Travel

Otto Schvalb
Presov
Slovak Republic
Interviewer: Martin Korcok
Date of interview: February 2005

Mr. Otto Schvalb lives with his wife on the outskirts of the town of Presov, in a beautiful apartment furnished with antiques. He and his wife are immensely kind and hospitable people with a sense of humor. Mr. Schvalb worked as a dentist and university professor for a long time. He fell under nature’s spell while still young, and has returned to it with affection, time and again throughout his whole life. He has had to give up this passion of his in the last year due to health problems.

My family background

Growing up

During the war

After the war

Glossary

My family background

I don’t remember my great-grandparents, because they died almost as soon as I was born. I only remember my grandparents. My grandparents on my father’s side were the Schvalbs. Grandfather’s name was Moric Schvalb, and was born in 1859. He worked as a merchant in the town of Presov. He owned a mixed-goods store. He sold flour, sugar and similar things. My grandfather on my father’s side was an Orthodox Jew. During the time of my youth, Presov had both a Neolog 1 and Orthodox community 2. This basically meant that the Orthodox Jews were stricter than the Neologs. In everyday life, the difference between the two communities manifested itself mainly in the fact that Orthodox Jews attended their synagogue every Friday and Saturday, and of course during all holidays.

My father’s mother was named Hermina Schvalbova, nee Frankl. In her birth certificate it says that she was born in Stiavnicka, but her family lived in Vychodna. She was born in 1863. My grandmother kept a kosher household. She had separate utensils for meat and milk. The wife of their building superintendent used to help her out at home. For example, she would wash my grandparents’ dishes. Because they kept Sabbath, they weren’t allowed to work on Friday evening and on Saturday. They wouldn’t even turn on the lights; usually I did that. I wasn’t as religious as my grandparents.

My father’s parents lived right in the center of Presov, on Main Street. They lived in a spacious house. My parents and I lived in the front part of the house, facing Main Street. My father was a doctor, and also had his office there. My grandparents lived in the back part of the tract, where they had their own house. It was actually an extension to the main house. That’s where they lived. There, they had two rooms, a kitchen, pantry and washroom. My grandfather’s store was beside my father’s clinic. In the time of my youth the building already had electricity, and we also had running water. In the back there was a courtyard that was completely paved with stone tiles. In the time of my father’s youth my grandparents had a doggie, but they had the poor thing shot. We later also had a dog.

My grandfather had another house built in the courtyard. He had it as insurance, that when he would be old and not able to work, he could live from renting it out. Two Jewish families lived in it. Downstairs there was the family of a teacher, and upstairs the family of some merchant. Both families were Orthodox. I was friends with their children, but otherwise I have to say that most of my friends were from the Neolog community. Of course, during Sabbath we couldn’t play in the courtyard, because my grandfather would yell at us. So we went to play elsewhere. Despite the fact that I belonged to the Orthodox community, I believed teachings that were less strict. Our Orthodox synagogue in Presov was one of the most beautiful in Central Europe. Even the Neolog one was nice. It had a choir, so we used to go sing there, because in the Orthodox one it wasn’t allowed. Otherwise, as I say, my father was Orthodox, his father was also Orthodox, I was also Orthodox, but I was already a modern Orthodox.

My grandfather wore clothing normal for the times. Because in those days he lived in the modern world, so he also dressed like every other person. If he had lived 300 years ago, he would have dressed according to the times. He would have had a yellow belt and dressed like all Jews. I can’t remember very well whether he wore tallit under his clothing, but I think so. He never forgot his hat before leaving the house. My grandmother also dressed according to the times. Despite being Orthodox, she never wore a wig. My father’s parents never visited the mikveh in town.

Before the war, the Orthodox rabbi in Presov was Mr. Lau. After him came a rabbi from Stropkov. I don’t remember his name any more, despite the fact that he was a famous rabbi. He was a very interesting and wise person. People in the town ranked him among the miraculous rabbis. A number of interesting stories from my life are connected with him. Because my father was a doctor, when the rabbi had health problems, he got used to calling my father. On one such occasion he asked my father how big his family was. My father said that he had a son. At that time I was about three months old. The rabbi gave my father an orange and told him to have my mother cut it in half, to eat one half and put the other half away. My mother put the second half away at the back of a cupboard and completely forgot about it. After about ten years that half of the orange was found, and imagine that it hadn’t rotted!

The rabbi used to visit graves in Poland. During one such trip, as he was walking among the graves, he cut his leg on a wire. When he returned to Presov, his leg was already swollen. He called my father, who said to him, ‘Mr. Rabbi, you have to go to the hospital, because it needs more serious medical treatment, otherwise you’re in danger of blood poisoning.’ Upon hearing this, the rabbi called a shammash and gave him a prayer book, into which he had placed a piece of paper, and refused to go to the hospital. My father asked him what was written on the piece of paper. The rabbi answered, ‘I wrote down when I’m going to die.’ And it also happened that way. He knew the date of his own death in advance!

The main thing I remember about my grandfather is that I used to annoy him quite often. We used to play soccer in the courtyard and he didn’t like that. We damaged the walls with a shovel, broke a window, but otherwise everything was all right. I remember my grandmother better. She was a very beautiful woman. She more or less buzzed about the household, and when visitors came, she would attend to them. That was what was required by the times. She went about dressed in dark clothing; in those days that was the fashion.

My grandfather on my mother’s side was named Gustav Kempler. He owned a textile shop. He was born in 1870 in the town of Nowy Targ, which today belongs to Poland. He came to what is today Slovakia during the time of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. He settled in Trstena na Orave. He opened a store there and prospered. He was a well-positioned man. As far as Jewishness goes, Grandpa went to the synagogue. The town had a Jewish community and a cantor. However, my maternal grandfather was more modern than my father’s father. He died in 1935. They took him to the hospital in Ruzomberk, and there they declared that he had cancer.

My grandmother on my mother’s side was named Jana Kemplerova, nee Reisz. She was born in 1880. She came from Liptovska Sielnica. Today the town is partly flooded by the Liptovska Mara water reservoir. Sielnica was a big village. My grandmother’s father was a farmer; he had horses and such.

My mother’s parents lived in Trstena na Orave. Grandpa owned a store and family house, which had three rooms, a pantry and washroom. In the courtyard in the back they had a smaller house where the helpers who worked in grandpa’s store lived. There were no farm animals in the courtyard, only a large garden. My mother’s brothers, that is, my uncles, used to take care of the garden. My mother’s youngest brother, Martin Kempler, was only eleven years older than me. So he and I used to hike around the surrounding mountains. So he took care of the garden along with my grandmother. While my mother was still single, she lived with her parents, four brothers and a sister. Her sister died in 1921 at the age of 16. I don’t remember her name.

I had a few funny experiences with my grandparents. My grandfather once had an elegant suit made. He came home, carefully laid it out and left. I saw long pants, took some scissors, and nicely cut some of it off. I made them into shorts. Grandpa was angry, but didn’t beat me. If his sons had done it, they would have for sure gotten walloped. I could have been all of six at the time. But I used to do similar things at home as well. My father’s younger brother, Eugen Schvalb, who was a lawyer, used to very much like soups: chicken, beef, it didn’t matter. When my mother would prepare them for him, I was used to ‘nicely’ seasoning those soups. He wouldn’t scold me, but only ask for a different soup.

The difference between life in Presov and Trstena was big. In Trstena, that was different fun, different friends. In Presov they were burgher’s boys, in Trstena farmer’s boys. They would go about on horses, take them to water and so on. I don’t know how many Jews lived in Trstena. I’m assuming that there were a bit over a hundred, maybe 120. They had their own synagogue and school. But when I stayed with my grandparents in Trstena, I didn’t go to the synagogue. During Sabbath we mainly played cards. My grandfather’s store was of course closed during Sabbath; no business was done during that time. I would say that my grandfather wasn’t religious, but kept that Jewish ‘form.’

Trstena didn’t even have any non-Jewish shops; all the merchants in the town were Jews. My grandfather Kempler had a large textile shop. He sold textiles and shoes. Then there was a hardware store in town. The hardware store belonged to Baumann. His son was a doctor, he was named Otto Baumann. He disappeared during the Slovak National Uprising 3; they killed him. Then there was a mixed-goods store. The owner was named Strauss. He also sold sweets. The soda shop was owned by Sajn. There was a hotel in town; the owner was named Stoter.

In my own way I liked all of my grandparents, in that child’s way. Despite this, I had a better relationship with the ones in Trstena. Maybe also because I saw them less often. I would go there for summer holidays, and at Christmas, so once, twice a year. I would go there together with my parents. I was together with my father’s parents constantly, so I was more used to them. My mother’s mother treated me more affectionately, or how shall I put it. It’s hard to define. My mother’s mother baked excellent goodies.

Whenever we came by train to visit them during winter, a horse-drawn sleigh would be waiting for us. The train station was about a kilometer from town. There was a lot of snow. A roast goose would be waiting for us on the table as the first meal. Grandma also made excellent ‘Koszut crescents.’ It was this delicious fine pastry made of vanilla dough, brushed with egg and sprinkled with sugar. Very good. In those days they didn’t make cakes, as far as I remember. People liked different sweets. One always ate and drank well at my grandparents’ in Trstena. In one word, everything there was good.

Grandma and Grandpa Kempler spoke several languages. Between themselves and with me they spoke Slovak and Hungarian. They had already studied in Slovak schools. However, with my father my grandmother spoke German. Grandma and Grandpa Schvalb from Presov spoke exclusively German. One can’t say, though, that only German was spoken among the Jews in Presov. People also spoke Hungarian, and because my mother was, as they say a Slovak ‘from the floor,’ she spoke excellent Slovak. However my mother also communicated very well in the Hungarian language. Otherwise, in the Saris region, during the time of my youth, Slovak predominated. However, a Saris dialect was spoken, and Hungarian words were inserted. [Editor’s note: Saris is a historic land in the northern part of Eastern Slovakia and named after Saris Castle. It is made up, essentially, of the districts of Presov, Bardejov, Svidnik and Stropkov, the first of these being the regional cultural and economic centre. Among Saris’ popular leisure resorts are the Domasa Dam, and the winter centers of Drienica-Lysa and Buce. Evidence of the region’s culture and history is abundant, including distinct popular tradition and surviving folk architecture, the pride of the region being, its wooden churches, and more numerous here than in any other part of Slovakia. Totaling no fewer than twenty-six, they are together classified as a National Cultural Site.]

In Bratislava they didn’t understand this language very much. Hungarian and German dominated in intellectual circles; they spoke Slovak, but not as well. I think that until the year 1918, when the [First Czechoslovak] Republic 4 was created, they spoke Hungarian. But after as well, because Slovakia didn’t have teachers that knew how to teach Slovak, so Czechs used to come here and teach it. That wasn’t Slovak, though, but Czechoslovak. Civil servants, however, had to start to learn Slovak; it would have been hard to replace them all at once. But beginnings were hard, and Hungarian was used, up until for example the courts were completely Slovak.

My father, Alexander Schvalb, was one of two children. His brother, Eugen Schvalb, was a lawyer. My father got along very well with his brother. In those days it just didn’t happen that two Jewish siblings would argue. And it didn’t happen! Our entire family in Presov lived in a large house on Main Street, where everyone, that is, my father’s parents, my father’s brother Eugen, and my father, had their own separate apartment. Our former President Havel 5, called a house inhabited in this way a ‘rabbit hutch.’ Eugen was single. His apartment was made up of two rooms and a washroom. He also had an office in his apartment. Despite the fact that all the families lived in the same house, everyone led his own household. For example, when dinner was being made, my grandmother would cook her own at her place, and so would my mother. Only my father’s brother didn’t cook. He ate mainly at his parents’. My mother would of course also invite him over.

My father’s brother devoted himself to his law practice. During his free time he would go to a coffee house, where he would meet with friends. It was an exclusively Jewish group. Today it’s not like that any more. When I go to the coffee house, my friends are mostly non-Jews. In those days things were different. There were 20 Jewish doctors in the town, 20 Jewish lawyers, and they had their families, so it was a large community. Of course among them were also businessmen, farmers, engineers – a large community.

