Victoria Angelova and Paola Gadol

This is a photo of my mother Victoria Angelova, nee Elazar, and her youngest sister Paola Gadol, nee Elazar. I suppose that the picture was taken in Kyustendil in the 1910s because Aunt Paola is still a little girl here.

In my mother's baptismal certificate it is written that she was born on 654, Gradetz Street in March 1906. My mother's parents rented a house there. Not many people had their own houses at that time. The house where my mother was born was somewhere near Hisarlaka [a hill in the central part of the town]. I don't know exactly where the house was situated because my mother's whole family moved to Sofia at the beginning of the 1920s.

All my mother's sisters got married in Sofia without having any dowry because they were all very poor. After they moved to Sofia they all found jobs and contributed to the family's income. My mother wanted to have some qualification, attended a typing course and started work as a typist. She met my father at this course. They all lived in the house on Pirotska Street then.

My mother was the only one of the sisters in the family that got married to a Bulgarian, my father Jordan Todorov Angelov. The fact that she didn't marry a Jew wasn't a problem for the family.