Four women who were imprisoned in hostile countries share their stories of incarceration— and eventual redemption
“How old do I sound to you?” Fernanda challenges me at the beginning of our conversation. It’s hard to believe the woman with the clear, energetic voice recently celebrated her 84th birthday. “I might sound young because I experienced clinical death a few decades ago,” she comments. “I’ve heard people say that someone who experiences clinical death starts to count his years of life over from that time. That’s why it’s possible I’m actually the age of my oldest son…
“It doesn’t matter what my exact age is,” Fernanda continues. “There isn’t a day when my memories don’t carry me back to my time in an Egyptian prison, after I was caught spying for the Mossad. I remember those dark nights in the prison cell well.” Her voice is thick with tears. “It’s impossible to describe what I went through there. I didn’t think I’d make it out alive.”
Fernanda’s story is riveting. Her parents were Italian Jews, her father, a diplomat, and her mother, a medical professor. “We were very wealthy,” she says. “As part of my father’s job, we moved from one country to the next every few years. My older sister was born in Czechoslovakia, and I was born in Egypt. That’s where my father was stationed at the time.”
She relates that at the beginning of the 1950s, when she was a young girl, there were hardly any Jewish schools in Egypt. That’s why her parents — who weren’t observant — sent her to a Christian institution.
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