Salma and Asra Zakeri were two sisters. Salma was in first grade, and Asra was in fourth grade.
On their last morning, as he always did, their father helped Asra put on her socks. The little girl looked down and said, “Daddy, you put them on wrong.” She pointed with her hand: the dolls on the socks had to stand beside each other. Her father patiently took them off and put them on again. The image on the socks stayed in his mind.
Hours later, among many covered bodies, he saw the foot of a little girl. A doll-patterned sock was showing.
He cried out: “Asra has been found.”
The bodies of Asra and Salma were found beside each other. Their father says they had not suffered severe visible injuries; they had died under the rubble after the building collapsed. At the funeral of Salma and Asra, the father held both of his daughters under the coffin at the same time. For their family, the pain was not only losing two daughters, but finding them together, as if even death had not separated the sisters.