Salvator Israel

This is my husband Salvator Marko Israel. The photo was taken sometime in the 1930s. He was was born on the 2nd of April, 1908 in Plovdiv in the family of the respected merchant Marko Israel and the Hungarian Sephardi Jew Leontin Demayo, who had lived in Budapest and Vienna before the marriage. They met in Vienna on one of Marko's business trips, they married and Leontin came to Bulgaria. My husband had five sisters - Rashel, Sarika, Rene, Elizabeth and Hanika, who died very young. Salvator went to study in France, Montpelier, and graduated in Paris as a medical doctor. He lived in France for ten years and after he graduated, he became an assistant in the university. Then he had to go back to Bulgaria, because he couldn't support himself. On his return in 1938, he worked for a while in the state hospital in Plovdiv and then opened his own medical practice where he worked until 1941. That year he was mobilized as a district physician and later as a municipal physician in Karnobat during the war. That's how we met. In 1942 we married in Karnobat.