My father was born in 1887 in Presov. First he studied at a well-known evangelical college in town, where he got his high school diploma. After the end of his studies at this school, he left for Budapest. There he studied at the medical faculty of the University of Lorant Eotvos. From Budapest he returned to Presov. In time he opened his own office and worked as a general practitioner. His patients came from a mixed society, meaning both Jews and non-Jews. Similarly, there were people from higher circles, but also workers.

In the time of the First Republic there was a so-called medical fund. It’s something like today’s health insurance. The medical fund, that was more expensive insurance, that’s why it had as its clients, let’s say only better-situated people. Then there was a so-called worker’s insurance company, where my father would always go and see patients for two hours. You know, with doctors it was never the case that at 3pm their workday would be over. Doctors had to be available 24 hours a day; they could be called upon at any time.

If I had to think about my father’s interests, I would say that his hobby was listening to folk songs. Always, when he returned home, he would put on a record. He listened to nice, sentimental melodies. He liked this very much. Of course he and my mother also attended balls. However, his work didn’t allow him to have much fun. Often it would happen that he’d be called away from a ball, or the movie theater, to a patient, and he’d have to go. That’s the difference between then and now. Now, when a doctor finishes his eight hours at work, and isn’t on call, he’s a free man. At one time it wasn’t like that. Poor Father, how many times he had to go. I remember these things very well. Often people would arrive at 2 or 3am, ring and call my father to come see someone who was sick. They didn’t come only from the town itself, but also the surrounding quarters. For example, there was a workers’ quarter here, called Argentina. Father would get dressed and go.

Our apartment was made up of five rooms. There was a bedroom, den, salon, and dining room. Of course we had a kitchen, bathroom and a veranda too. My father also had a separate office. We had a servant who cleaned and helped my mother with the cooking. She kept house and did the work connected with that. When we had guests, she served them. We had guests quite often. Mostly they were Jews, but non-Jews also visited us regularly. When my mother’s girlfriends came to visit, they would play cards. Male visitors would go to the den, and sit and debate. In those days people entertained themselves differently; today it’s not like that any more.

Various groups of people would come to visit my parents. One was solely a card group. These were men from Christian and Jewish society mixed together, and they played cards together. This didn’t happen any more in the post-war period. In essence they did it only for fun. They only played for halers [smallest unit of currency, 100 halers = 1 crown]. A person could win at most 10 crowns. That wasn’t a huge sum. I think that the change was there only to give the game some purpose. In Presov there were a lot of balls held. There was for example a Jewish Ball, the Matica Ball, the Tennis Ball...Life was very social. [Editor’s note: The Slovak Matica was founded at its founding Majority Assembly on 4th August 1863 at St. Martin in Turciany. Its mission is the development and strengthening of Slovak patriotism, to deepen the relationship of citizens to Slovak nationality.]

My father didn’t belong to any political party. He was without party affiliation, but people in the town liked him. For example, after World War II they would often invite him over, even the Communists, to social gatherings. In the post-war years my father became an honorary citizen of the town of Presov, which brought him significant privileges.

In my parents’ home there was a large bookcase, built into the wall. Imagine how many books it held. It would be hard for me to say what my parents read; I didn’t prepare for this interview and didn’t think about it. For sure my father also had professional literature, that is not only some light tomfoolery. We also used to subscribe to newspapers – during the First Republic to Kassai Ujsag [a newspaper from Kosice].

My mother, Maria Schvalbova, nee Kemplerova, was born in 1900 in Trstena na Orave. Trstena was a typical Slovak town. What this means is that my mother’s native tongue was also Slovak. But she also spoke Hungarian well. My mother had four siblings: Jozef, Mikulas, Bartolomej and Martin. Besides she had a sister, who died at a young age of the Spanish Flu.

Jozef was a doctor in a Moravian spa town, Roznov nad Radhostem. The town was about 20 kilometers from the Slovak border. Uncle Jozef and his wife Margareta, who was also Jewish, had a daughter named Vera. During World War II he and his wife stayed in the Protectorate. They deported him to Terezin, from where we found out that after four days they sent him to Maly Trostinec in Belarus. I had never heard of that place before. The town is between Minsk and Mogolewo. Later the Russians put out a small brochure about that camp, but they only talk about their captured soldiers in it. Nothing about the Jews is written in it. I thought about visiting the place, but in the end I never did. Jozef was the only one of my mother’s siblings to not survive the war. He died together with his wife and seven-year-old daughter in the Holocaust.

Another of my mother’s brothers was named Martin. He had a master’s degree in Pharmacy. He worked as a pharmacist. Mikulas took over the family store from his father, and Bartolomej was a lawyer. What can I tell you about them, they all lived well, liked girls, and liked to eat. Before the war all of my mother’s brothers were single. They didn’t get married until after World War II.

Growing up

My name is Otto Schvalb and I was born in Presov, in the year 1925. I was my parents’ only child. Despite being an only child, my mother didn’t spoil me at all. My mother believed in a good upbringing, which means – how would I say it – she didn’t tolerate all the foolishness that I got up to. I always had to be home exactly when she said. Before I reached the age of six, I had a nanny. I liked her, she was a kind girl. She came from around Gelnica. She belonged to the Mantaks, Spis Germans, so we talked mainly German with each other. [Editor’s note: More or less tolerated form of German, in the regional dialect called ‘mantak’, microculture in the quite isolated small town of Medzev (German Metzenseifen) with about 4,000 inhabitants in the valley of the Bodva River in Eastern Slovakia. It deals with the actively spoken Mantak language and with the use or even abuse of mantak elements of folklore (songs, dances, traditional costumes etc.). The original Mantak population, that had been living there since the Middle Ages and that managed to stay during the cruel times of the compulsory transfer under President Benes in 1946/1947, was strongly discriminated against.] At the age of six I began to attend a school where the subjects were taught in Slovak, and maybe also for this reason my parents decided that I don’t need a German nanny.

Before the war we observed all the high holidays at home, but for example during Sukkot we didn’t put up a tent any more. There were, however, families that did. I can’t say that as a child I had a favorite Jewish holiday. I didn’t even go to the synagogue very much, only when my grandfather on my father’s side took me along with him. Even before the war a little Christmas tree would appear in our household, of course without any sort of cross, only decorated with candy and chocolate. It was mainly for the girls that worked in our household. In the beginning my grandfather was against it, to decorate even a small Christmas tree in our house, but then he let himself be convinced that it wasn’t anything important. So we didn’t celebrate Christmas at all, only Chanukkah. We would pray and Chanukkah supper would be prepared. We got gifts. After World War II, in the beginning I observed mainly Yom Kippur. But I only fasted until dinnertime, no later than that.

I attended elementary school for four years, and then I transferred to an Evangelical [Protestant] high school in Presov. Of course we also had catechism classes there. The Protestants went to Protestant classes, the Catholics to theirs, and we Jews also had ours. We were taught by a teacher who also worked at the Jewish school. Once a week he would come to our high school and we had religious education. My favorite subject at school was summer holidays. But if I really had to think about it, I preferred the humanistic subjects, for example history and geography. I liked to travel and my interest in world events has held on to this day. So it’s stayed with me. Math and Latin, which I had to learn entirely by memory, I liked less. I liked almost all of the teachers at school, because there weren’t any nasty teachers there. Not one of my teachers, with the exception of the catechism teacher, was a Jew. Among my classmates there were a few Jews here and there. But you couldn’t say that I was friends only with Jews. I was friends with these, and with those. It was a mixed bunch.

After school my friends and I used to go to the swimming pool. We also boxed. In the winter we used to go skating and skiing at the Calvary [a place where the stations of the cross were]. We also liked to go cycling. We did everything. Often we played Indians. Today children sit in front of the TV until their eyes go baggy. I was also a member of the local Maccabi 6 and Slavia sports clubs. In Maccabi I swam, and I played soccer for Slavia. In those days it was amazing. We had four soccer teams. There was ETVE, the Hungarian Torekves, Slavia, and Maccabi. [Editor’s note: the evolution of soccer in Slovakia dates from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century, when the ETVE Presov (1896) and PTE Bratislava soccer clubs came into being.] There was a healthy, sporting rivalry between the clubs. As I already said, I didn’t play soccer for Maccabi, but for Slavia. The Maccabi team roster was fully occupied by good players, and well, so I got into Slavia. I just played for the junior team. They called us ‘patkani’ [rats].

The Maccabi in Presov was composed of only Jewish athletes. There were many excellent athletes, who excelled for example in swimming. The Olympic swimming champion Cik was at a competition here, and lost a race. I think that Viktor Mandel beat him. The Olympic champion almost died of shame. But there were also other good swimmers. Poor souls, almost all of them died during the Holocaust; soccer players too, for example Miki Harmann, an excellent forward, renowned for his looks – when he walked onto the field, women went crazy.

During the war

In the pre-war period, no-one took the fact that I was a Jew negatively. I never had an anti-Jewish incident. When the Slovak state [see Slovakia] 7 was being created, they walked and shouted: ‘Slovakia for the Slovaks, Palestine for the Jews.’ Slogans like that against the Jews. Then we of course could no longer go to school and they threw us out of high school. The anti-Jewish laws of course affected me very much. In the end 270 anti-Jewish laws were passed, the so-called Jewish Codex 8. Besides being allowed to breathe, everything was forbidden. It was forbidden to go to the park, it was forbidden to go to the movie theater, it was forbidden to go visit the swimming pool, skating was forbidden, everything was forbidden. Of course I didn’t pay attention to all the prohibitions. For example, I didn’t wear a yellow star [see Yellow Star in Slovakia] 9, that didn’t even occur to me. I wasn’t afraid that I wasn’t wearing it. Of course, my parents didn’t approve, but I didn’t ask them. I simply said that I wasn’t going to wear it. It would have been different, if I had looked like a Jew. Those that knew me didn’t inform on me, and strangers didn’t even notice it. Of course I had to stop hanging out with my non-Jewish friends. Boys who I had played soccer with for Slavia were still my friends, but it wasn’t like before. There were even some among them that told the others: ‘Leave that Jewish boy, that Jew, be.’

I think that the first transport of Jews from Presov left on 22nd March 1942. On it were boys between the ages of 16 and 18. Then they also sent a girls’ transport out of town, but that one was turned back at Poprad. When my father found out that family transports were due to start, we hid. My father’s brother was already deceased at that time. He died in 1935 of pneumonia. I hid with my mother and father. Someone informed on us though, the guardsmen [Hlinka-Guards] 10 came and took us away. We were gathered in one schoolyard in town. The next day guardsmen came and announced to us that the Germans would ‘shine a light’ on all of us. They took us to the train station where we were supposed to be put on transports. There were 700 people there, and we were waiting for another 300 from Bardejov who were supposed to arrive by train. However, the train didn’t arrive, and because they hadn’t gathered together 1,000 people, which was how many were needed to make up a transport, they only sent us to Zilina.

In Zilina they separated us and we went to the local reception camp. From here my mother sent a note to her brothers. One of them had an Aryan fiancee, and she knew the commander of the Zilina reception camp. She was a former classmate of his. They let me and my mother go, and my father stayed in the camp as a doctor. In the end the Minister of Health put out a decree saying that the state had a shortage of doctors, and so no more doctors of Jewish origin would be let onto transports headed outside of Slovak borders. Aryan doctors were at the front, and many towns were without doctors. So that’s how we got to Hrinova. At that point very good times began for me. It was likely sometime at the beginning of August 1942.

In Hrinova there were no Jews or anti-Jewish sentiments. Once again I could run around outside with other boys. We played soccer and volleyball together. In the winter we skied. These new friends of mine took me everywhere with them. The boys and I hiked in the mountains. There was beautiful nature all around us, and that made up for everything for me. I’m a nature lover to this day. I had it relatively good. Despite this it wasn’t freedom, because we were still Jews.

Then when the Germans arrived, that was worse. We had to escape to Polana. We left Hrinova together with the army and police, heading towards Banska Bystrica. Luckily, on the way we met a group of soldiers somewhere near Banska Bystrica. They said, ‘Don’t go there, the Germans were already there.’ From the time we left Hrinova, we had to hide out. In Polana, at first the mayor himself hid us. People found out about it though; they also found out that my father was a doctor. People started going to the mayor, as he had a doctor there, and it started to get dangerous. So the mayor found us a hiding place with a local farmer, who he rented land to, he gave him a cow, and said, ‘You’ll get this, but you have to hide these people.’ Maybe we were also lucky because people always liked my father very much. They hid us in the mountains, here and there, because there were German patrols. Once we were in a place where only one single wall separated us from the Germans. I was sleeping on one side of the wall and the Germans on the other. When they coughed, I took advantage of it and coughed as well. If the Germans had found out that we were there, God save us...We were liberated in February 1945.

