knowledge that the girl is not with her… what she went through.

Simon Mana