Selected text
I wanted to study medicine very much. Once during our Biology lessons at the junior high school we had to dissect black beetles, as big as the biggest plums. The beetles had been intoxicated with chloroform before and had been pinned to small boards. We had manicure scissors. Our task was to take out the digestive tract of the beetle without tearing it to pieces. My dissection was the best in the class. It was then that I decided to become a doctor, and mind you, not an ordinary doctor, but a surgeon. Dreaming of this I applied for medicine in 1942 but one tenth of the average grade in my high school academic record left me out of the list of successful candidates. We competed then for places at the universities only by our records from the high school certificate. [At that time universities didn’t organize exams for admission of students, they selected candidates only according to their grade point average from the high school.]
In 1945, when I had already completed my financial education, I decided to apply for medicine. I have a stubborn character and I don’t just let things go. I asked my wife who was studying at the faculty of Roman philology in Sofia and was working as an assistant pharmacist. In fact she studied Roman philology for one year, and then she quit and graduated from the pharmacy department at the Medical Academy in Sofia. She encouraged me and promised to work during my years in university. I just sent my documents and, as a university graduate, I was automatically accepted and I just had to pass a medical check-up. Well, there I went and got a notebook with a test for color-blindness. And they detected my color-blindness. This news came very unexpectedly. I was mentally prepared to study medicine. The associate professor, who was testing me, then even invited students to see what color-blindness was. One of the students then asked why one should believe that what I saw wasn’t right and what they saw was right. That was how my dream fell through.
When I got unemployed again, I prepared identical applications and I sent them here and there. One morning at six o’clock there was a ring on the doorbell. My wife and I went to open the door, she in her nightgown and I in my pajamas. A warrant officer asked me if I was David Kohen and invited me to accompany him to the commandant-ship. My wife started shivering with fear, but I remembered that it could be possibly in connection with an application, which I lodged there, too. Lieutenant-colonel Milenkov received me and he was the chairperson of the civil staff at the Interior Ministry. We had a short conversation and he offered me a job as a chief accountant. I accepted and when I was leaving he stopped me at the door and said we hadn’t talked about the salary. I told him we would talk when he saw how I worked. Later I learnt that I had found favor with him because of this attitude.
The situation with the books at the commandant-ship was awful. There wasn’t an accounting staff. I was the first in this department. They had started working without thinking of organizing the documents in a certain order. I managed to finish the first annual financial report in April or in May, while the requirement was to present it in a month and a half after the year-end. We worked extremely hard in order to compensate the previous delay. After that they took me in the financial department of the Interior Ministry. I worked there for several years. After a year there were job cuts and I was moved to the State Archive.
I started working in the State Archive with great unwillingness. I felt disoriented because I had been fired from my previous job after having proven that I work well. My new director was once my teacher, who was a good pedagogue, and understood my situation very well. He didn’t give me any concrete tasks, but only an archivist’s guide written by some Russian author. My director told me there were no economists employed in the State Archive; there were only historians and pedagogues. So I was the only economist and he offered to take me up to where the documents of the joint-stock company ‘Granituit’ were, which was the largest public company in Bulgaria.
State archivists then had to collect documents whose ten-year validity period had expired, to put aside more valuable papers, that were worthy from a historical point of view, as well as to prepare a protocol, based on which experts had to issue their stance. Day by day I found this documentation very interesting. I started thinking how schematically we were taking the things from our social and political life. When someone was called ‘rich,’ we were thinking of him as a bloodsucker and extortionist. My job helped me see an absolutely different image of a capitalist. I saw an image of a man who defended the national interests of Bulgaria, a person who set himself against German representatives in the enterprise, defending not his interests, but the country’s interests. I was captivated by this documentation, which determined my remaining in the position at the State Archive. All papers to do with the country’s economy came to my sector. I was the head of the economy department in the State Archive, which was let me say the largest one.
After a while we started publishing a magazine of the State Archive and I started researching a topic, which was very warmly received by the scientific circles. The magazine’s editorial staff then included an Associate Professor in Economy, Hadjinikolov, who later became a professor and academician in economy history. I was attached to him as a PhD candidate. My thesis was called: ‘The Financing of German Troops in Bulgaria from 1941 to 1944.’ I have found very expressive documents that hadn’t been studied in our economy literature. Each month Bulgaria’s Council of Ministers had voted a sum for financing the German troops in the country. The thesis got published and this was my dearest child as far as my research was concerned. This publication was followed by another one focused on the German ransacking of the tobacco sector in Bulgaria during World War II.