Grandma Schvalbova also hid with us in Hrinova. When we left there for Polana, grandma stayed. Imagine that when the Russians were liberating the village from German occupation, they threw a grenade into the house where my grandmother was hiding. They covered her with a blanket, and left her there, wounded. She was lying there like that for several days. She held on until we arrived. She saw me, kissed me, wept and died.

In the meantime my parents had returned to Presov. At home they found almost nothing. Our windows were broken, because Presov had been bombed. We didn’t find our furniture. During the war, some family from Kosice had been living in our house, from when the Hungarians had occupied Presov. After the war they moved out of our house. We got our house back without any problems, but later, when the Communists came to power, they took it from us. In the year 1948 they won the elections, and that was that. After the war, my father worked as a doctor for a hospital insurance company. My mother stayed at home. My father died in 1968 and is buried in Presov, in the local Jewish cemetery. I think that the Presov cantor Lowy buried him. Each year since, I recite the Kaddish. In the synagogue they announce that it’s the anniversary of his death.

Before the war, there were two Jewish religious communities in Presov, Orthodox and Neolog. After the war there remained only one community. Both communities had their own synagogue. The Germans turned the main, Orthodox one, into a stall for horses. In the other, the Neolog synagogue, the Jews who were still in the town during the war were taken care of. They fed them there, and they could also sleep there.

After the war

Right after the liberation I went to Banska Bystrica to study. Because I had been thrown out of school in Presov in ‘kvinta’ [fifth year], I did sexta and septima [sixth and seventh years] in Bystrica. I finished my education at university in Prague. I started my studies there in 1946, and finished in 1952. Right at that time, the Slansky trials 11 began, which also affected me. I think they must have affected everyone. Certainly it left a certain mark in every Jew. After all, there were rants of Slansky, that Jew, Zionist and so on. They knew about me too, that I was of Jewish descent. I didn’t announce it to everyone, but it was known. But there were also those that came to tell me that they didn’t agree with what was going on. No one knew, however, what was going to be. In the end they convicted 13 people, eleven of them to death. Almost all of them were Jews. It wasn’t a good period. Things eased around the year 1953, when Gottwald [Klement Gottwald (1896-1953): President of Czechoslovakia from 1948-1953] and then Stalin died. Then people started to talk about the beastly things that they had done.

I was also a member of the Communist Party 12. I joined the Party in 1945-46 and left it in 1970. That is, I left it, but didn’t leave it. They got rid of me, I was thrown out. After the war, I joined because I was enthused by the idea of communism. When you read the statutes and program of the Party, it was very humane. There, they talked about rights, about responsibilities, that we are all equal, that there are no differences, and so on and so forth. There was a big pile of these things, so people that were arriving, and had been in the camps [concentration and work camps] and had been persecuted – to them it seemed to be sensible. Then, to top it off, there were additional anti-Jewish sentiments in Slovakia, for example pogroms against Jews in Topolcany. So I saw salvation in the Communists. The Communists were supposed to be people that would protect us, but the opposite happened. Already in 1948, when they won the elections, I noticed that it wasn’t going to be the way we had thought. I realized that the Communists were an organization that ‘preached water but drank wine.’ In the 1950s, that was only its culmination. So even back then it didn’t sit well with me.

After I finished my dentistry studies at Charles University in Prague, I got a job at a clinic in Kosice, on Rastislavova Street. There I did three post-graduate certificates, in periodontology. Basically it was my specialization. I worked as a dentist in Kosice for two years, and then moved to Presov. I worked as a dentist from 1952 to 1991, when I went into retirement. I liked my work very much. I devoted myself solely to dentistry, concretely periodontology. I wrote one paper that was accepted at a diabetology congress in Madrid. I worked on it with one colleague, but he wasn’t a dentist, but an internist. We concerned ourselves with the influence of saliva on the gums of diabetics. My friend whom I worked on it with left for America, and in 1989 came to see me, saying that I should go there with him. I told him that I didn’t want to go any more.

In 1968 [see Prague Spring] 13 I was still young and full of hope. It was, after all, a little less restrictive regime. At that time the thing wasn’t that the Communists should step down. The thing was that certain things should be made accessible for people. That is, so that people wouldn’t be so limited, that they could travel. Then what happened, happened, and for the next 20 years we had it worse than before the year 1968.

During the time of the Communist regime, we took vacations everywhere where it was possible. Often we went to Bulgaria, twice we went to Yugoslavia, once to Italy, and of course to Hungary. Because I’ve been through a few Communist countries, I can compare it to the situation in Czechoslovakia. I think that our country was a showcase of Socialism. We really had everything here. The Germans were maybe a bit better off, but not in everything. Germans had to wait for a car for eight years, ten years, and then got a Trabant. So there were also positives here. It wasn’t all bad. But as far as the level of cultural development, freedom of speech and similar things goes, that was bad. During the time of totality we had family in many parts of the world, for example in Australia, Germany and the USA. We didn’t have any problems that we had family members living in the ‘West.’ Starting in the 1970s they visited us regularly.

I did my army service as a dentist in an army hospital in Kosice. So, one can’t say that I was in the army as such. Later I was even on army exercises. We also had exercises in the army hospital. When I was on call, ambulances had to report to me what calls they had had, and so on. Then I had to report this to the hospital commander. I had the rank of second lieutenant, and so I had it good.

There are of course many experiences connected with my army service. Once I was on duty in the army hospital in Kosice. I had my own room there, and signed leave papers for the soldiers. One older man from Kosice, who was on army exercises, came to me and asked me for a permit. He told me that he wanted to be with his wife in the evening, could I make it until midnight. Midnight came, and he was nowhere to be seen. At 1am someone pounded on my door. I opened it. Before me stood two guards with the soldier that I had lost. ‘Please sir, we caught him in a cafe, what should we do with him?’ The man was afraid of what was going to happen to him. But he was very lucky; they punished him by forbidding him further leaves. Then I asked him why he hadn’t asked for a permit until 2 or 3am, that I would have signed it for him, and why hadn’t he returned? He told me that he had gotten into a fight at home with his wife...Those were the kinds of laughs we had in the army. It was good army service. The soldiers liked to go out with me, because I didn’t need a permit. In the coffee house they would sit down with me, because when soldiers would go around and check permits, they wouldn’t ask anyone sitting with me, because I was a second lieutenant. It was a gas.

I met my wife in an interesting way. Even before we had met for the first time, I had heard about her from one young Jewish guy in Prague. He told me that he knew this one young 17-19-year-old girl in Zilina. I didn’t know whom he was talking about, and wasn’t even interested. By coincidence my mother was at some spa with a family lady friend. She asked my mother about her family. She said that she had a son who was a doctor, aged 28. And this lady friend said, ‘is he single? Because, you know, I have a friend, she’s got a daughter, she’s about to graduate, she’s also single, and we’d like for her to have a Jewish boy.’ The women arranged it, as if all that was left for me to do was simply get married.

My mother told me about it, that she had met a lady who had a friend in Zilina, and that that friend had a daughter...In short my mother told me about it when she came back from the spa. The first time my wife and I met was in Zilina. I said to myself, ‘buddy, you’re already an old goat, it’s time to maybe settle down.’ Twenty-nine years gone, it’s time to get married. So it was arranged and we came to Zilina. An uncle of hers, whose place we were meeting at, was waiting for us at the train station. We sat down at his place, drank coffee, and then she arrived, my future wife, and we started to talk. I said to myself, ‘nice-looking girl,’ which is of course very important. You know, I have to blow my own trumpet a bit: I was going out with a girl in Prague, who was so pretty that everyone, almost everyone turned around to look at her; she was a very nice-looking woman. Of course she left me; that’s the danger with pretty women.

In Zilina we agreed that at Christmas I would go skiing to the Krkonose Mountains, and would stop by on the way back home. I was returning home from Krkonose, but we were an hour late. The train was supposed to arrive at 10pm, but arrived at 11. I was traveling with a friend, and I said to him, ‘Listen, I need to make a phone call to that family.’ And he said, ‘If you call now, you’ll wake them. They’re sleeping, it’s almost 11:30.’ So I let it be, I didn’t call. I got home, where she called me. It was good manners, to not say anything.

After some time she had an interview in Kosice. Her parents called me, asking whether I could find a hotel for her. My mother heard this, and said, ‘No hotel, she’ll stay at our place, I’ll be responsible for her.’ And she really did come to Kosice, we went to a cafe together, then dancing, and then home to Presov to my parents’ place. We got to know each other a little better, I knew what her opinions were, and I knew that she was a very smart girl. Though she had a lot of suitors, they gradually fell away. In the summer I traveled to Zilina, and we used to go to Strecno. I had an old Opel in which we would drive there. We took in the beautiful countryside, and everything else, and decided to get engaged.

We had a Jewish wedding in Zilina. Cantor Halpert from Zilina married us. For our honeymoon we went to Prague. This was in the year 1954. I remember our honeymoon very well. We had reserved a sleeping car on the train from Zilina to Prague. However, the train that arrived from Banska Bystrica had no sleeping car, as it had been disconnected at Vrutky due to a malfunction. The wedding guests were very entertained by this incident. In the end my wife and I, Judit Schvalbova, nee Donathova, settled in Presov.

I don’t know how religious of a family my wife came from, you know, I didn’t go to the synagogue with them. But I think that they were reasonably religious. My wife’s uncle was the ‘minyanman’ [a person that fills in the number of Jews, so that a minyan is reached, the minimum of ten men necessary for public prayers] in Zilina, so he went to the synagogue on both Friday and Saturday. If he would have been missing, theoretically they couldn’t even have had a service. After our wedding, our entire family went to the synagogue, including my parents. My wife even observed the fasts, but not I. For the bigger holidays I even took time off.

As far as the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 is concerned, for me as a Jew it has little significance. The state was a guarantee that the status of Jews in the world will be different, that’s one thing, and the second is that if some problems arise again, people will have someplace to go. Today Israel has the opportunity to come forward, whether in the UN or wherever, and express its opinion. During the Israeli wars I was very angry, because the Communists presented the entire situation the wrong way around. They branded Israel as the aggressor, while the opposite is true. You know, there are recordings that show the Arab leaders talking about how they’ll drive all Jews into the sea. The Communists twisted it around and people believed it. When something is repeated many times, it’s said that even a lie becomes the truth. However, I don’t recall anti-Jewish sentiments from that time. Only in television and radio, they accused Israel of aggression.

I visited Israel for the first time in 1992. The entire country surprised me, in the positive sense of the word: the housing developments, how they were able to turn the desert into fields, their whole irrigation systems. How, with such a lack of water, they were able to ensure a developed state that was able to compete with any other country in the world. That means that Israel is viable. Today it’s a developed country, that is agriculturally industrial, that has such economic successes that others learn from it, mainly those that go there to work. That is something incredible. And then the cities that they built, people see that. As opposed to the Arab side: an Arab has a beautiful house built, but around it there’s nothing, a wasteland. A Jewish village isn’t built as luxuriously, but houses have gardens, greenery, trees and so on. Those are the differences.

Because of course not everything is positive, just like in every person, so in Israel, too, you can find something negative. The thing that made the most negative impression on me were Orthodox Jews. We were in one neighborhood, and right away you recognize that something’s not right. These are the jarring elements, but otherwise Israel is a very nice country.

After the year 1989 [see Velvet Revolution] 14 big changes took place in Czechoslovakia. These also affected the Jewish religious community in Presov. Before, it was a community only on paper. There was one chairman, who did what he was told. After the war the community didn’t get any property back, so we had nothing. People were afraid to go to the synagogue. Such were the times, but despite this some people attended secretly. I myself went on only the major holidays. I wasn’t religiously inclined and also I didn’t want to risk anything. After all, it was a small state, and it wasn’t good when they designated you as unreliable. Today people don’t go to the synagogue very much, just during the major holidays, but now it’s a completely different situation. Now there just aren’t enough people. In the last few years those of us that were persecuted during World War II have begun to get money from the Claims Conference.

