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.
