Mira Cotin with Paula and Neumann Feldman

This picture was taken in Bucharest in 1940. My sister, Mira Cotin [nee Mizrahy], is on the left, together with some distant relatives, Paula Feldman and her father, Neumann Feldman.

My sister was born in 1923 in Bucharest. She was a quiet child and a pupil loved and respected by her schoolmates. I did something blamable the day my sister celebrated her 17th birthday! I wasn't invited to the 'tea party' given that afternoon and the fact that I was only 14, while she had the 'nerve' of being 17 gave me such an 'inferiority complex'… So I prepared a vial of sulphydric acid whose formula I had just learnt in school with the excellent chemistry teacher Voitinovici, opened all the doors between the laundry room, where I had improvised my little laboratory, and the rest of the house, and went to the skating rink, as it was Saturday… In the evening, when I came back home, my sister was crying because I had ruined her 'tea party.' My parents shut down my laboratory, 'sealed off' my skates, but the smell still persisted in our house… Except for this bad 'prank,' I don't remember any other incident with my sister during our entire childhood. 

In college, my sister kept on being a good student and she became a respected physician. She was an obstetrician in the first 10-12 years, and then she changed her specialization after she left the country, becoming a good internist. 

On 30th October 1945, I boarded the 'Transilvania' ship which was at anchor in Haifa harbor, to return to Romania from Palestine. We reached Istanbul on 20th November. We only stayed for a couple of hours. Among the few passengers who boarded, six or so, were my cousin, Paula Dragusanu [nee Feldman], her husband Silviu, and their son Miky, aged one year and four months. They had left Palestine a few months before and were waiting to be repatriated from Turkey. That same night the ship set off. The following day, on 21st November 1945, we reached Constanta.