Rene Benveniste with classmates at the Lycee Francais

This photograph was taken in 1925 at the Lycee Francais, the school that my husband, Rene Benveniste, attended, and at the time of the photo he was nine years old.

My husband Rene came from Kavala and he had lost his mother and sister to World War I. They didn’t have a refuge, so the whole family was together, but I don’t know where. Anyway, when they got in, my husband hid in the corner. His father went to take him from the corner to be with the rest of the family. At that moment a bomb fell and all the others turned into ashes, and only the two of them survived. His father Nisim married a relative of his mother Siniorou, with whom he had a son named Pepo, and so my husband had a new brother. My husband came to Thessaloniki with his father and brother.