Currently I am the vice-chairman of the Jewish religious community in Presov, but it’s only an honorary function, I’d say. As far as synagogues are concerned, that’s a little worse: a person would have to see them to know what state they’re in. Look, it’s fair to say that once there was a synagogue in every town in Slovakia. Wherever there were 50 Jews, they built a synagogue. These synagogues disappeared after the war. But the rest prosper, some less, some more. Now these things are being exposed to the wider public, even TV sometimes broadcasts something. Back then [before 1989] no one rather said anything. It was a different situation.

Certain changes took place in my personal life as well. I could for example travel freely. I was in the USA, Switzerland – there where before I couldn’t go. I didn’t have to worry about any informants, and that someone was watching me. I wasn’t afraid before either, but in this political system a person is conscious of freedom. Well, and of course exceptions of the type ‘you’re a Party member, you’re not,’ stopped being made. You can, you can’t. There was a lot of negativity in that. In fact it was mostly negative. But larger changes didn’t happen in my life; after all, I did have my years and was in retirement.

The separation of Czechoslovakia was also something that could be expected. You know, there were always such tendencies. Maybe it’s also because according to me it’s not good to always listen to a certain refrain that was sung by certain nationalistic parties. For my part, I was never in favor of it being divided. After all, during those decades something had been mutually created. When a person looks at it from my viewpoint, the viewpoint of a person that isn’t considered to be a born and bred Slovak, separation was a mistake. But when you ask people here, most of them will tell you the same thing. However, you can also find a few of those that will say that it’s better this way. In politics it was all caused by Klaus 15 and Meciar 16. Everyone was sick of it, and in the end we split up. After all, now we’re in the European Union, and it doesn’t matter any more. Currently the political party that’s closest to my views is the SDKU [Slovak Democratic and Christian Union, leader Mikulas Dzurinda]. Lately though, Dzurinda’s 17 statements aren’t the best.

Glossary

Dora Feiman

Tallinn

Estonia

Interviewer: Ella Levitskaya

Date of interview: June 2005

Dora Feiman lives in a shared one-room apartment [see Communal apartment] 1 in the center of Tallinn. She has a tidy room with potted plants all around. She has many books. There are pictures on the walls. Dora looks young for her age. Her dark hair is nicely done and she has a friendly smile. Dora is an easy-going person and she likes joking and laughing. Her hard life has had no impact on her vivacity and optimism. She always looks at the brighter side of things. Maybe that’s why many of Dora’s friends are younger than her. When talking to her I wasn’t conscious of the age difference. Dora is a very hospitable hostess. Though she has problems with walking having an artificial hip limb, Dora made a delicious cake which she offered me wholeheartedly. She loves having guests. She has no family, but she isn’t lonely. A lot of people are fond of her and find her an interesting person.

My family background

Growing up

Soviet invasion of the Baltics

During the war

After the war

The perestroika

Glossary

My family background

Unfortunately, I hardly have any information about my parents’ families. My father’s parents lived in Estonia, but I don’t know where they lived. My grandfather died before I was born and my father’s mother died when my father was just a child. My grandfather remarried. My father told me that my grandfather was a rigorous and austere man. He had a few children in both his marriages, but I didn’t know any of my uncles or aunts. My father, Isaac-Azriel Feiman, was born in 1888. He didn’t enjoy his childhood. He was sent to study a vocation at an early age and started working at the age of 13. My father tanned skins for tanners. Later, he went to work as a supplier for a factory in Tartu [180km from Tallinn]. My father had a religious education. He studied in cheder and could read in Hebrew. His mother tongue was Yiddish.

My mother’s family lived in Zagare [250 km from Vilnius], Lithuania. That was where my mother’s parents came from. Their family name was Sonik, but I don’t know their first names. My grandfather died before I was born and my grandmother died when I was still a child. My grandmother visited us occasionally, but I have vague memories of her. All I remember is that she was short, wore a dark dress and had kind eyes. My grandparents had five children. My grandmother gave birth to more children, but they died in their childhood. I didn’t know two of my mother’s older brothers. They moved to America in the 1900s. My mother corresponded with them until before 1940. They must have been rather well-off. My uncles sent my mother money and supported us. When we returned from evacuation in 1945, they sent us several parcels. I still sleep under the blanket which they had sent in one of their parcels. After my mother’s death this correspondence stopped. We lived in Soviet Estonia, and I was afraid of corresponding with relatives abroad [see Keep in touch with relatives abroad] 2. In the USSR such contacts weren’t safe. One of my mother’s sisters and her family also lived in America. My mother, Ethe, was born in 1893. I don’t know anything about her childhood. She didn’t like to talk about it. My mother’s younger sister stayed in Zagare. 

My parents got married in 1913. Their marriage was prearranged as they lived quite a distance from one another. They got married in Zagare and the Zagare rabbi registered their marriage. After they got married my mother moved in with her husband in Tartu. She became a housewife, which was quite common with married women at that time. 

My older brother David, the oldest among all children, was born in 1914. In 1916 Abram was born. I was born in 1918, and my Jewish name is Dvora. Later I was addressed as Dora. My younger brother Iosif was born in 1920. 

Growing up

At first my parents rented a one-bedroom apartment in the center of the town. When I was born, this lodging became too small for the family, and we moved to a three-bedroom apartment in the same neighborhood. We lived there until the evacuation in 1941. Our family wasn’t very wealthy. We had no property and my father worked for a living. However, my father provided well for the family. My mother could afford to have a housemaid to help her. Also, when the children were small, we had a nanny. I remember my nanny, an old German lady who had a small dog. I remember her taking my older brothers and me for a walk in the suburbs where there were no houses, but fields. Those were memorable adventures for us. After we started going to school, our nanny went to work for another family. The housemaid helped my mother with cleaning the house and washing dishes, while my mother did the cooking. There were no fridges and my mother bought food products at the market and cooked fresh meals every day. She observed the Jewish traditions. She followed the kashrut and cooked traditional Jewish food. 

Tartu is the second biggest town in Estonia. It was famous for its university both during the tsarist and Soviet regimes. Young people came from all over Estonia and other countries to study there. There was no Jewish quota in Tartu University. Therefore, during the tsarist regime many Jewish folks from tsarist Russia went to study there due to the existing Jewish quota in the higher educational institutions in their country [see Five percent quota] 3. In 1875 the Jewish Students’ Fund, the first Jewish organization in Estonia, was established. Wealthy Jews could afford to pay for their children’s studies, while the fund supported poor students. That same year the first Jewish elementary school was opened in Estonia. Before 1907, Jewish students worked as volunteer teachers in this school. During the First Estonian Republic 4 the Jewish Cultural Autonomy 5, which granted Jews more rights, was established. There was no anti-Semitism in Estonia. Jews were treated as equal residents. 

There was a big Jewish community in Tartu. There were many wealthy Jews who were manufacturers and owners of jewelry, shoe, clothes and food stores. There were many Jewish lawyers, doctors and teachers. They made charity contributions. The community built a home for the elderly and poor people where they were provided with all they needed. There were still many poor people and the community helped them. Poor Jews could get free matzah at the synagogue before a holiday and there were food deliveries so that they could enjoy and celebrate the holidays according to the rites. Anyway, most of the Tartu residents were neither rich, nor poor. They could earn their living and provide for their families, and my father belonged to this very group. 

My parents were moderately religious. There were many Jews in Tartu, who went to pray at the synagogue twice a day: morning and evening. We observed Jewish traditions at home. There was a shochet in Tartu. He slaughtered the live chickens which housewives bought at the market. There was kosher meat sold at the Jewish butcher’s. We definitely never had pork at home. We had separate utensils for meat and milk products and my mother watched strictly that nobody mixed one for the other. We also had Pesach dishes stored separately. We only used them on Pesach. On Sabbath my mother lit candles and prayed over them. Then we had a festive family dinner. On the following day my father did no work, but spent his day reading the Torah. He often told Jewish historical tales to me and my younger brother. My mother also tried to do no housework on Saturday. She did the cooking the day before. Our Estonian neighbor came to turn on the light or start the stove on Saturday. However, my parents didn’t go to the synagogue on Saturday. They dressed up and went to the synagogue on Jewish holidays. 

I remember Pesach of all holidays. There was a Jewish bakery in Tartu. It baked matzah for Pesach. We always bought sufficient matzah to last through the holiday since we didn’t eat bread on those days. There were sweet desserts made from matzah flour. My parents made wine for Pesach from raisins. My mother made a big bottle of wine each year. When the wine was ready she poured it in smaller bottles and kept them separately from the other food products. It was delicious wine. My mother also made some hop plant drink. She boiled it in a big casserole, had it infused and poured it into bottles. This drink was effervescent like champagne. Of course, my mother made gefilte fish, chicken broth and tsimes 6: traditional Jewish food. She also cooked radish in honey, ground them and topped them with crumbled walnuts. I’m not sure about the details since I’ve never cooked this. All I remember is that while the radish was boiling, it smelled awful, but the dish was very delicious. My mother also made kharoyshes, ground apples with honey and cinnamon. 

There were fancy wine glasses placed on the table, and the biggest glass for Elijah the Prophet, filled with wine, was in the center of the table. There was also a set of ten traditional Pesach food products: a piece of bone meat, a hard-boiled egg, bitter greens, a saucer with salty water, etc., according to the rites. There were two seder ceremonies conducted on the first and second Pesach nights. My father wore white clothes and conducted the seder while reclining on cushions. We sat at the table and my father recited the Haggadah. He cut a piece of matzah into three and put one piece under a cushion. One of the children was to find this piece, the afikoman, and put it away to give it back to my father for a ransom. Of course, we also celebrated other holidays: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Chanukkah and Purim. On Yom Kippur all the adults fasted for 24 hours. We spent a whole day at the synagogue and had dinner after we went back home in the evening. There was a big and beautiful synagogue in Tartu. Women were on the upper tier and men were downstairs. Many young people visited the synagogue. I also went to the synagogue with my parents. 

We spoke Yiddish at home and with other Jews. We spoke Estonian to Estonians. Before our evacuation I didn’t know a single Russian word. 

All Jewish children went to the Jewish school. At the time when David and Abram were at school, this was a Jewish gymnasium. After finishing the gymnasium they entered Tartu University. David studied at the Pharmaceutical Faculty, and Abram was a student at the Chemical Faculty. There was a students’ organization in Tartu, and it was called the Jewish Students’ Organization. Other students called its members yiddishists 7. Members of other associations didn’t approve of yiddishists. They believed that Jews were to adapt to the country they lived in rather than move to Israel. Of course, Zionists protested against it. 

I also went to the gymnasium. Later, it became a six-year Jewish school. After finishing the sixth grade, I went to the seventh grade in the Estonian gymnasium for girls, who mostly came from wealthy families. This was the best gymnasium in Tartu. The daughter of our landlord taught English over there. She convinced my parents to send me there. I was to study in the gymnasium for six years. My father had to pay for my education there twice a year and also, he bought my school uniform for me. He also had to pay for my younger brother’s studies. 

There were two Jewish organizations for young people: Hashomer Hatzair 8 and Betar 9. I was a member of Betar. The Trumpeldor [Betar] members were prepared for their future life in Israel. We were trained to be patriots of Israel. We had frequent gatherings. We were trained in vocations required for future settlers in Israel. We had lectures on Jewish history and were told about the life of Jews in Palestine. It was always interesting in Betar and we gladly attended it. There were also sport sections. I did swimming, gymnastics and skiing. There was Maccabi [see Maccabi World Union] 10, another Jewish organization for young people, and David was a member of this organization. He occasionally joined other students to take a day trip to Tallinn. There were good sporting activities, a gym and trainers, in Maccabi. 

There were many Jewish students in the Estonian gymnasium. After the Jewish gymnasium was closed many Jewish girls went to study at the Estonian gymnasium. The teachers and students had a friendly attitude toward us. I never once faced a single demonstration of anti-Semitism in all the years of my studies. 

By the time I was to finish the gymnasium my father was severely ill. My older brothers were still in university and the family had to pay for their education, while I had to work to support the family. Before my father fell ill he worked at the tannery, owned by a Jew called Uzhvanskiy. I went to work as an apprentice accountant at the factory and later became an accountant. After finishing the gymnasium my younger brother also went to work. My brother and I were hoping that when our older brothers graduated from university and went to work we would be able to continue our education, but we were disappointed. 

