Victor Baruh and his wife Ester Baruh

This is a photo of my wife, Ester Baruh, nee Asher and me. The photo was taken in Sofia in 1946, two years before we got married. Ivan Bashev, a friend of mine, said of this picture: ?Just like young Zionists who are going out to drink some coffee?. He was a very capable journalist and he did most of the work on ?Narodna Mladezh? [People's Youth] newspaper as opposed to Bogdan Botev, the editor-in-chief at the time. Later he became the Minister of Foreign Affairs. I met my future wife in Pazardjik, where she had also been interned. She was very young, 16, a high-school student. Her maiden name was Ester Leon Asher. Her father, Leon Moshe Asher, was born in the town of Samokov. He was a leatherworker. Her mother, Berta Asher was from the town of Vidin. They married in 1918 and came to live in Sofia. My wife had one brother, Mois Asher, born in 1920, who was a construction engineer and married a Bulgarian, Elena. They had one son. Immediately after the wedding in 1948 my wife went to the village of Nedelino [a village in the Rhodope Mountains in the Zlatograd district, close to the Greek border] as a temporary freelance teacher at an elementary school. I visited her there and I remember how we were riding horses along the borderline with a frontier officer and looking at the Aegean Sea. I wrote a story of a woman-teacher at the border, 'At the Front Post' that was published as a serial in the newspaper Narodna Mladezh [People's Youth] in 1949 but now I see it as a bit of a conjuncture. In fact, we celebrated our wedding when she came back for the Easter vacation in the spring of 1949 in the house of my brother Armand who had already married Mati Pinkas - a lot of people gathered; it was a great fun.