Tag #123488 - Interview #78516 (Eshua Aron Almalech)

From my first until my fourth grade I studied in the Jewish school in Stara Zagora. The building also housed the synagogue and a canteen for the poorer Jewish families. Then I started studying in the First Junior High School in town. Every year we had to get enrolled in the school and when I was going to enroll for my third year there, the director, Mr. Ilkov, refused to accept my application, because I was a Jew. This happened in 1936. Then I enrolled in the Second Junior High School. Hitler had already taken the power in Germany and anti-Semitism was beginning to spread in Bulgaria. In 1937 my uncle Solomon, who lived in France with his family, visited us in Stara Zagora. He told my father that they should send me to the French College [3] and that he would pay for my education. So, I went to study in Plovdiv.