We knew that the fascists came to power in Germany in 1933. We knew that Hitler initiated the persecution of Jews. They were persecuted and dispossessed of their property. However, it was only after World War II, when we got to know that there were concentration camps where Jews were exterminated. 

In 1939, after Hitler’s effort to invade Poland [see Invasion of Poland] 11 failed, the USSR and Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 12. According to this pact, Estonia was to be under the influence of the USSR, referring to the complicated international situation which started the establishment of military bases in Estonia [see Estonia in 1939-1940] 13. Tartu was turned into a military settlers’ town. The military lived separately and hardly ever socialized with the locals. I was surprised that there were many Jewish soldiers and particularly, Jewish officers. A military career was closed for Jews in Estonia. Though there were no limitations for Jews in higher educational institutions, no Jews were admitted to military institutions. I remember that when the Soviet military settled down in Tartu, they started buying everything in the stores. We couldn’t even imagine how limited the assortment of goods in the USSR was, and that there were cards [see Card system] 14 for food products. We couldn’t understand this. I remember that Swiss watches were popular with the Soviet military, and they were buying numbers of them. It was hard to understand why one person needed so many watches. 

Soviet invasion of the Baltics

In 1940 rallies of workers began. They demanded work. They were organized by the Communist Party of Estonia. It was underground before 1939. The marchers went in columns and were accompanied by Soviet tanks. The government resigned after another wave of rallies. The new government dismissed the parliament and announced pre-term elections. Immediately after elections the new parliament addressed the USSR with the request to annex Estonia to the USSR. On 6thAugust 1940 Estonia became a Soviet Republic. 

The factory where I worked was nationalized. The owner was dismissed. At first they appointed a commissar [see Political officer] 15 to supervise the work until a new director was appointed. I remember the day when the Soviet forces entered the town. The director told us to leave work and go to the main square in Tartu. I also joined the rest. Soviet tank forces were entering the town. There were no protests or resistance. People knew that what was happening was inevitable, since the USSR was far too powerful. I didn’t care about policy and accepted the on-going events as a matter of fact. We hardly had any information about the USSR. Whatever little we knew was from the Soviet mass media calling the USSR the country of full democracy and equal rights for all people. We believed that there was no anti-Semitism, unemployment or political repressions in the Soviet Union and that all people enjoyed equal rights. 

Our family had no property and therefore, we didn’t loose anything. Of course, those whose property was nationalized by the new regime weren’t happy about it, but they didn’t dare to illustrate their unhappiness. Newcomers from the USSR were by no means shy and felt quite at home. 

Gradually food products and other commodities were disappearing from the stores. Estonia had never known lines in stores before. There were lines for butter, fish, sausages, socks and handkerchiefs. The Soviet currency was introduced. It became next to impossible to buy any imported or even local goods.

Some of the girls I knew started seeing Soviet military men and even married them. Our family had no contact with the Soviet newcomers. At work I mostly socialized with Jews and Estonians and our family acquaintances were mostly Jewish. 

14thJune 1941 was a terrible day in the history of Estonia. On this day, Soviet authorities deported Estonian residents [see Soviet Deportation of Estonian Civilians] 16. Our family avoided this horror. We weren’t wealthy and had no property or business of our own. However, we knew many people who were forced to leave their homes. An NKVD 17 truck arrived at their homes; they were given little time to pack their belongings and were taken to the railway station where trains were waiting to take them away. This action was well-organized. Many families were deported from Tartu. There were Jewish and Estonian deportees. It wasn’t their nationality that mattered, but their state of wealth and political views. This was a scary situation. I remember going to work one morning, when I heard that a few employees of the factory had been sent to exile. Everything was done in secret to prevent people from hiding away. 

During the war

On Sunday 22ndJune 1941, one week after the deportation, we heard that Hitler’s armies had attacked the Soviet Union without declaring war [see Great Patriotic War] 18. Molotov 19 announced on the radio that the war with Germany had begun, and that the Soviet Union would win. There were battles somewhere not too far away, and the following day we could already hear the artillery cannonade. 

Evacuation was prompt in Estonia. My parents didn’t consider evacuating. My father kept saying that we did no harm to anyone and that the Germans weren’t going to do anything evil. Most people thought Hitler wasn’t as bad as the Soviet propaganda had described him. Also, the deportation played a major role in people’s unwillingness to evacuate. They feared the Soviets more than the fascists and even more so, they waited for the Germans as their rescuers. 

Iosif was recruited to the army in the first days of the war. My other brothers stayed at home. On the morning of 5thJuly 1941, a boy brought us a note from my parents’ friends. They wrote that they were at the railway station and were on the last train to the rear of Russia, and that if we wanted to escape death we had to pack immediately and go to the station. We didn’t have time to pack or consider. We packed whatever was at hand. We hoped that the war wasn’t going to last long. We were sure that we would be home before winter and took no warm clothes with us. The railway station was crowded. There was a cattle freight train and we squeezed into a carriage. It was awful there. There were small windows high by the ceiling, and there were two-tier plank beds along the walls. The carriage was packed with people who were sitting on their bags and suitcases. Many of our acquaintances stayed in Tartu. They were hoping that by knowing German they would manage somehow. None of them survived the German occupation. 

All we knew about our point of destination was that it was in Russia. The train was continuously bombed on the way. During the raids by German planes the train stopped. People jumped off and scattered around trying to hide away. I stayed in the train during such air raids. I thought if I was to die it didn’t matter where I was, in the train or in a trench. And, as a matter of fact, no bomb or splinter hit our carriage. 

We arrived in Chuvashia [today Russia] and were taken to a kolkhoz 20. We were lodged in a room. Our landlady was a poor farmer. The room was dirty and smelly, and there were bugs. There was no food and we had to trade whatever belongings we had for food. The German forces were in the vicinity of Moscow [today Russia]. They were advancing promptly. We feared that they would soon reach where we were. Life was very hard, particularly because we didn’t know any Russian. 

Our acquaintances from Tartu decided to go to Almaty [today Kazakhstan]. They suggested that I go with them. I thought that after I found a job in Almaty I would be able to have the rest of my family join me. In the beginning I had to look for a job where my lack of knowledge of the Russian language was of no importance. I got jobs on farms or worked on road repairs. Gradually I learned to read and write in Russian. My neighbor was the railway station logistics manager, and his wife, a very kind woman, often helped me in a neighborly way. When I learned enough to talk with her she promised to talk to her husband and ask him whether he would find a job for me. I went to the HR department and the manager interviewed me. She said I had to improve my Russian language skills, but she trusted I might manage as I was. She offered me a position as a file controller in the railway office. I was to enter the information on movements of trains and materials assigned to the department. Of course, this work was difficult for me in the beginning. I had a German-Russian dictionary with me, and it helped me at first. 

My co-worker, who had evacuated from Russia, helped me. We shared a room which we rented from a landlady. I’m very grateful to this lady. She taught me how to generate the files and corrected my mistakes. I worked in the logistic department till the end of the war. Of course, I didn’t earn much. We received employee cards for 400 grams of bread per day. My salary was just enough to pay for this ration of bread. There was saw dust in this bread and it was under baked, which made it heavy. It looked more like a piece of clay. My food was bread and water. However strange it may seem I wasn’t slim. I was rather plump. I walked three kilometers to work. It was all right in summer, but in winter each day was painful. I had no winter clothes. My acquaintance gave me an old coat. It wasn’t warm, but it was better than nothing. As for shoes, it was a nightmare. I left home wearing sandals and I wore them all through the first winter. I walked on snow and ice in them. Perhaps, that’s why I have ill legs. The climate in Kazakhstan is better than in Estonia. The air is dry, and the summer heat or winter cold isn’t as unbearable as in Estonia. However, winter temperatures dropped to -30 or -40°C, and I was always freezing. 

The following winter I was given a coupon to get felt boots, and my feet were warm in them. When my sandals fell apart, I made cloth shoes with carton soles. Of course, there were clothes and shoes sold at the market, but I couldn’t afford them. What I earned was sufficient enough to pay for this rationed bread, but even this wasn’t always available. Sometimes it was replaced with little flour. Also, we gathered burdock leaves, cut them with a knife, mixed them with flour and baked flat breads on the red hot stove. We had no salt. Occasionally, we traded whatever we had or bread for salt at the market, and at times we just managed without salt. I never had one single bar of soap during the evacuation. It was too expensive at the market. We made a solution with stove char to wash ourselves, clothes and underwear. Of course, not all those in evacuation were as needy as we were. There were families of various bosses in Almaty. They had everything. They were well off even in the evacuation. I met one such family. They were a mother and daughter. They sympathized with me and invited me over for some food. They introduced me to two Estonians living in Almaty. Since then I didn’t feel so awfully lonely. 

I corresponded with my mother and brothers. There was no writing paper or envelopes. We wrote letters between the lines on newspaper pieces. Then we folded these sheets in triangles and wrote the address. There were no stamps required. The post office stamped the enveloped with ‘free’ stamps, and these letters reached their addresses. My mother wrote that both my brothers had been recruited to the army. They were in the Estonian Rifle Corps 21 to which my younger brother had already been recruited at the very beginning of the war. My father was severely ill even before the war. The hardships of evacuation were too much for him. He died in 1943. My mother was there all alone. She couldn’t move in with me. It was too complicated and so we lived apart throughout the wartime. My brothers also wrote to me from the front line. It was amazing that despite all this mess in the country the mailing system worked without fail. 

In late 1944 we heard that Estonia had been liberated from the fascists. Our spirits changed. We knew that the end of the war was close. On 9thMay 1945 Germany capitulated. This was a holiday for all. People rejoiced in the streets dancing and singing. I was eager to go back home, but to return to Tartu I needed a letter of invitation. My mother returned home, and my management wanted me to stay at work. They said that they had no replacement and tried to convince me to settle down in Almaty. My brother David sent me an invitation letter, but it was only after a few months that I managed to leave for home. 

After the war

When my mother returned to Tartu, she found other tenants in the apartment where we had lived before the war. Our belongings were gone. My mother lived in a smaller apartment in the same building where we had lived before the war. This was the very apartment she had lived in after her marriage. I lived with her. David married Sheina, a Jewish girl. After the wedding they moved to Tallinn. David worked as a pharmacist in a drugstore. After some time he was promoted as the drugstore manager. They had two daughters: Lea, the older one, born in 1950, and Rachel who was born in 1955. After the war my second brother stayed to serve in Germany. He returned in 1949. Abram married David’s wife’s cousin Sheina. Their only son Hari was born in 1958. Abram worked as a chemical engineer in the laboratory of the Tartu shoe factory. After finishing his service in the army Iosif entered a militia school. Upon graduation he was sent to work in Saaremaa. Iosif married twice. Both his wives were Estonian. His son Victor was from his first wife Ruth and was born in 1950. His second wife Aina gave him two children: daughter Liya, born in 1958, and son Ivar, born in 1960. 

All of my mother’s relatives living in Lithuania were killed by the Germans. Only my mother’s sister’s daughter Ida, if my memory doesn’t fail me, survived. She was married and had three children. Her family was in the Vilnius Ghetto 22. The Germans killed her husband and children. Ida was taken to a concentration camp. I don’t know how she managed to survive. When the camp was liberated, she didn’t want to go back to Lithuania where her family had been killed. She went to the USA. On the boat to the USA she met a man. He had lost his wife and children, too. They got married after they arrived in the USA. They corresponded with my mother, but after my mother’s death I didn’t keep in touch with my cousin. During the Soviet regime correspondence with relatives abroad wasn’t safe. Though I was no bigger than a common citizen, I was still afraid of having problems in this regard. I lost contact with my cousin. In the late 1980s my brother wrote to her, but his letter returned with the stamp ‘Undeliverable.’ She might have passed away, being ten years older than me. 

We knew that during the occupation, Estonians had helped the Germans identify and exterminate Jews. This was true, but we also knew that this wasn’t just hatred towards Jews that made them do this. If it hadn’t been for the deportation in 1941, and if people hadn’t been so afraid of the Soviet regime, they wouldn’t have waited for the Germans as their rescuers. Many of them were hoping that the Soviet regime would never be reestablished. At least, when we returned to Tartu, Estonians were very sympathetic towards us and tried to help as much as they could. 

