The cover of Victor Baruh's book 'Beyond the Law'

The cover of Victor Baruh's book 'Beyond the Law'

This is the front cover of the second edition of my book ?Beyond the Law?. It was a successful book: there are six reprints of it and it has been translated into French [with the title 'Hors-la-loi'] and English. I don't know if it is still available. ?Beyond the Law? is dedicated to the participation of the Jewish Youth in the Resistance. My family and I suffered the consequences of the Law for the Protection of the Nation and my experiences influenced this story. There are a lot of true episodes in there. For example, there is a description of the demonstration on 24th May 1943 against the internment of Jews from Sofia. I remember that a young man took a flag off a green wooden fence and walked with it at the head of the procession. This scene is in the book. When the writer Dragomir Assenov read this in my book, he said: 'That was me'. When we came back to Sofia from Pazardjik, we didn't find anything - everything had disappeared: the furniture, the books, everything. We found ourselves 'at a bare meadow' [Bulgarian idiom for 'down and out']. I joined the II Guards Regiment in Radomir but I didn't leave for the front, I worked as a journalist with the Narodna Gvardiya [National Guard]. After the demobilization I worked at Partizdat publishing house as a technical editor; we produced two very good editions - one of them was a volume of poetry by Nikola Vaptsarov with Radevsky as editor and Shmirgela as illustrator [Hristo Radevsky (1903-1997) is a well-known Bulgarian poet; Shmirgela a well-known artist]. Afterwards I worked at Narodna Mladezh, then at their publishing house and finally at the publishing house of Bulgarski Pisatel [Bulgarian Writer] where I was editor-in-chief at the time when I retired. Meanwhile I was also engaged in literature. I wrote ten or eleven books for adults and three books for children.
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