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In 1948, when the state of Israel was founded, the Bulgarian Jews with communist orientation were hardliners and said that no support should be offered to a state, which doesn’t accept the socialist ideas. Jacques Nathan was the leader of the Jewish commission at the Bulgarian Communist Party’s Central Committee; he was also the chair of the Jewish Fatherland Front. We lodged a written proposal for Jews in Bulgaria not to be allowed to immigrate to Israel. Then Georgi Dimitrov [24] called him and said that the first time in their history Jews were fighting bravely for the restoration of their fatherland and Bulgarian Jews shouldn’t obstruct them. Whoever wanted to had to be allowed to freely emigrate. It was this position of Georgi Dimitrov that opened the gates for Jewish people. No other socialist state in those years let its Jews freely emigrate. The Soviet delegate to the United Nation, Andrey Gromiko was the man who lodged the proposal in the United Nations for the establishment of a Jewish state, but the Jews from the USSR weren’t allowed to emigrate.
Before [10th November] 1989 [25] I was well off, I could afford a car and a normal place to live. My wife graduated in pharmacy from the Chemical-Pharmaceutical Institute. She was in charge of the analytical laboratory there. We both had good salaries for that time. We brought up our children with the help of my wife’s mother, because the two of us were working.
The events of 1989 in Bulgaria were regression. We now have a certain bringing to life of capitalism in its most cruel forms, which I hadn’t seen before 9th September 1944. The people who were rich then, had achieved this gradually; they had collected their wealth for decades. We are now witnesses to how a monstrous opulence can be gathered for a short period. It’s obvious that we have organized crime now, which wasn’t a common thing then. I don’t know Italian Mafia in details, but I think it has its match in the Bulgarian one. Since we know that Bulgarian people were workmen and white-collars for 45 years [i.e. the communist period in Bulgaria, 1944-1989], it becomes difficult to explain from where some people have all this wealth. I think that governments after 1989 opened a wide space for crime and corruption, as well as for misappropriation and thefts from the state treasury, so that a small group of people may live a rich life sponging on the whole nation.
Before [10th November] 1989 [25] I was well off, I could afford a car and a normal place to live. My wife graduated in pharmacy from the Chemical-Pharmaceutical Institute. She was in charge of the analytical laboratory there. We both had good salaries for that time. We brought up our children with the help of my wife’s mother, because the two of us were working.
The events of 1989 in Bulgaria were regression. We now have a certain bringing to life of capitalism in its most cruel forms, which I hadn’t seen before 9th September 1944. The people who were rich then, had achieved this gradually; they had collected their wealth for decades. We are now witnesses to how a monstrous opulence can be gathered for a short period. It’s obvious that we have organized crime now, which wasn’t a common thing then. I don’t know Italian Mafia in details, but I think it has its match in the Bulgarian one. Since we know that Bulgarian people were workmen and white-collars for 45 years [i.e. the communist period in Bulgaria, 1944-1989], it becomes difficult to explain from where some people have all this wealth. I think that governments after 1989 opened a wide space for crime and corruption, as well as for misappropriation and thefts from the state treasury, so that a small group of people may live a rich life sponging on the whole nation.
Location
Bulgaria
Interview
David Kohen