Carol Ionel and Ruth Greif

This is a photo of me and my husband, Carol Ionel Greif, taken in Brasov in the 1950s. I think it was taken at a ball, but I don?t know if it was a Purim ball or some other event. At that time we weren?t married, but we were dating. I was a student at the Faculty of Medicine in Cluj Napoca at the time. I met my husband, Carol Ionel Greif, in the social circles in Brasov before I left for university. He was a Jew from Cernauti and older than me; he was born in 1923. He studied at two universities. He studied languages - he knew six or seven languages - and he studied chemistry by correspondence at a university in Belgium. He had quite a reputation with women, but to me he was friendly and he often took me out to the theater, behaved like a gentleman and joked that when I grew up he would marry me. I studied at the faculty of medicine in Cluj for six years, from 1952 until 1959. My schedule was so tight, I barely had time to live. I had classes in the morning, more practical assignments in the afternoon, but I still found time to go to the opera two or three times a week. I had a suitor, a Jewish opera singer from Cluj, a baritone. He was ten years older than me, but I got attached to him; he reminded me of my father. Victor Vida was his name, and we remained good friends even after I married. For as long as I was in Cluj, I saw Carol only during holidays, and in the meantime he was engaged to someone else, but that didn't work out. In the end we fell in love and married in 1959, just before I took my state examination. We only had a civil marriage that year because my husband was very proud, and he said he would have a wedding only with a rabbi, not with a hakham. But we had the religious wedding later on, when my husband found out unexpectedly that Rabbi Moses Rosen was in Poiana Brasov. He went after him and persuaded him to wed us, and he did.