Leon and Bienvenida Moshe with their daughter Erietta Molho in Evian

This picture was taken in 1929.

My grandparents, Leon and Bienvenida Moshe and my mother Erietta Molho, nee Moshe, were on vacation in France, in Evian.

Every year they went to France. You know, Thessaloniki was a cosmopolitan city, a small Paris, and it was also the Jews that were offering a particular flair to it.

All Jews were civilized people; they had not lived in villages. Since they had no country of their own, as Israel didn’t exist then, they always lived in big cities. They had the particular radiation of the big cities.

I always happen to hear from friends, co-students etc., ‘I will go to my village.’ My village! Thessaloniki and later Athens were the only places I knew.

And the Jews in Thessaloniki were more numerous compared to the Christian Greeks, a balance, which, of course, later changed. Thessaloniki was a city that shone.

For example my grandfather and my grandmother would never go to Athens; they would go to Paris or to Vienna.