Tag #149695 - Interview #98226 (Berta Pando)

Not only did my father sell the milk, he also processed it. People from the nearby villages would bring the milk to him in the morning. He put it on the hob to boil, then poured it into some basins, leavened it and at dusk he would start making ‘kebapcheta’. Such were those basins – for four or five liters of milk. He used to sell the milk in the shop which was in the Gorna Neighborhood. My parents used to get up at 1.30 or 2 o’clock at night and would go to the shop to uncover the milk which was almost ready. In that shop there were some huge cases with shelves in them – there they used to put the basins with the milk and after it was ready they had to uncover it so that the yogurt could breathe and lower its temperature. In the morning they took it downstairs to the cellar, the cellar was made for that purpose. It was exactly under the shop and was three meters high. When the house was demolished it turned out the walls were more than sixty centimeters wide… So, they would take the yogurt downstairs, to make it cold and the one from the previous day would be taken up to the shop so that they could sell it. And it was yogurt difficult to describe – it was as thick as cheese, as butter… And when dad started to cut it, he used to have that spoon made from tin that was almost flat, and he dipped it into the yogurt and take some out of the basin – and the yogurt stayed like that, like a slice made of milk and when a person wanted to buy yogurt that was what he would do – dip the spoon into the basin and put two or three such slices into a bowl – as much as the customer wanted. After finishing work with the milk, dad started work on the meat. He was preparing it into a wooden trough in order to make the minced meat for the ‘kebapcheta’. He would leave blocks of ice underneath the trough in so that the meat would stay cold… Ice was sold at that time. There used to be an ice-selling cart that was passing through the neighborhood, I don’t know, they were making it somewhere… He used to buy six or seven blocks of ice every day. In the evening my parents would start grilling the meat - ‘kebapcheta’, liver, lamb sweetbreads…Dad used to make the minced meat and grill the ‘kebapcheta’. That was something only he was doing. Mum used to help in everything else. She was a waitress and a cleaner most of all.

My father became a member of the [communist] party after 9th September [1944] but I recall such a case during the Holocaust. Our neighbors were Jews and we gathered – either at our place or at some neighbor's. The adults were playing cards, poker with beans because they didn’t have money. Four or five families used to spend the evenings together – the women were playing on one of the tables, the men – on another, and we the children under the table to and fro and in the dark, outside, because we were living close together, so we could go home whenever we wished at that time…One day they had covered the window with a blanket and papa called us ‘Come here now. I want to show you something.’ He took the older children with him but we, the younger ones, joined them and he broke some toothpicks in two. He broke five toothpicks right in the middle and he arranged them on his hand, dropped some water on them and because of the water the picks moved and a David’s star appeared. My father was not a member of the Jewish community. There wasn’t anything like that at the time in Yambol.