Mina and Moritz Solomon

This is a photograph of Moritz and Mina Solomon [nee Schonfeld], my mother's sister, taken in 1972. They were in Israel then, in Ghivat Schmuel.

Aunt Mina was born in Bucharest in 1896. She worked as a clerk until she married Moritz Ticu Solomon. He fought and was wounded in World War I. He became a sergeant in the Romanian Army. He was a self-made man, an oil man who had a small refinery at the entrance of the town of Ploiesti. He built himself a four-floor apartment house, with two apartments per each floor, in Bucharest, on Sfintilor Street. They were the only ones in the family who had a car and a chauffeur. In the early 1930s they had a Daimler, then a Marmon; I had never heard of this make before and I never heard of it again, but I remember the license plate: 676 B. 

Marian Solomon, my cousin, was born in 1921 in Bucharest. He left on a small boat to Palestine in 1942 and spent six months in Izmir [Turkey], until the British let him stay in Cyprus, in 1943. After one year and a half he got to Palestine. He never returned to Romania. He went to the Polytechnic in Beirut [Lebanon], spent a few years in France, and then he settled in Australia, in Sydney, where he became the general manager of some factory. He had two children, a boy, Alan, and a girl, Nathalie. The boy was a sort of young genius of the family; he was Australia's chess champion at the age of 13. In his turn, he has a son, who has recently chosen to become a policeman. My cousin Marian died of leukemia in Sydney in 1980. Mina Solomon died in Tel Aviv in 1986.

The Centropa Collection at USHMM

The Centropa archive has been acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. USHMM will soon offer a Special Collections page for Centropa.

Academics please note: USHMM can provide you with original language word-for-word transcripts and high resolution photographs. All publications should be credited: "From the Centropa Collection at the United States Memorial Museum in Washington, DC". 

Please contact collection [at] centropa.org (collection[at]centropa[dot]org).