In 1945, when I had already completed my financial education, I decided to apply for medicine. I have a stubborn character and I don’t just let things go. I asked my wife who was studying at the faculty of Roman philology in Sofia and was working as an assistant pharmacist. In fact she studied Roman philology for one year, and then she quit and graduated from the pharmacy department at the Medical Academy in Sofia. She encouraged me and promised to work during my years in university. I just sent my documents and, as a university graduate, I was automatically accepted and I just had to pass a medical check-up. Well, there I went and got a notebook with a test for color-blindness. And they detected my color-blindness. This news came very unexpectedly. I was mentally prepared to study medicine. The associate professor, who was testing me, then even invited students to see what color-blindness was. One of the students then asked why one should believe that what I saw wasn’t right and what they saw was right. That was how my dream fell through.
When I got unemployed again, I prepared identical applications and I sent them here and there. One morning at six o’clock there was a ring on the doorbell. My wife and I went to open the door, she in her nightgown and I in my pajamas. A warrant officer asked me if I was David Kohen and invited me to accompany him to the commandant-ship. My wife started shivering with fear, but I remembered that it could be possibly in connection with an application, which I lodged there, too. Lieutenant-colonel Milenkov received me and he was the chairperson of the civil staff at the Interior Ministry. We had a short conversation and he offered me a job as a chief accountant. I accepted and when I was leaving he stopped me at the door and said we hadn’t talked about the salary. I told him we would talk when he saw how I worked. Later I learnt that I had found favor with him because of this attitude.
The situation with the books at the commandant-ship was awful. There wasn’t an accounting staff. I was the first in this department. They had started working without thinking of organizing the documents in a certain order. I managed to finish the first annual financial report in April or in May, while the requirement was to present it in a month and a half after the year-end. We worked extremely hard in order to compensate the previous delay. After that they took me in the financial department of the Interior Ministry. I worked there for several years. After a year there were job cuts and I was moved to the State Archive.
I started working in the State Archive with great unwillingness. I felt disoriented because I had been fired from my previous job after having proven that I work well. My new director was once my teacher, who was a good pedagogue, and understood my situation very well. He didn’t give me any concrete tasks, but only an archivist’s guide written by some Russian author. My director told me there were no economists employed in the State Archive; there were only historians and pedagogues. So I was the only economist and he offered to take me up to where the documents of the joint-stock company ‘Granituit’ were, which was the largest public company in Bulgaria.
State archivists then had to collect documents whose ten-year validity period had expired, to put aside more valuable papers, that were worthy from a historical point of view, as well as to prepare a protocol, based on which experts had to issue their stance. Day by day I found this documentation very interesting. I started thinking how schematically we were taking the things from our social and political life. When someone was called ‘rich,’ we were thinking of him as a bloodsucker and extortionist. My job helped me see an absolutely different image of a capitalist. I saw an image of a man who defended the national interests of Bulgaria, a person who set himself against German representatives in the enterprise, defending not his interests, but the country’s interests. I was captivated by this documentation, which determined my remaining in the position at the State Archive. All papers to do with the country’s economy came to my sector. I was the head of the economy department in the State Archive, which was let me say the largest one.
After a while we started publishing a magazine of the State Archive and I started researching a topic, which was very warmly received by the scientific circles. The magazine’s editorial staff then included an Associate Professor in Economy, Hadjinikolov, who later became a professor and academician in economy history. I was attached to him as a PhD candidate. My thesis was called: ‘The Financing of German Troops in Bulgaria from 1941 to 1944.’ I have found very expressive documents that hadn’t been studied in our economy literature. Each month Bulgaria’s Council of Ministers had voted a sum for financing the German troops in the country. The thesis got published and this was my dearest child as far as my research was concerned. This publication was followed by another one focused on the German ransacking of the tobacco sector in Bulgaria during World War II.
Location
Bulgaria
Interview
David Kohen