Only after my mother died in 1992, my father agreed to speak about our own private holocaust. In August of 1948 or thereabouts, my older brother was born in Dajani Hospital in Jaffa. He was a chubby boy with blue-green eyes. Our families have eyes in that color. Two of my brothers have green eyes and my dear father as well. Of course my father visited the hospital and saw his baby, and was told to come take him in two days, when the child would be three days old. My father arrived with a suit he had bought for the occasion, and found my mother crying. He asked her why, and she told him that she nursed him a little while ago and afterward she was told he had died.

My father asked for the child to bury him, and they told him they had already buried him. He asked, “Where is the grave?” And he got a little angry and started to shout. They threw my two parents out from the hospital. My parents were new immigrants from Libya. They didn’t know much Hebrew, and were helpless in a way that chokes me up until this day, and that is how it ended. When I learned these details I started searching, but every place I turned to after the death of Meshulam (may he rest in peace), did not even want to hear. It is as if there is a fear to contend with it, as if they are waiting for the elder politicians to die. It’s strange. Today my father has also passed, my parents bore this pain in silence. We knew about it but not from them. They would not talk about it. That’s it. I am very disappointed that my people have done this to me. It is not the Philistines, not the Romans ... not the Nazis. These are my people, my brothers.

Miri