Roza Kuzinsky was 17 years old when she began working as a nurse-trainee at the nursery in Ein Shemer. In 1995, as the tate Committee began its investigation, Kuzinsky called Avner Farchi—a journalist and investigator that also accompanied the Committee’s investigators—and testified to him that she was a witness to the kidnappings.
“I’m the one who worked then, and I’m the one who would take the breastfeeding infants. We would take the babies healthy and whole, and we would come back with nothing, as if nothing happened,” she told Farchi.
“They were given up for adoption, mostly in the United States. One day when I arrived in the nursery, there a man and woman speaking English were standing around. Later the man said ‘maybe she can understand,’ and then switched to German, but I speak Yiddish. It related to taking the baby. I came home, told my mother and she said: ‘You shut your mouth, what do you care? So they took. They probably paid money for it.’”
“I would take two or three babies, and they would send me in an ambulance to Afula. We would leave the babies healthy and well. The next way I would again take babies. They would ask: Where are the babies? We would say they’re gone, dead. ‘What do you mean dead? But they were healthy! There was nothing wrong with them!’ I took them. Today when they say they died—it’s not true.”
Farchi himself admits that he was apprehensive about publishing Roza’s testimony. “What am I to do with this explosive information I have in my hands? I don’t know what a different journalist would do. I was scared. I kept it to myself, I made one copy of the testimony, sent it to my colleague, and told her: ‘If something happens to me, you have a copy in your hand.’ The method was to take the babies unidentified. Then no one knows where to return them to, and with no other alternative they would be driven to WIZO and from there we know that it was only adoption.”
Farchi passed the tape on to the investigative committee, but Kuzinsky refused to come to Jerusalem to testify. According to her letter to the committee she has heart disease and the drive would risk her health. With no other choice the committee drove to her room. Kuzinsky was investigated behind closed doors, with no audience, as per her request. In front of the committee’s full session, Kuzinsky moderated her recorded testimony.
The video is taken from the Ilana Dayan’s television program “Uvda” [“Fact”] that aired in 1996, and the recording is courtesy of Avner Farchi
Links:
http://www.jdn.co.il/news/israel/704155
https://www.haaretz.co.il/yemenite-children/MAGAZINE-1.2922957#hero__bottom
[Link to the Uvda video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVewBGHFI3A ]
"I’m the one who worked then, and I’m the one who would take the breastfeeding infants. We would take the babies healthy and whole, and we would come back with nothing, as if nothing happened"
“They were given up for adoption, mostly in the United States. One day when I arrived in the nursery, there a man and woman speaking English were standing around. Later the man said ‘maybe she can understand,’ and then switched to German, but I speak Yiddish. It related to taking the baby. I came home, told my mother and she said: ‘You shut your mouth, what do you care? So they took. They probably paid money for it.’”