Ester Baruh with her pupils

This photograph was taken on 12th December 1949 in the village of Nedelino. My wife Ester Baruh, nee Asher, is in the center wearing a green jacket given to her by the Joint [American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee]. I met my future wife in Pazardjik, where she had also been interned. She was very young, 16, a high-school student. Her maiden name was Ester Leon Asher. Her father, Leon Moshe Asher, was born in the town of Samokov. He was a leatherworker. Her mother Berta Asher was from the town of Vidin. They married in 1918 and came to live in Sofia. My wife has one brother, Mois Asher, who was a construction engineer and married a Bulgarian, Elena. They had one son. Mois died in 1995. Immediately after the wedding in 1948 my wife went to the village of Nedelino [a village in the Rhodope Mountains in the Zlatograd district, close to the Greek border] as a temporary freelance teacher at an elementary school. I visited her there and I remember how we were riding horses along the borderline with a frontier officer and looking at the Aegean Sea. I wrote a story of a woman-teacher at the border, 'At the Front Post' that was published as a serial in the newspaper Narodna Mladezh [People's Youth] in 1949 but now I see it as a bit of a conjuncture. In fact, we celebrated our wedding when she came back for the Easter vacation in the spring of 1949 in the house of my brother Armand who had already married Mati Pinkas - a lot of people gathered; it was a great fun.