Shimon Danon, his wife Anna Danon and friends on an excursion to Musala

This is a photo of my wife and me with friends on holiday the year after we got married. We were holidaying in Borovets [a famous Bulgarian winter resort]. These friends were Bulgarians. I would like to emphasize the fact that we have always had good relations with Bulgarian people - nobody cared if you were a Bulgarian or a Jew. We were very well accepted in Borovets, we had long excursions all over the mountains. Wrong things were said about socialism, that people weren?t able to freely visit western countries. At that time I had been to London, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Moscow - at least to 20 countries, including Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey. In spite of the propaganda that is spread by some Jewish agencies that in communist times the position of Jews had been very bad, I would even say that it wasn't bad then. It's true, for example, that the relatives of some Jews who were living abroad were monitored and watched; they weren't allowed to hold governmental and state posts. The number of Jews working in the network of the state security system was very limited. And now - for example, Jews in Bulgaria haven't yet been compensated for their property losses during the Holocaust. But 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.