Tag #125379 - Interview #77984 (Leontina Arditi)

I was small then and I remember vaguely the famous manifestation of 24th May 1943 [12] when the Jews marched to tell the King not to expel them. As a matter of fact 24th May [13], the day of the Slavic alphabet, as well as of the saint brothers Cyril and Methodius [14], who created it, was my favorite holiday. I was 14 years old then. I remember I had put on my red blouse. Suddenly the people who participated in the events started running because there was mounted police that scattered them. I was playing in the street; mum came, collected me, brought me home and said: 'Take off this red blouse! You have chosen a bad moment to wear it!' [red as a symbolic color of the communists] It was this day that I first heard of the word 'anti-Semites'. I heard: 'The anti-Semites battered to death the Jews!' I didn't know what it meant; I couldn't even pronounce it. We were six Jewish children, who studied in the Bulgarian school, but nobody bothered us, nobody maltreated us.