This is a picture of my mother, Victoria Angelova, nee Elazar, my aunt Zelma Avramova, nee Elazar and two friends of theirs. My mother Victoria is sitting on the very right, her sister is next to her and Olga, who was my mother's friend of many years is standing on the right. Rashel is standing between my mother and my aunt. Rashel is the mother of a friend of mine who was a sponsor at my wedding in Varna. Everyone in the picture is Jewish and they are all wearing the traditional clothes for Sabbath.The photo was taken in Sofia in April 1924.
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 her sisters and her brother were very young and most of them started working as shop assistants. They lived on Pirotska Street when they came to Sofia and afterwards they moved into a house on Otetz Paisii Street in the Jewish neighborhood of Iuchbunar. There were many textile merchants and my mother and sisters managed to start working in their shops. One of my aunts, my mother's sister Zelma Avramova, nee Elazar, married a textile merchant and went back to live in Kiustendil - their house was in the center of town. I remember that when I was a little child my mother used to take me to Kiustendil every summer to visit my aunt.
Victoria Angelova, Zelma Avramova and two friends
Share
Photos from this interviewee
The Centropa Collection at USHMM
The Centropa archive has been acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. USHMM will soon offer a Special Collections page for Centropa.
Academics please note: USHMM can provide you with original language word-for-word transcripts and high resolution photographs. All publications should be credited: "From the Centropa Collection at the United States Memorial Museum in Washington, DC".
Please contact collection [at] centropa.org (collection[at]centropa[dot]org).
