Estera Goldsmann and Elisabeta Klausner

These here are my maternal grandmother, Estera Goldsmann, and my aunt, my mother's sister, Elisabeta Klausner, nee Goldsmann. The photo was taken in Brasov, in the 1940s, I think, because my grandmother still looks rather young here. My maternal grandmother was born in the 1880s in Turches, in one of the seven villages that now form Sacele. Her husband, Bernard Goldsmann, had died when she was still young, and she never remarried. My grandmother lived in Brasov when I knew her. She lived in a rented house, she never owned one. My grandmother shared a courtyard with several other tenants. There were no Jews there, but she was very esteemed all the same. She worked very hard. She had a store and it was open from morning until late in the evening. She lived in the same house where she had her shop; from the shop you could go into the living room of the house, and she occupied the other two rooms of the house, each with separate entries. She also had a kitchen and a bathroom. She sold several delicacies in her shop, sausages and other meat products, chocolate, liquors. And she was in charge of everything: the stocks, bookkeeping, selling. She was a very energetic and agile woman and she had no help. She didn't have time to breed animals or grow vegetables; she was too busy with the shop. For as long as I knew her, my grandmother never had a vacation. She couldn't leave the store; she didn't want to lose her clients. Aunt Elisabeta was born in Sacele in 1907. She was married to a Jew here, in Brasov, Edmund Benzel, who was the manager of a timber factory. He died in a train accident, so she came to live with her mother in Brasov, and after many years, she remarried a Jew named Klausner and moved with him to Bucharest, but they didn't have any children. I don't remember what he did for a living, but he too had been married once before and had had two children. Aunt Elisabeta died in Bucharest in 1995, and she was buried in the Jewish cemetery there.