David Davidsohn

This is my father, David Davidsohn. Initially, I had no photograph of my family. I found some by chance at relatives, or at the grandparents, and I took one or two to keep. Thus, I have a memory of my parents. I don't know when this photograph was taken, whether it was before or after they got married.

My father, David Davidsohn, was born in Botosani around 1900, I believe. I think he graduated secondary school - they attended 7 grades back then. My father owned an ironmonger's shop in Botosani - before he got married - where he sold other products as well.

They met either through a matchmaker or when my father happened to travel to Dorna and met my mother… These are suppositions, I didn't get to ask him these questions. I was 12 when mother died, there wasn't enough time for her to tell me all these things. Then, when my father returned after the deportation, he remarried, and there were things left untold, things that I would have wanted to learn, to know, but they remained unspoken.

My father was from Botosani, and he married my mother, who was from Vatra Dornei. And he stayed in Vatra Dornei as well after they married. My mother didn't work, she had no regular job, and my father was in charge of the store. The store was located downtown. I forget what it was called, but he ran it with my uncle, my mother's brother, Iosef Laufer. It covered the space of a two-room apartment and they sold hardware, nails, they even sold lime there.

After returning from the deportation my father developed a brain tumor. He had been beaten, hit, and, approximately 2 years after he got married again, around 1949, he started having terrible headaches. He went to Bucharest, underwent surgery - he had a brain neoplasm. They emigrated to Haifa in 1951. And life over there was hard in the beginning. They had nothing when they arrived there. My father received a job, he worked until he saw that he started having a relapse of the disease. And he died in Israel a year later, one year and a half after emigrating there, in 1952-1953. He died in Petah Tiqwa, for that's where he was hospitalized, and he is buried there.