Vida Sadikario

This is my mother Vida Sadikario. They took this picture for fake identification cards. All the Jews had their pictures taken for passports, fake papers. Fake passports were to be issued as if we were Serbs, even though we were not. This was not Serbia, it was Bulgaria. So that they could expell us, as though we were foreigners. [Editor's Note: This photo was more likely taken by the Bulgarian authorities in the first half of 1942 for identification purposes. Source: www.ushmm.org]. My mother married my father Josif when she was 12 years old. My father's first wife died during childbirth. There was a tradition if you had a[n unmarried] sister she had to marry the widowed man. Regardless of the fact that she was young, she had to marry my father. By the time she was 13 or 14 she already had two children: Mirjam, her sister's child, and another one. My mother was a housewife. She was a very peaceful woman. She had eight children. My mother's head is not covered here, but she usually covered her head with a kerchief trimmed with two rows of coins. It saddens me to see her picture. She was such a good woman. She was killed in Treblinka.