Despite the large scale of families that lost their babies between in what is known as the Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan Kidnapped Children Affair, this affair has gone unrecognized by the Israeli government, media and legal system. In the forties and fifties of the last century, thousands of young children were kidnapped through the state medical system in the newly established State of Israel, This paper uses trauma studies as developed in the US to capture and understand families’ experiences using quantitative measures, qualitative interviews and the analysis of home movies and photographs as types of unconscious expressions tracking the unnamed impacts of trauma. After being told that their child had died during routine medical care, but were provided with neither death certificate nor body, this paper asks: How did families continue to function in the shadow of ambiguous loss? How did they reconcile the betrayal of the state and its medical institutions? And how did they contend with the governmental denial of the affair?