Melitta Seiler with her sister

This is my sister Erika Esther Ellenburgen, on the left, and I, in 1947. It was some kind of celebration at the synagogue, organized by the CDE [Jewish Democratic Committee], but I can?t remember what it was exactly. I do remember though that my sister, who was very slim and danced very well, was in the program as a dancer, and I wasn?t. Still, I wanted to have a photo of myself wearing one of those dresses that would be in the show, so we both tried them on and had our picture taken. We were very close before we got married, we dressed alike, had the same clothes and wore our hair the same way. I was lucky that I made good friends with the young people from the Jewish community here, immediatley after we arrived back to Brasov from Transnistria. They were Pista Guth, Brauning, Loti Gros, and some other high school colleagues of theirs. They liked my sister and me a lot, so they introduced us in their circles and in Gordonia, a Zionist organization. They were very friendly, invited us to small five o'clock tea parties and so on. Erika and I finished school here in Brasov. I finished the ten grades of high school in evening classes, and after that, at 19, I got a job. Although we were rather poor, my mother didn't want us to neglect our education. In the first two or three years after arriving in Brasov, we had private lessons of German literature and grammar with a teacher. After that we studied English with a teacher, Mrs. Rathaus. It was rather expensive, but I took those classes for about eight years, I only interrupted them when I was about to give birth to my son. After she graduated, Erika became a Russian teacher here, in Brasov, and married a Jew, Alfred [Freddie] Ellenburgen in 1959. They had a good marriage, and they have a son, Marcel. Marcel married a Romanian, Iulia, and they live in Israel now, where he has two little boys. At Gordonia there was a young doctor, Bernhart, who liked me a lot, courted me, and he introduced me to a friend of his, doctor Orosz. He was a Hungarian, not a Jew, but he had many Jewish friends. Doctor Orosz courted me as well, we went out for walks, and during one of these walks we met doctor Jacques Friedel, my future husband. Jacques was born in Campulung Moldovenesc, but he studied medicine in Cluj-Napoca, and he was assigned to Brasov.