This picture was taken in 1920 in Thessaloniki. Here you can see my mother’s sister Sylvia Cohen, nee Moshe, and her brother Mario Moshe.
My mother was called Erietta, nee Moshe. In her family there were two sisters and two brothers, Jacques, Mario, Erietta and Sylvia.
Sylvia was born in 1902 and Mario in 1904. Sylvia suffered from poliomyelitis and was handicapped.
My grandfather would do whatever the doctors would tell him. One of them said, ‘Go, early in the morning, to the slaughter house and get the gall-bladder of a cow that’s just been slaughtered.
Bring it home and put the foot of the girl in it.’ They thought that this would make the nerves to operate again.
And so Grandfather would take his carriage with the horses, bring the gall-bladder and put it, as a compress, on his daughter’s foot.
Later, in 1914, he took her to Vienna to be treated, imagine, to Vienna in that period!
Sylvia went to live with her husband in Spain, they got married in 1927 in Thessaloniki and left in 1930. They had two sons, Jaime or Jacob and Leon. She died in Valencia in 1989.
