Shimon Danon and friends on an excursion in the Vitosha Mountain
This is a photo taken in the Vitosha Mountain in 1975. We are on an excursion with our friends. I am on the right with my wife Anna and our daughter Raia is the girl left of us. The half-naked man behind my daughter is Jak Benvenisti. He was a very interesting person. He was director of the Zoo, a cultural figure in Sofia and a very capable person. His prewar memories were much brighter than mine because I lived my childhood during the Holocaust. Unfortunately I don't really know anything about his past, but I suppose that he was probably also interned during the Holocaust.
I reached the highest levels of power. I was deputy prosecutor-in-chief of the Republic [in communist times]. It means that I was responsible for a whole department in the chief prosecutor's office. There isn't a town in Bulgaria that I haven't visited. There isn't a prosecutor in Bulgaria who wouldn't know me. I have appeared dozens of times on TV and radio with my full Jewish name - Shimon Eshua Danon.
My wife, Anna Danon, is a doctor. I met her in the reading-room of the library of the Jewish community in the 1950s. At that time I was a law student but I also worked there as a librarian. It was a rich library, visited by a lot of Jewish students. There I met Anna and we soon got married - we had a secular wedding. Our daughter is a teacher of Spanish language at the Spanish high school in Sofia.
In my adult life I have kept my Jewish identity by regularly observing certain Jewish traditions, like Pesach, for example. As I am a member of the Jewish community in Sofia, I often visit lectures and various events that are organized by it. And, throughout the years, I have maintained regular contact with my mostly Jewish friends. I visited Israel in 1993-1994. It was a visit to my wife's relatives.
