Sofi Danon-Moshe with her brother Shimon Danon

This is me with my brother Shimon in the garden of our house in Pazardzhik. There's an inscription in ink 'October, 1933'. You can see our house in the background as well as the luscious vegetation, which was the result of my mother's efforts.

There was a garden around the house. At a certain time we kept some hens but later we got rid of those animals. But, on the other hand, the garden was full of roses. My mother was known to be a great gardener. We had orchard trees and a lot of quinces. We were known for our quinces as well; they looked like apples and you could eat them immediately after picking them from the tree. They were very nice and juicy. And the trees were all over the garden. Half of the garden was tiled; the other half was left with the earth. And we used to light fires in the earth part of the garden to boil the tomato sauce, and the jams for the winter. My mother used to have some of those very big pots called 'payla.' It wasn't something that all our neighbors owned. Our neighbors next door waited for my mother to finish cooking to borrow it. That was how they rotated the 'payla' to one another. The last one to use it washed it and returned it afterwards.

Our house was the only one, which was painted in red. We were surrounded by Jews. There were little doors in the fences between the houses and we could move freely from one house to another, but there were ordinary wooden doors to the street. We didn't even lock them. The neighbors could just press the handle and enter. We kept in touch mainly with my father's relatives.