Edita Adler

This is me in 1985, here in Brasov; I had this picture taken at the request of some friends of mine from the USA. I had been there in 1984 to visit Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York, and I stayed at some Jewish friends of mine, former colleagues from the faculty of medicine in Bucharest, Jean and Olga Aronovici. I was born in Bucharst in 1937, but we moved to Brasov in 1945. In 1966, when I got married to Iuliu Adler, I went to work in Prejmer [village belonging to Brasov county, 25 km from Brasov], which was much closer to Brasov. I lived with my husband in my parents' house in Brasov, and I was commuting every day to Prejmer, going there in the morning. In Prejmer I was in charge of stomatology department and I retired from there in 1990. Living conditions were hard during communism: at work, in the practice. Many times there was no electricity, so we couldn't work; also, when I was on duty during the night, on Sundays, or even during the week, as a general practitioner, not as a dentist, I was sometimes needed for an emergency: I had to walk two or three kilometers in the field from the hospital to some house where the patient was - and houses were scattered in Prejmer, there were big distances between some of them - in total darkness, with no flashlight, and I could barely see my next step. I was also upset by the lack of electricity at home: I couldn't read, I couldn't study for my profession. Each household had a share of gas that had to be enough for one month, but of course it never was. There were stamps for food, but everybody had to find something on the black market to have enough. For example, we knew somebody from a pig breeder, who would sell us a 100 kilo pig in fall that we had slaughtered, so that we would have food for the following year. We didn't observe tradition much in our family, my husband wasn't religious at all; we only went to the synagogue on the high holidays. However, after my husband died in 1976, and was buried in the Jewish cemetery here, I sat shivah after him.