Wedding photo of Magdalena and Carol Springer

This is a photo taken on 16th August 1936, the day my parents, Magdalena Springer, nee Iszakovics, and Carol Springer, got married. It was an arranged marriage: my father's family had met my mother's some time before, and they had established that their children would meet and marry, and so it was. The wedding took place in Odorhei, in my maternal parents' garden; I think the rabbi came there. After my mother married my father, she came to live with him in Bucharest, where he worked as a dentist. I was born in Bucharest in 1937, and my sister, Alice, 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. My parents weren't very religious, but my father always went to the synagogue on Friday evening, and we had to go with him, even if we didn't feel like it. On Friday evenings my mother always lit the candles, and we had poultry soup with home-made noodles, the traditional sponge cake [challah], then boiled meat with potatoes, tomato sauce, apple pie and fruit.