When I was back in Tartu, I worked at the shoe factory, in the logistics department. I was an accountant and was later promoted as the logistics manager. My Russian language skills helped me with my work. I could also handle Russian documentation. There were few Jews in our department. 

In 1948 the campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’23 began in the USSR. Every day newspapers published articles blaming the rootless cosmopolites: scientists, writers and artists. They were full of Jewish surnames. If an artist or a writer had a pseudonym, they were sure to mention his or her original Jewish name. Those convicted of cosmopolitism lost their jobs and were sent to the Gulag 24. Many of them were sentenced to death and executed. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee 25 that made a great contribution into the victory over fascism during the war was eliminated. Solomon Mikhoels 26, a famous Jewish actor, perished. The official version stated that he died in a truck accident, but people were saying that it wasn’t an accidental death. These progressions were feeding anti-Semitism. In Estonia, anti-Semitism came about in 1940 after it was annexed to the USSR. In the beginning it existed on a common everyday level and was initiated by newcomers from the USSR, while in 1948 it acquired the state level ascendancy. I didn’t believe that those articles were published with the official authorities being unaware. I didn’t face any anti-Semitism at work. Most of my co-workers were Jewish and Estonian, and they had no friendly feelings toward the Soviet power. However, at the enterprises with Russian management employees faced anti-Semitism and were afraid of losing their jobs. 

In 1949 the second deportation of Estonian residents occurred. However, while the first deportation in 1941 involved Estonian residents despite their nationality, the second deportation was focused on Jews. Some people returned to Estonia from exile after the war. The Jews among them were deported again, including women and children. My niece’s mother-in-law Lia, who is living in the USA now, was deported twice, and she was just a child when this happened the first time. Of course, there are few of them living now, only those who were children at that time. This was terrible and one wouldn’t argue with that, but I do think that those who were deported had a chance to survive. Of course, the exile was hard, and the deportees were involved in wood cutting or other hard physical work and they were starving, but at least they weren’t shot at. Many died, but there were survivors as well while Hitler was killing all Jews, and the survivors were few, if any. That made a difference.

Of course, there was much discontent with the Soviet regime, but there were no open protests. The fear of the Soviet regime was very strong. After the Doctors’ Plot 27 initiated in January 1953 the anti-Semitism developed an official nature. There were many Jewish doctors in Estonia, and they were severely affected. I remember people talking at a polyclinic whether they should visit a Jewish doctor or not. It needs to be mentioned here that mostly such talks were heard from newcomers from the USSR, while the locals were quite neutral about it. 

After the Twentieth Party Congress 28, where Khrushchev 29 denounced Stalin’s crimes we had big hopes that our lives would change. Of course, there were no mass repressions or exiles, but everything else remained the same. We weren’t allowed to have contact with relatives abroad or observe Jewish traditions and celebrate Jewish holidays openly. Anti-Semitism didn’t disappear from our lives either. We faced it in everyday life and on the official level. 

At home we continued to observe Jewish traditions. Of course, we did it quietly and at home. There was no synagogue in Tartu after the war. It burned down during the war, and the local authorities made no effort to restore it afterwards. Abram, who was in Tartu, also observed Jewish traditions. Of course, it was difficult to follow the kashrut. Not only kosher, any other food products were hard to get. I think the card system in the country lasted till the late 1940s. We couldn’t celebrate Sabbath since Saturday was a working day in the USSR. Sunday was the day off. When my mother was alive, Abram and his family joined us on holidays. There were no places selling matzah and so we made it at home. Of course, we followed the rules of making matzah, there was to be a maximum of 18 minutes between making the dough and the actual baking. 

We made matzah long before Pesach. Abram’s wife Sheina joined us to make matzah. We had to make sufficient matzah for two families. There was no bread at home during the holiday. We only ate matzah. On the holiday my mother removed all chametz from the house, sweeping away all bread crumbs. Since we had no kosher dishes for a long time, my mother koshered our everyday utensils and dishes till we bought special utensils and dishes for Pesach. It was hard to buy food products for a fancy meal on Pesach in the first postwar years, but my mother managed somehow to buy chicken, fish and all the ingredients to make strudels. We enjoyed these holidays. My brother, his wife and son joined us. Abram conducted the seder according to the rites. On Yom Kippur we fasted and we also celebrated other Jewish holidays. Occasionally, my two other brothers, their wives and children visited us on holidays and this made the holiday twice as enjoyable. 

My mother died in 1961. We buried her in the Jewish cemetery in Tartu following the Jewish traditions. The Jewish cemetery wasn’t destroyed during the occupation. Not one grave was touched or a gravestone ruined. It existed through the duration of the Soviet regime, and it’s still there. After my mother’s death we celebrated all the holidays at my brother’s place. 

We also celebrated Soviet holidays: 1stMay, 7thNovember [October Revolution Day] 30, and Victory Day 31. Soviet holidays were days off. On the eve of a holiday we had a celebration at work. Soviet parades on Soviet holidays were traditional, so we went to parades, and in the evening we had a party at my home or at one of my colleagues place. We were young and grabbed any occasion to have fun. We didn’t care so much about the subject of the holiday, but just enjoyed getting together to make some nice food, dance and laugh. However, Victory Day was a really great holiday. On that day we celebrated having survived this horrible war which took so many lives, remembered our relatives and dear ones, who had fallen victims to this war. This holiday combined joy and grief. 

Another family shared the apartment with us. They were Jews from Tartu: a man, his wife and their son. They had returned from evacuation. Their house had burned down, and they had no place to live. Before I returned, my mother had invited them to stay with her till they found a place to live. I don’t know whether they failed to find a place or they never looked for one, but when I returned to Tartu, they were still living in our apartment. After my mother arrived she received a one-bedroom apartment, but considering the new lodgers, we happened to live in a shared apartment: my mother and I lived in one room, and this other family had another room to themselves. I felt very uncomfortable about it. I couldn’t invite friends or do whatever household chores I chose on my weekends. 19 years passed like this: 1945 through to 1964, when I finally received a one-room apartment in the center of the town, from my workplace. 

I went on business trips to Tallinn where I met with my older brother. I always listened to his advice and accepted his support. David died in Tallinn in 1976. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Tallinn. He had a traditional Jewish funeral. After his death I continued having a good relationship with his family. Iosif died at the age of 52 in 1972. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery, and his wife Aina was buried near him. Abram died in 1992 and was buried near my mother in the Jewish cemetery in Tartu. 

In the 1970s mass Jewish emigration to Israel began. Many of my friends and relatives moved and I sympathized with them though I was happy to hear that their life was improving in the new location, but I never considered departure. I was alone and had no husband or children. Why would I depart? I had relatives and friends here. If I had a family I would have considered relocation, having close people with me. Of course, I had acquaintances in Israel, but I wouldn’t necessarily live where they lived. Besides, they had their families and their own lives. So why go to another country? I earned my living here: I had a job, and an apartment. So, I decided against departure. 

David’s wife tried to convince me to move to Tallinn. I had many friends who had moved there for various reasons. They also told me to move to Tallinn, and finally in 1978 I decided to move here. I traded my apartment in Tartu for one in Tallinn. When I was moving into my apartment in Tartu I promised myself that I would never live in a shared apartment again, but I didn’t keep my word. I traded my apartment in Tartu for one room in a two-room apartment in Tallinn. I share this apartment with an elderly lady. She is also single, and we don’t disturb one another. This is where I live now. 

After I moved to Tallinn I went to work at the Tallinn shoe factory. They knew me at the factory since I’d visited the factory before on my business trips. I worked there till I turned 72 years of age. My colleagues were very good to me. Despite my age they kept me at work and were convincing me to keep working as long as I could manage. I liked my work, but after the breakup of the USSR [1991] this factory was closed like many other enterprises. So I retired after this factory was liquidated.

In the 1980s David’s daughters and their families moved to the USA. I correspond with them, and they call me every now and then. Hari, Abram’s son, lives in Tallinn. Iosif’s children left Saaremaa. Lia lives in Foru village and Ivar lives in Talevere near Tartu. They live in villages. We also keep in touch. Hari often comes to see me, and Ivar and Lia frequently visit me. Ivar calls me every week. I spend my summers in Talevere village. My nephews and nieces like me a lot. Every year they drive me to the cemetery in Tartu. We leave on Saturday, spend a night in Tartu and then go to the cemetery in the morning. We clean up the graves and remember our dear ones.

When I was younger I liked traveling. I went on vacations and visited all distant parts of the USSR. I even took trips abroad. I bought these holiday packages from the trade unions at work. I visited Poland, Germany and Bulgaria. I received a small salary, but food and utility services were inexpensive in the USSR, so I didn’t spend much. 

The perestroika

When perestroika 32 began in the USSR, I had a lot of trust in Gorbachev 33. Life was changing rapidly. The ban on religion was lifted, there were many new books published, and newspapers published a lot of new information. There were interesting TV programs. It was allowed to travel abroad and invite friends and relatives from abroad. I went to visit my nieces in the USA. The Jewish community of Estonia 34 was established during perestroika. This was the first officially registered Jewish community in the USSR. This was a new development for us at the time, but now I wouldn’t imagine my life without our community. 

It’s hard to describe my feelings about the breakup of the USSR. On the one hand, after Estonia declared independence [see Reestablishment of the Estonian Republic] 35, and particularly, when it joined the EU, life became more expensive. There is everything in the stores, but pensioners can’t afford to buy these products. On the other hand, I remember that life wasn’t bad during the period of the First Estonian Republic. Our country can build up its own life without any directions. Besides, we, pensioners, know that despite all hardships, our government cares about us. I understand that there will be no immediate improvement. My eyes will not witness these changes, but maybe my nieces and nephews and their children will enjoy these improvements. I’m still happy this happened. This new era gives possibilities to the younger generation. What might I want considering my age? Health, but it’s gone, unfortunately. Recently our government issued the law, according to which all those who had been evacuated would have their pensions increased, and one year of work in the evacuation would be equal to three years of work experience. So I have nine years plus my job experience, and next time I will receive a significantly higher pension. Regretfully, there are very few of us left. 

The Jewish community helps me a lot. Of course, my life would be much harder, if it wasn’t for them. I used to have lunches in our community diner, but now it’s hard for me to walk. I have an artificial hip limb plus a number of diseases, but I don’t feel like talking about it. I rarely leave home. I go to the nearest store or bank to pay for utility services, and I spend the rest of my time at home. Now I have dinners delivered here every other day, and all I have to do is heat the food. The food is delicious and the choice is good. A cleaning lady visits me three times a month. Of course, I try to keep my home clean, but it’s difficult for me to do the general cleanup. The community helps me pay for heating in winter and they also pay for my medications whenever there is a possibility. I’m very grateful for what they do for me. I know there are other needy people. The community cares about me. They often call me asking whether I need something. They don’t only do everything to give us sufficient food, but also, help us not to feel lonely. Loneliness is terrible, much worse than material or health problems. 

Our community opened a synagogue on the second floor of their building, and we have a rabbi now. It also started the construction of a new synagogue. It’s so very unfortunate that I can’t attend community events: they celebrate all birthdays once each month. They have parties and give birthday presents. This is so very moving since some people have nobody even to congratulate them. I’m fortunate to have friends. They are the few friends left. My current friends are much younger than me, but we always have things to talk about. Thank God, my mind is still all right. I watch TV, read newspapers and books and listen to the radio. I like laughing. I was teased a lot in my childhood for laughing when it was unsuitable or quite out of place. I don’t know why God has granted me such a long life. My dear ones died when they were relatively young. My mother died at 68, David at 62, Abram at 76, and Iosif at 52. Maybe I live whatever years were meant for them. Or, perhaps, laughter makes life longer, who knows!

Glossary:

Bulgaria

Interviewer: Svetlana Avdala

Date of Interview: December 2005

Reyna kept on constantly taking out things from somewhere. ‘This here is my father’s elegant working bag, look at his camera, and these here are the newspapers from the beginning of the century, these are his trousers – look at the label. Now I am wearing them.’

