Buka Yuda Madzhar and Mordohay Sabitay Madzhar dressed in folk costumes

The photo was taken around 1920 in Dupnitsa. Everybody is dressed in folk costumes from this part of the country. In the first row in the middle, fourth from left, is my mother, Buka Yuda Madzhar. My father, Mordohay Sabitay Madzhar, is also on the photo (upper row - sixth from left to right). My father was born in Dupnitsa in 1892. He inherited his father's gut processing trade, which had nothing to do with the kashrut; the guts were sold to Bulgarians who produced sausages. My father was a very kind man and was not strict; he never hit me. I remember that once he was very angry with me, and yet he didn't beat me. He was a kind-hearted man. He very much believed in people, he was kind of naive. He had many Bulgarian friends. That's why during the Law for the Protection of the Nation we didn't experience much hardship. We had friends in the villages and in town, who brought us flour and bread; there was a miller, who was a friend of my father. The baker also respected him. My father was a well-known man and everyone was willing to help him. But sometimes his faith in people got him into trouble. Once he came to work in Sofia with a fellow man from Dupnitsa. They earned a lot of money, but his so-called partner cheated him and gave him nothing. My father was very kind, but maybe because of his job and his fellow workers, butchers, who are on the whole ruder, wild and unrestrained, he was very brave. I can?t say that he was rude, but he reacted very fast in dangerous situations. I remember once during the war [WWII], a man came into our yard and broke our windows, probably because he hated Jews. My father jumped outside with an axe and ran after him. He found the man hiding in the toilet in the yard, holding a knife. Attacking with the knife, he cut my mother's hand and my father hit him so hard with the axe that I thought he killed the man. The man was alive, thankfully, but my point is that my father was afraid of nothing. He had two brothers, Rahamin and Aron, and four sisters ? Miriam, Buka, Vida and Rashel. My mother was born in 1894 in Dupnitsa. She didn't work; she took care of me, my sister and the house. She was the one who cooked. My grandmother also cooked sometimes, but since she helped my father with his work, my mother was in charge of the household chores. When she was young, she worked in the tobacco warehouses; she came from a very poor family and didn't go to school. Although our family was poor, my father earned enough money so that we would not be among the poorest ones. Most of the people in Dupnitsa lived in misery. Only my mother looked after us, and we never had a maid. She was a very good cook. My father would often bring some edible offal home from work and my mother made various meals with it.