Moritz Assa

This is my husband Moritz Assa in Plovdiv in the 1930s, before he got arrested and sentenced for his illegal activities. He is the one in the middle and the people around him are youths who had enrolled in the Revolutionary Youth Union. My husband was involved in illegal activities and was gathering followers of the Revolutionary Youth Union [a youth antifascist organization]. He went to the school and agitated young men to become followers of the RYU. The police were looking for him and he used to hide in the homes of his friends - students. He came to sleep in our home just for one night, on 1st March 1941, after we got married, and then he got arrested. I suspect that the landlord's son, whose name was Berto Garte, had informed the police about him because everybody else in the house was our friend. We met this man again, many years later in Israel, but he insisted that it wasn?t him that had betrayed my husband. My husband was a very respected person, and when the policemen led him through Plovdiv the whole town went out to see him. He was fettered in heavy iron chains so that he couldn't run away. I remember that his legs were hurt, and we managed to hire a carriage to take him from the prison to the court. My husband was in prison in Varna [a town on the coast of the Black Sea] for three years as a political prisoner.