Haim Benaroya

This is a photo of my half-brother Haim Benaroya (first from left), taken in Lyubimets in 1942. The other man in the photo is Haim's friend, but I don?t know his name. Haim was my dearest brother after my father's death, who died when I was only 15 years old. Haim looked after me a lot. He is from the first marriage of my mother. She remained a widow when Haim was one year old. After several years she met my father in Plovdiv, where she worked in a cigarette kiosk; she married him and went to live with him in Karnobat. During World War II Haim was sent to a labor camp somewhere near Lyubimets [a small town in Southeastern Bulgaria]. He married Jula in Karnobat. She is Jewish. After the war he took his family and went to live in Israel. He had a son, Yitzhak, and a daughter, Rebecca. When I or someone else from my family traveled to Israel, we always visited Haim's children living in Petah Tikva. My older granddaughter Matilda - the daughter of my younger son - Michel, who has been living in Israel for four years, sees them almost every day and they are her family there. She is working as a psychologist in a hospital in Petah Tikva.