It is Poland, the winter of 1941-42. Some four dozen Jews from a labor camp are herded one day to an isolated ravine about 20 miles east-southeast of Lublin, where they are shot to death by SS guards stationed at a nearby training base. After the executions, a high-ranking guard appears at the mass grave. Walking on a wooden plank that spans the bulldozed gully, he notices one man 15 feet beneath him moving, still barely alive, point-ing to his head. The guard aims his rifle at the man and shoots. The man stops moving.

Zionism and the need to remedy a nursing shortage are working hand-in-hand in southern Israel. For the past eight years, the head nurse of the Soroka University Medical Center in Beersheva, Masha Hechtlinger, has been traveling as often as five times a year to the former Soviet Union to interview and recruit potential Jewish nurses.
She goes armed with the promise of financial support, while the nurses learn Hebrew and prepare to take Israel’s rigorous test to become registered nurses. And she holds out the prospect of employment at Soroka for those who pass the exam.