Tag #122911 - Interview #78508 (Mayer Rafael Alhalel)

One night, when the whole family was in the house and I had just returned from one of my labor camps [see Forced labor camps in Bulgaria] [21], I don’t remember which one, and we had just fallen asleep, suddenly there was a knock on the door. I was 18 or 20 at that time and went to see who that was which was very foolish of me. When I went outside the house, I saw a German soldier holding a knife. He was drunk. He asked me in German: ‘Jude? Jude?’ That is, if Jews lived here. I started shouting at him and he raised the knife to stab me. But I was strong then and very fit from my work in the printing house before the Holocaust. So, I caught him and took away his knife. I remember that I was wearing a gold ring on my right hand, a present from my mother. I had squeezed the drunk German so hard that the ring stuck deeply into the flesh of my finger. The German ran away, but I immediately went to Dimitar. He was an influential man and lived next to us. I woke him and his children up at 2am. He immediately sent his son to the police station. The police came and took away the German who was still wandering in Kaleto. The story had a happy ending, but it could have been much worse.