Mira Cotin with Henriette Mizrahy

This is a photograph of my sister, Mira Cotin [nee Mizrahy], taken when she was 16, together with my mother, Henriette Mizrahy [nee Schonfeld], at the engagement of a distant relative.

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. 

Photos from this interviewee