Tag #125121 - Interview #89859 (Estera Sava)

We had a relative there, Milu Stormann, the brother-in-law of one of my parents, who had also gone to the Medical School there, had married a French woman, and worked as a physician in some smaller town. Our father himself had spent four years in France in his youth. So he said: ‘Well now, it’s easier if you go to France, because we’ve got Milu there, we give the money to his parents here, and he will give you the same amount from his own money over there…’ Because he really wanted to send some money to his parents in Bacau, but couldn’t find a way, so this arrangement would suit him too. So she left for France, to Montpellier. When she got there, she wanted to enroll in the 2nd year! They checked, and told her: ‘You can’t, because you’re coming from Italy and the classes there are considerably inferior. If you had studied for one year in Romania, we would have taken it into consideration.’ You see, we used to have great universities: Iasi, Bucharest and Cluj! ‘So it’s impossible.’ So she went to the dean’s office; she pleaded, showed them her grades, and asked that she be allowed to attend the lectures of the 2nd year, explaining she was planning to pass the equivalence exams during the next session. They let her. And so she did. She succeeded at the equivalence exams and was able to continue.