Margarita and her husband Shemuel Kohen

The picture was taken in May 1939 in Zlatni Pyasutsi resort near Varna [a town on the Black Sea coast] at a voyage de plaisir – honeymoon with my husband Sharlo [Shemuel Kohen]. The sea seemed to me very frightening and endless. We traveled by train. We visited some other towns like Vratsa, Belogradchik and we traveled on the Danube by ship. There is neither a stamp on the back of the photo, nor any other inscription.

My husband Shemuel Samuel Kohen was born in 1906 in the town of Samokov. He was a Sephardi Jew. He had three brothers – Leon, Mois and Zhak. My husband was the youngest – the fourth child. Sharlo had finished the Jewish junior high school. After that he had enrolled in the high school and had started studying there but his parents couldn’t afford it and he couldn’t finish it, he dropped out. He started work first as a carpenter, then he became a clerk and in the end, just before getting engaged, he started helping his parents. Afterwards, when the shop needed an accountant, instead of hiring somebody else, he quit the accountancy and started helping his father and brother. After 1944 he finished planner courses and worked as a planner at machine tools enterprises like ‘Balkan’ and ‘Madara’. It was very nice to be with him, he was good company. He wasn’t picking on people, he was very tolerant and later, in marriage, he remained the same – very open-minded, easy-going and with great sense of humor – man with spirit. In fact, the choice was mutual but it seems to me his father liked me very much too.

After the wedding we were living in my husband’s house with my mother-in-law, father-in-law, my brother-in-law Zhak who a year and a half later married the Jew Dora. We, the whole family Kohen, were living on the second floor and the first and the second were rented out. On the ground floor there was a shop which was also rented out. My mother-in-law was quite a dame and very house-proud. As a young bride she used to wake me up at five in the morning: ‘Come on, come on, let’s start cleaning!’ Mum would say: ‘My God, are you wearing aprons on Saturday?’ My mother liked cleanliness too but not as much as my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law’s behavior wasn’t very normal. She liked doing the same things every single day, and that turns into a routine, becomes very boring, but I couldn’t do anything. In fact, that cleaning was mainly my task because she couldn’t do it – she was paralyzed.