We boarded the ship, and it was a good ship. There, we calmed down, ate and drank. Then, they stopped us in the middle of the sea and told us “There are the English here, you will not enter Israel”. After a few hours, we entered Israel. We entered Saint Lukas, from Saint Lukas they took us to Binyamina, here, in this place. I knew Italian, Italian, we used to study in Italian. We came to Israel and we didn’t know anything. Wherever we went to to to to to to to, what’s that? In Italian. Then we learned Hebrew and we forgot Italian. To here, this, this place. I used to live here. Tents, tents, tents, it was all full of bunks and there there was a canteen, we used to go take our food and back to our tent. We stayed here for a year.

A little girl, my father and mother died, the Germans killed them. I grew up an orphan. They came and let the Arabs to what they wanted. And the Arabs did to us… me, they opened my head, my head was open from here to here. My parents, they killed them with stones taf taf taf. And i was raised by my grandmother, my grandmother was an old woman. I didn’t know, she sent me out to work when I was eight years old, to eat. If you don’t have money, you die. Nobody would help you, and this all happened to us, my sisters and I. We were four girls. Two died, another is dying, she is sick, poor thing, and I remained alone.

The Zohar, they read the Zohar, the men read the Zohar, and they prepare a lot of food, and sing, rejoice and shrill, lu lu lu lu lu lu lu, very beautiful, during the Zohar. The next day he is circumcised. On the Zohar night, we, the son, the mother doesn’t go out at all, she only stays with the son, she doesn’t go out at all. She clings to the son and stays with him. They care a lot about sons.

My husband wasn’t… he would hold you in high esteem if you gave birth to a daughter. He would rejoice both for the daughter and for the son. He would go buy the clothes and bring me everything at the hospital, he loved me very much. Whether I gave birth to a girl or a boy made no difference to him, the same. He rejoiced for the girl and rejoiced for the boy.