Tag #125883 - Interview #98885 (Bitoush Behar)

What I remember first about the period of the Holocaust is how my father was completing the documents. We enlisted in a declaration all our property and real estate – an incessant succession of documents [Law for Protection of the Nation] [28]. They didn’t take anything from us because there was nothing to take. We were living in rented lodgings but we had to pay very high taxes for everything we owned. After that appeared the badges [yellow stars] [29] that all the people of Jewish origin over the age of ten were obliged to put on. We were obliged to wear them. The badge had to be sewn, but we put them on with safety pins so that we could put them on different clothes. My father was buying them from somewhere, I don’t know where from. Dad had bought a badge for every member of our family. There were differences in the badges of the Jews who were decorated with a military star and the cripples from the wars. Theirs had a big black button and not a David’s star. My father had taken part in the wars but hadn’t been injured and he was wearing an ordinary badge. The ones who had a button on their badges were privileged but I don’t know in what way. We, the Jews, were not allowed to work at certain institutions like the police, the municipality council, but the craftsmen went on working. After 1943, when the Jews interned from Sofia came, the doctors were forbidden to work in the towns they lived in [Internment of Jews in Bulgaria] [30]. They were sent to other places, where there were no doctors. That’s how the doctors of Jewish origin from Plovdiv were sent to the most difficult job positions. During the war incredible home production developed – necklace making, bag-knitting, knitting of different hand-made objects. People were trying to earn a morsel. There was a great demand on the market and people were in need of all possible goods, you could sell and buy anything – war.