Edita Adler with her nanny Erzsi

This here is me, when I was just a few months old, with my nanny, Erzsi, in 1937. We were living in Bucharest back then. Erzsi was Hungarian, from what my mother, Magdalena Springer, told me, and an honest girl, hardworking, and good with children. I think she took care of me for a year or so. I was born in 1937, and my sister, Alice Raphael, nee Springer, in 1938. We lived in a rented house in the center of Bucharest. It wasn't very big: it had two rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom, a large courtyard, running water and electricity. We had to rent the house, although the rents were very high, because father was just getting started in life and didn't have enough money to buy a place of his own. Before World War II started, the financial situation of the family was rather good; my father earned enough to provide a comfortable, yet not luxurious, life for us. He ran his own practice, which was located in the same house where we lived. My mother kept one servant, who helped with the cleaning, but she did the cooking herself. The food wasn't exactly kosher, and there were no separate pots for dairy and meat products. It wasn't possible to observe that: the times were hard, you could smell the war in the air, and people were making supplies of food, of clothing, of soap and so on because they knew that kind of merchandise would be hard to find during the war. Money was wisely spent in our family, as the war drew near.