Sion Haddad was born in Tripoli, Libya in 1923, the only one of Ezra and Zola Hadad's eleven children to survive infancy. Ezra died when Sion was three years old, and Zola remarried. The family maintained a traditional Jewish lifestyle.
During the years 1911 to 1943, Libya was under Italian rule. When Libya's governor, Italo Balbo died and Italy joined the war against Britain in 1940, the situation deteriorated for Libya's Jews, who were accused of collaborating with the British.
Anti-Jewish legislation was passed In late June 1942, after the British were pushed back from Cyrenaica for the second time. In addition, all Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 45 were conscripted for forced labor. Their absence from the workforce created economic problems for the Jewish community. On one occasion, the Germans seized youngsters in Tripoli, and ferried them in trucks to the Bukbuk labor camp in East Cyrenaica on the Egyptian border. Zola Hadad, a policewoman, tried in vain to prevent the roundup in which Sion was taken away.
The camp was located in a desolate wilderness, and the laborers were put to work paving roads from Libya to Egypt for military purposes. Water was scarce and supplies reached the workers only once every few days. Work continued from morning to night, and conversation was forbidden. Sion took a book of psalms with him to the camp, which he kept inside his sock during the workday, taking it out to read by candlelight in the evenings. He was very connected to the words of the psalms, and knew them all by heart. Bukbuk was bombarded in October 1942, and the Italian forces retreated from the area in November. The prisoners discovered that they were free to go when they read the air-dropped flyers. Left to their own devices to find a way home, Zion hitchhiked from Egypt to Libya, a journey that took six months. When he returned, he worked in the police force for a short period. Following his mother, in 1949 Zion immigrated to Israel on the Galila with his wife Fortuna and their three daughters, Julia, Geula and Victoria. Baby Victoria died during the journey, and was buried at sea. They had another seven children in Israel, where they initially settled in Moshav Ziv and then moved to a ma'abara (immigrant absorption camp) in Rishon Lezion. Zion worked for the IDF as a civilian, and passed away in 2009. While renovating the apartment, his daughter Shosh found the book of psalms, family photographs and other documents in a box in the attic, encountering her father's Holocaust story for the first time.
_2.jpg?itok=gYdTa_Sy "The Siddur (Prayer Book) that Gabriele Kohn Received after Liberation")