From a number of notebooks–diaries fall out Reyna’s collections from her childhood – cuttings of fairytale illustrations and pieces of tin-foil paper. Here are some boxes full of postcards – letters from that time and heaps of pictures, pictures, pictures…It was swarming with pictures everywhere. We are talking while sitting at an old solid carved table with four stable chairs around. I had the feeling that Reyna’s mother was still there. She had just gone out for a while and Reyna was taking advantage of the situation to mess up the place a little because she feels the order imposed on her as a burden.Otherwise in telling her story Reyna is amazingly precise, logical. She has a phenomenal memory for dates, quotes them in succession, she is always ready to be of help. For me Reyna is an example of the perfect worker and the fact that she went on working at the same place well after the age limit for retirement is not accidental. Even when she quit at her own will, they still wanted to retain her!

My name is Reyna Buko Lidgi. I was born in Sofia on 16th March 1929. I am a Russian Philology graduate and I have worked as an interpreter and a teacher. I don’t have brothers and sisters and I have never been married. My mother tongue is Bulgarian but I also speak Ladino, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Polish, French.

My ancestors may have come from the town of Leon in Spain, but I am not sure 1 2. I have made this assumption according to some pieces of information form the Yearbook of the Jewish Organization. [‘Yearbook of the Jewish Cultural-Educational Organization’. The first issue of the Yearbook was published in 1966. On its pages appear materials devoted to the past of the Bulgarian Jews, scientific announcements about the history of the Balkan Jews, about their customs, way of living and culture. There also appear articles on historical, linguistic, ethnographic, demograhic and cultural topics. They are a serious contribution to the present and the past of the Bulgarian Jews.] They are Ladino 3 [Sephardi] Jews. I don’t have any information about my great-grandmothers and grandfathers. My memories begin with my grandmothers and grandfathers – the parents of my parents.

My parental grandfather’s name is Aaron Lidgi. I don’t have information about when he was born. I don’t know him because he died in 1929 in Bregovo village (Vidin region). My appearance has been planned after his death as a continuation of the family. He used to be a middleman of wheat and grain crops. His mother tongue was Ladino. I have no information about how religious he was. He had three sisters but I don’t know them and I don’t have any information about them.

My mother has told me that he used to be a very soft chap who loved her very much. It seems that their financial situation was very good, judging by the fact that they had the means to send my father to study in Vienna and Switzerland and by the golden jewels, which the family gave to their daughter-in-law, my mother. I have seen and I know that there existed a golden ring with a diamond, a golden watch and a golden wristwatch, two tiepins, as well as golden earrings, a golden shedai. I don’t know where they are as they disappeared as time passed. [Reyna is afraid to state that they still exist.] My paternal grandmother, Reyna Lidgi (nee Kohen) was born in 1868 in Vidin. She died in 1937 in Sofia. With my grandfather Aaron they had two children – my father Buko and his sister Rashel Lidgi (Pinkas by marriage). The family used to live in a house with a garden in Bregovo village (it was sold much later). I can’t say when exactly the move took place. I can’t say why but her daughter Rashel also moved to Sofia. Granny Reyna lived with us in our house for some time (in Pavlovo quarter at the time). [A special report of the Ministry of Finance connected to the repeal of the anti-Jew laws (1945) shows that 300 Jews owned plots and houses on the territory of Sofia Municipality – in Knyazhevo, Pavlovo, Dragalevtsi, Boyana, Moderno Predgradie. There is no information about the other details.] I remember granny Reyna. She didn’t know Bulgarian and spoke to me in Ladino. I owe my initial knowledge of this language to her as my mother and father spoke mainly in Bulgarian. They used Ladino only when they had to share something secret so that the others would not understand them.

My grandmother was a plump woman; she wasn’t pretty. I remember her with her knitting work in hand. She used to be strict, domineering, always pressing her views, she required corresponding attitude and my mother, who was very shy, always conformed with her, was even afraid of her. This was partly due to the fact that my granny Reyna didn’t like my mother because she didn’t have dowry. My mother had told me that when she went to live in my father’s house in the town of Vidin, before my birth, granny Reyna wanted her to do the cooking in the house but my mother couldn’t cook and she was shaking with fear so much that when she was told to prepare her fisrt rice granny kept quiet and didn’t give her a hand in order to see what her daughter-in-law was capable of. My mother then asked my father what to do and he said, ‘Well, put in rice, pour in water’ and the result was something repulsive. But my father thought highly of my mother’s prestige and when she served the rice, he said, ‘It’s very tasty! It’s very tasty!’ Granny was looking on that scene and said, ‘Why! I prepare dishes for you which are twice as better and you don’t like them and now you say you like this’. This makes me think that she was a domineering woman. After some time my mother tried to prepare French beans but out of fear that something would go wrong, she dropped the pot with the dish inside and soiled some mat in front of the cooker. She ran into her room and was hiding there until my father came back from work. Those were difficult months as a whole.

My mother’s father, Isak Moshe Beniesh, was born in 1863 in the town of Ruse and died in 1939. His mother tongue was Ladino. He was from a rich family, which was known in Ruse as the family of the Benishimi, who used to have sugar factories in the town. They were five children (altogether three brothers – Samuel, Mois and Isak and two sisters – Tihana and Timazal). I can’t say anything else about them. My grandfather was the youngest. To a certain extent my grandfather was a failure and he couldn’t find his place in life. He was poor – his brothers didn’t include him in their business. I couldn’t say what the reasons for their decision were. He used to be a commission merchant – he would offer goods to different companies and delivered them afterwards, but he didn’t profit very much from this activity. He used to be very religious – attended the services in the synagogue and afterwards would wake the whole family up for the Morning Prayer. Due to religious motives, as well as to his love for traveling, he decided to leave for Palestine [at that time] and to become a Hadji. [Hadj for the Muslims and Hadjiistvo for the Christians are connected to a pilgrimage to the sacred places. For the Muslims the sacred place is Mecca whereas for the Christians it is Jerusalem. There is no data about Hadji in Judaism.] Shortly before that, he had got engaged to his first wife, Sarah (nee Eroham). While he was in Palestine the rumor had it that she was very sickly, which was something terrible at the time but nonetheless, after returning from his pilgrimage, he married her in 1901. My mother was born in 1902, in 1907 in the town of Ferdinand my uncle Mois Beniesh was born (he died in 1976) and in 1910 in the town of Sliven my other uncle Nisim Beniesh was born (he died in 1948). His children were born in different towns because grandpa used to travel a lot. On the one hand, he loved traveling and, on the other, it was connected to his job. Additionally, the frequent change of the place of living was indispensable because of their necessity to find a cheaper way of living, as grandpa didn’t earn much.

In 1918 his first wife Sarah (nee Eroham) Beniesh, (by marriage) died from Spanish influenza [At the time of the First Balkan War in 1913 and World War I in 1914 on the front lines and in the regions of the military operations there were several outbreaks of certain diseases that took the lives of many soldiers and civilians. The diseases were cholera, typhus and plague and they were mentioned in the official statements of all the countries involved in the war. Probably Spanish influenza was also an epidemic disease.] in Ruse. I don’t know what the symptoms of this disease were, I know that it was a real pandemy at the time, which did all kind of harm and took more victims than the victims of World War I. My mother also caught Spanish influenza, together with grandma, but she managed to survive whereas grandma died because of her weak heart. Exactly forty days after the death of grandma Sarah, grandpa got married for the second time - to Dzhamila. He met her in Ruse where she was born in 1880 (there is no information about the time of her death). After the wedding, in 1919 the whole family, for I don’t know what reasons, settled down in Sofia.

My maternal grandmother’s name was Sarah Beniesh (nee Eroham). She was born in Ruse in 1880 and died in Ruse in 1918. She had three brothers – Solomon, Eroham and David and three sisteers – Duda, Sulcha and Esther. (I have absolutely no information about these brothers and sisters. When I visited Israel in 1960 I met with Esther only, who was living in a home for elderly people, and I found out that she had not been married and didn’t have children while all the other brothers and sisters had children.)

Grandma Sarah spoke Ladino, she was religious and she was an unbelievably good housewife. From her my mother inherited and mastered her sense of order. Nonetheless, granny Sarah didn’t allow my mother to spend too much time in the kitchen because granny wanted her to study. That is the reason why mother couldn’t cook when she was very young.

A relic has remained from granny Sarah - a dress that is called bindali. My mother used to protect it like something sacred during all our journeys. When I was a child she didn’t allow me to even touch it. It was bought in Turkey and was part of the dowry of the Jewish girls. It was wine-red in color – silk velvet with ornaments embroidered with a silver thread. It was being worn during different celebrations – engagements, births, weddings but it is not a wedding dress and it wasn’t granny Sarah’s wedding dress. I decided to put it on at a holiday organized by OJB ‘Shalom’ 4 and then it became the emblem of the organization.

The second wife of my grandfather, Dzhamila, got married for the first time to my grandfather when she was 38. At that time my mother was 16, Mois was 11 and Miko (Nisim) was 8.  Dzhamila couldn’t conceive in the first two years of the marriage and looked after her three stepchildren very well. Afterwards she gave birth to three more children – Sarika, Clara and Solomon. (I don’t have reliable information as to the years of their births. I only know that Sаrah – Sarika - was born in 1920.) The appearance of her own children changed Dzhamila’s attitude towards her stepchildren. From her stepchildren she loved Mois the most. His brothers and sisters from the second marriage also loved him very much and long after they grew up and left for Israel they went on calling him uncle Mois. My mother was the one who felt worst of all in the family.

There had always been some tension in the relationship between her and Dzhamila. On the one hand, it appeared because grandpa married her too soon, only forty days after granny Sarah died and, on the other hand, grandpa made my mother give the jewels, which were left to her by her mother Sarah, to Dzhamila. Eventually, she gave them, but this gave an edge to the relationship between her and her father Isak. (The third reason was that Dzhamila used to be a beautiful, domineering woman, very religious. She had special requirements for the food and even later, when she visited us she didn’t have anything to eat because she had doubts as to whether the food had been prepared according to all religious requirements. She had imposed the same order in the family that was new to her. At that time the family was already living in Sofia. I don’t know any details about their life but my mother told me that the family had a difficult existence because grandpa didn’t earn very much and it was difficult to provide for the six children. The poor way of living and the strained relations were a torture for my mother and she used to feel very depressed at home. That’s why she didn’t call her stepmother ‘mum’ for a long time. Not until much later, during one of our visits to Israel in 1960, when Dzhamila was already living in a kibbutz, did my mother call her ‘mum’ and granny Dzhamila, deeply moved, allowed herself a bite of the cake, which my mother had prepared and afterwards expressed satisfaction that she had prepared it ‘very cleanly’. Only then did their relation get warmer.

My mother, Elvira Isak Lidgi (nee Beniesh) was born in Vidin on 18th July 1902 and died in 1990 in Sofia. She used to like Mathematics very much. She finished her secondary education in the Second Girls’ High School in Vidin and later, when she was already married, attended a free university in Sofia but she didn’t finish her studies at the insistence of her husband. I can’t say what his motives for that were. She used to go to the synagogue regularly and she kept the rituals. She was a beauty, too, with a very stately figure, but she was extremely depressed after her mother’s death and was very devoted to her two brothers, and most of all to Mois Beniesh.

Mois Beniesh, who in 1939 finished his secondary education in a Trade High School, started work as a bookkeeper in the hosiery factory ‘Rufo’. He married Rebeka in 1935 and had a daughter – Maya Beniesh [An editor in the Theater Department of ‘Hristo Botev’ Program of the Bulgarian National Radio]. My uncle played an active role in the communist movement. In 1946 he left for Moscow as a spokesman for Georgi Dimitrov 5 and there he enrolled at GITIZ (State Theater Institute) – drama directing. He returned to Bulgaria and became a director at ‘Ivan Vazov’ National Theater. [Mois Isak Beniesh was born on 29th May 1907 in Ruse. He died on 6th May 1976 in Sofia. He initially studied at the Drama School at the National Theater and until 1951 - at the State Theater Institute in Moscow in the class of Y. Zavadski. He worked as a drama director at the National Theater from 1951 until 1976. He was teaching at VITIZ (The Institute for Drama Arts in Bulgaria) from 1952 until 1976. A professor in Drama Directing since 1969. A characteristic feature of his work is the combination between a width of social generalizing and a deep analysis of the spiritual life of the characters. He stages works by Stephan Kostov, Arbuzov, Arthur Miller, A. Hakett, J. Priestley, B. Brecht, Gibson.]

