Yvonne Capuano-Molho with friends in front of her family house

Here you can see me with my friends in front of our house in Thessaloniki. The photo was taken in 1938.

First from left is my dear friend Mendi Hassid. To her right is her brother, Phifi. Mendi was murdered in the Holocaust. Her brother survived and today lives in Belgium.

We were living at Cyprus Street. It was a residential street. It had nine or ten houses, and in every house on each floor lived one family. In the house next door, which had three floors, lived three families.

Only in our house, on two floors, it was just us, while normally it could have accommodated two families. We stayed in this house quite a long time, almost all our life.

In the front was the good big door, which was the door we used to enter. However, there was another door, a smaller one, with a corridor that led to the kitchen. This is the door that the grocer used when he was bringing us our shopping.

A characteristic of this house was the quantity of honeysuckle. Honeysuckle covered the two pillars on which the door was hanging, and there was so much that sometimes we had difficulties to fully open this door.

The house was dubbed ‘the house with the honeysuckle.’ In the morning, when I was leaving for school, it smelled so intensely and from such a distance that I kept its smell in my nostrils all day long.

Photos from this interviewee