This is my sister, Anuta Martinet (nee Rosenberg), in the dissection room at the University of Montpellier, in France. The picture was taken in the early 1940s, she must have already been married at that time.
After a year at the Medical School in Padua, in 1939 my sister decided to move to Montpellier, to a better university. It was easier for my parents as well, because we had some relatives in France who could help us with the money transfer. 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.
When she finished the 2nd year, she sent us a letter - actually, she sent us letters all the time - asking for some papers to be mailed to her. My mother asked her: 'But why do you need these papers? You took all the necessary papers with you when you left.' My mother immediately suspected she was planning to get married over there and wrote to her: 'Don't you dare get married in France, I won't agree to your marrying in France, because, if you do, I'll never see you again! There's a war coming, these are hard times, and I don't want to… You'd better… you'd better come home!' My sister wrote a moving letter to my mother, who had married our father for love, telling her: 'Mother, you of all people, you, who married Father because you loved him so much, how can you do this to me?' Eventually, my sister got married in France.
Her husband's last name was Martinet. He wasn't a Jew. He had a very good financial situation. He met her in class, in the dissection room. He used to go there to watch. He was from Paris, worked as an engineer, was specialized in photographic and medical equipment, and was an intern at the Medical School. So he met her, fell in love with her - she was very beautiful, and very clever if you think of how she had come from Italy and had proved herself worthy in Paris! Did I mention that she was pretty? So she got married. This meant that, beginning with the 3rd year, my father didn't have to send her that load of money anymore. Unfortunately, my sister's studying was in vain. She never got to practice as a physician. Before she could pass the last two exams, the Germans seized her and took her away… Her husband was fighting in the French army and, when they withdrew to the mountains, he told her: 'Anja, come with me, don't stay here all by yourself.' To which she replied: 'Well, what can I do? There's the hospital,' - she was working in a hospital - 'and I have two more exams to pass. What am I supposed to do? Postpone them, after I studied for six years? I worked too hard to do that… So let God's will be done.' Two days later, the Germans took her and moved her from camp to camp, because she was a doctor. Finally, she got to Auschwitz. Someone who had escaped from there told her husband about her, and her husband wrote to us. The former inmate remembered that they used my sister as a physician at first, and later they sacrificed her.
