Renee Molho with friends in Palestine

Here I am in Tel Aviv, Israel, then still Palestine, with Mimi Nahmias and Toto Benies. The photo was taken in 1945. Mimi Nahmias was a girl of the Jewish society of Thessaloniki. As I escaped she escaped too. She was with her sister Rita Nahmias, who married Paul Noah, and their young daughter. We practically left all together. We had contacted the Greek resistance and they gave us an appointment at a coffee shop. At this place arrived all the people who wanted to leave Greece. Paul Noah paid my fee for the trip to the resistance and he also gave me some money to be able to start over because I had nothing. I had no money and all my belongings were in a small pitiful bag. He also paid for Toto Benies, who was traveling with us. Toto is the third person in this picture. I don't know how he did it, all I know is that I am in deep debt to Paul. Assisted by the partisans we were loaded onto boats and taken to Turkey. Once we arrived there we were taken to a military camp. There we decided to look for Paul, Rita, Mimi and the others who had been loaded on another boat earlier. When we asked, we were told that they had not arrived yet despite the fact that they had left Greece a week earlier than us. We were very worried but one week later they arrived. You see, their captain had a girlfriend on an island and he took the boat with the passengers there, and in order to be with his girlfriend he stayed on the island for a week or ten days and, of course, the passengers stayed in the hold having extreme difficulty with food and the water and all. What I can say for sure is that our captain was much more efficient in that respect, and brave, and within one or two days he took us to Turkey while the others that had departed one week earlier arrived ten days later. This is what luck brings. When we were left in Athens, while they departed, we felt sorry for ourselves and thought we had bad luck but in terms of arriving in Turkey it ended up as our good luck, so you see, with luck you never know which is good and which is bad. Things are not what they seem.