The youngest brother – Nisim (Miko) - had very well developed technical skills. I don’t know what education he got but in 1947 he was awarded the Gold Medal of Labor for his appliances for the sewing machine through which different operations for the production of overlogue could be performed, so he was one of the first bearers of this medal. He married Milka Beniesh in 1928 and they had four children – Sarah, Isak, Yakim and Mony. Uncle Miko died in 1948.

I have scarce information concerning my mother’s brothers and sisters from the second marriage of grandpa. Sarika studied at a vocational school in Sofia and acquired the specialty seamstress. I can’t say anything about Clara’s education. Solomon got some sort of technical education, I can’t say what exactly. Later my uncle Mois helped him to get a job as a technician in the hosiery factory ‘Rufo’, in which he, too, had worked.

In January 1941 the three children Sarah, Clara and Solomon left for Palestine by ship. Dzhamila, their mother, remained in Bulgaria, but left later, I can’t say when exactly. On board Sarah met Levy Meyuhas – a Romanian Jew. After spending some time in a camp on the island of Cyprus, [The ships which had Jews on board during World War II on course to Palestine sailed under the flags of different countries. In December 1940 from Varna to Palestine started the ship Salvator, which sank after a shipwreck not far from Istanbul. The Jews, Bulgarian subjects, who were about 180, were returned to Bulgaria at the beginning of 1941 whereas the alien subjects were probably taken to Cyprus from where they were gradually sent to Palestine.] they – Sarah, Levy, Clara, Solomon – left for Palestine. Sarah and Levy got married and they bought a house. Later on they had five children – Itshak, Elly, Mony, Beni, Veri. In order to provide for them they went to live in a kibbutz for some time. When the children had almost grown up, the family went back to live in their old house. Clara lived in a kibbutz as well. Her mother, Dzhamila, went to live with her. The other sister Clara married Juda Braha and had five children, but I can’t say what their names were. The brother Solomon lived in Palestine, too, and died in 1948 in the first war there. I can’t remember his wife’s name but I know that he had two children – Itshak and Haviva. I have a picture of the children with granny Dzhamila.

My father, Buko Aaron Lidgi, was born on 29th March 1892 in Vidin and died on 19th February 1941 in Sofia. He acquired education that was considered high at that time. He attended a Trade School of Higher Education in Vienna. While abroad he caught tubercolosis of the bone joint and his parents sent him to Switzerland to undergo medical treatment. He spoke German, Romanian, Ladino and Bulgarian. His life in central Europe had put a mark on the formation of his views as well as on his appearance. The western-European education built in him a broad-minded view of the world in which the focus was on the values common for whole Europe and not on the religiousness and the strict keeping of traditions and religious requirements. At his insistence I enrolled at a Bulgarian school of general education, not at a Jewish school. There appeared certain tension in his relation with his sister Rashel because of the money their parents spent on his education and medical treatment. Aunt Rashel didn’t acquire any education. In spite of the fact that he had a slight limp and wore a little walking stick due to his illness, he was a handsome man – an eligible match for many girls. Later, I can’t say when exactly, aunt Rashel married her husband – Haim Pankas – and had two daughters, Sarah and Reyna. In the 1950s her family left for Israel.

My mother told me that in order to get separated from the heavy atmosphere in the family in the 1920s, she went to visit a distant relative from grandpa Itzhak’s kin, whose name was Tiyasumha. She lived in Vidin. In the house next door lived my father’s family. At that time he was in Switzerland but had come back to ask permission from his parents to propose to a Swiss girl. He saw my mother and some emotions arose in him. He felt attracted by her modesty, by her unostentatious presence. He went back to Switzerland but his desire to marry the Swiss girl had faded. He started writing letters to my mother all the time but she didn’t respond because, at the beginning, she had a friendship with a Bulgarian man. His name was Stephan. At a certain moment there occurred some cooling in the relationship caused by the boy – a Bulgarian and only then did my mother write to my father that she was ready to accept his proposal. My father had proposed on several occasions in his letters but she rejected him, he even had a very valuable ring, which he wanted to give her. My mother didn’t accept it because she was very proud and considered this as a kind of commitment. This ring used to be something really remarkable, but unfrotunately it was stolen from him in Romania. So they got engaged regardless of her difficult financial situation. She didn’t even have a dowry – ashougar. They managed to get engaged – the engagement took place on 3rd September 1923.

My father came to ask my mother’s hand from grandfather Isak in their house in Sofia exactly when the September Rebellion started. 6 And the two of them spent the night by the window because at that time there was unrest in Sofia. In fact, my father spent the night in the home of the Beniesh family. This is a story that my mother has told and I can’t give any more details, nor do I remember whether my mother has ever told me more about the September Rebellion. (The date fixed for the wedding was 1st June 1924. So, these nine months were a period of cooing, obviously. My father used to work in Vidin. And then began the agony of preparing the dowry – ashougar. I don’t know what exactly the dowry used to be and what it had to consist of.) [Ashougar or the dowry of the Jewish girl consists of: six sets of bed sheets and pillow-cases, decorated with hand-made embroidery, a special chemise for the first matrimonial night, garment, secular, and for keeping Sabbath as well, bought by the bride’s parents. The well-to-do families used to buy a bindali dress, which Reyna has mentioned; there was also the so-called ‘djura’ - a counterpane whose knitting patterns were given from mother to daughter and the very start of the knitting was to be performed in secret by an owner of an already made ‘djura’, a counterpane for a woman in child-birth.] Aunt Sulcha – granny Sarah’s older sister used to be very rich and she had promised to send out the dowry for Elvira. And there comes a big parcel, they open it and what do they see – old underwear, old chemises. This is the way a rich aunt treats her poor niece. My mother, as I have already told you, was very proud. She hires a seamstress, they repair everything, put the things in a parcel and send it back to aunt Sulcha with a letter, which says ‘You have another daughter, you may need this.’ But after all, there were some things left from granny Sarah. [The dowry was an important thing at that time as the tradition was to spread it on the fence so that everybody could see that the daughter-in-law was wealthy. My mother pulled her weight together and prepared her dowry alone. I still keep some parts of her dowry – a counterpane decorated with typical Bulgarian embroidery, garnish for a woman in child-birth – a silk cloth with hand-made embroidery, the bindali dress… probably there were more things but I don’t know what happened to them. So my mother exhibited some dowry. My father, on the other hand, gave 1, 500 leva to grandfather Isak, so that he could give them as a dowry to his daughter.

They married in 1924 in Vidin. According to a story my mother told she didn’t have her own wedding dress. They borrowed it from Auntie Lizi, wife of a cousin of my father. His name was Izidor Lidgi. At the moment when some photographs of the bride and the kin were being taken, my father’s siter Rashel, accidentally or on purpose – I don’t know - stepped on the veil and it was torn. They found another veil but my mother’s white stocking ran a ladder, then somebody spilled something on the bride’s dress and it had to be washed quickly. So, my mother set off for the synagogue in Vidin with a ladder on her stocking and a wet dress. The procession was followed by music performers. After the wedding, the family spent some time living with granny Reyna in Vidin but due to the tension, which arose between mother and daughter-in-law, my father decided to leave for Sofia with his wife in 1925.

I remember Sofia from 1935-1936. It was a small, relatively clean town. I have most vivid memories of Dondukov Street, where now is the Sheraton hotel and TZUM [Sofia’s Central Trade Center] – the so-called Largo [the St. Nikola Passage was situated there]. [The Liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman yoke in 1878 took place when Sofia was in an extremely miserable state as a town, as an object for communication and esthetics. The population amounted to approximately 20, 000 people, who used to live in about ten quarters with narrow, dusty and muddy streets. One of the first tasks of Sofia Municipality was to give start of the building of a new Sofia. For this purpose famous foreign architects like Kollar, Grunanger, Mayerber, Schwanberg, Yovanovich were invited. For a short period of time they built the beautiful buildings of the Synagogue, the Parliament, the Military Club, the Phoenix Insurance Company and so on. Some Bulgarian architects like Lazarov, Nachev, Fingov, Nichev, Yurukov, Marichkov, Torniov, Milanov, Koychev and others, also contributed to the construction of the new face of Sofia. Dondukov Street is situated in the central part of Sofia, the so-called Largo. The buildings in that part of the city were designed in the so-called Wagner-style (Secession). Some Renaissance elements were included in them too. In the monumental buildings, the architects had made an attempt to include details from the old architectural tradition; they achieved colourful effects, typical of the Byzantine-Bulgarian architecture from the Middle Ages. The old churches in Nessebar served as models. An example in this respect is the building of the Central Public Baths.] It was a nice, paved street, there was a tram moving on it. There were confectionaries; Tachev Cinema was there. In the bookstore ‘Chipev’, in that same street, my father would often drop in to buy his favorite pens, which he used to collect. Opposite the bookstore was the butcher’s ‘Dokuzanov’ where they sold fresh sausages, still hot, steaming… The ham was very tasty. I was often sent to do the shopping at St. Nikola market place [now TZUM], which was situated between the Central Public Baths and Dondukov street.

I was born in an apartment house, which was situated on the corner of the streets ‘Tzar Simeon’ and ‘Tetevenska’, now ‘Budapeshta’. Afterwards my family moved house to Pavlovo quarter because at the age of five I got dysentery. My father decided to rent a little house in Pavlovo and to live there until my recovery. There came my granny Reyna in 1935 when she decided to move to Sofia. During that period – 1935-1936 - the rest of grandpa Isak’s family (my mother’s father and Dzhamila) lived in Sofia as well. I remember they lived on the corner of ‘Bratya Miladinovi’ and ‘Makriopolska’ and afterwards in ‘Opalchenska’ street, but my memories are fading.

And after Pavlovo, we lived on 51 ‘Bratya Miladinovi’ street, afterwards on 41 ’Pop Bogomil’ and finally, before the internment 7, on 2 ‘Makriopolska’. My father liked us to change our premises because he was educated in Europe, and in Europe people used to move house more frequently than in Bulgaria and they prefered to live in lodgings.

I remember our place on 51 ‘Bratya Miladinovi’ and ‘Makriopolska’. We rented the place until 1937-1938. It was a three-storey apartment house, which still exists. Our two-room apartment was on the third floor; the owners lived on the second floor. Our neighbors were Bulgarian and we were on best terms with them. There weren’t any other Jewish families in the apartment house but opposite us, in ‘Bratya Miladinovi’ street too, lived the Primo family who we were friends with. We rented two rooms and a kitchen but, as we weren’t in a blooming financial situation, we had a tenant in one of the rooms. My father, mother and I used to sleep in the other room. The toilet was in the apartment and, since my mother was very house-proud, she kept it immaculate. My father also cared a lot about the toilet. He, as a person educated in Europe, used to say that in Switzerland and Vienna whenever you want to rent a place, you first go into the toilet. My mother had also cut some pictures, art reproductions from the magazine I used to receive then – ‘Kartinna Galeria’ [’Picture Gallery] [‘Kartinna Galeria’ – a Bulgarian monthly illustrated magazine. On print in Sofia between 1905 and 1925. Editor-in-chief – G. Palashev. In 1920 its name was changed to ‘Kartinna Galeria za Mladezhi’ (’Picture Gallery for Young People’). As an appendix to the magazine there was a special file with color reproductions of pictures by Bulgraian and foreign artists. The magazine played a significant role in the artistic cultivation of generations of Bulgarians.] – and had put them in the toilet for decoration.

Our next home was on the corner of 41’Pop Bogomil’ street and ‘Maria Luiza’ boulevard, rented again. The apartment was on the fourth floor. The whole burden in moving the house fell on my mother because my father had undergone a leg operation. She was very devoted to our belongings, and very tidy and meticulous on top of that. When we had to move every single object was carefully wrapped. Just imagine what it meant to move from one place to another. And she had difficulties to part with her belongings.

On ‘Bogomil’ we lived only for a while because at that time my father had problems with the heart and couldn’t climb the stairs to the fourth floor and, despite the nuisance of moving, we had to change our home again. The new one was on 2 ‘Makriopolska’ – our last home before the internment during the Holocaust. We lived on the second floor and we had a tenant again. Our tenants were usually boys from Vidin who studied in Sofia. The apartment was furnished modestly. We used to have a massive stable wardrobe. When we were moving house once the porters couldn’t take it down the stairs. They had to tie it with ropes and to suspend it from the window. The rope broke but the wardrobe fell on its legs and was absolutely unharmed.

In the room we had a big extending table, which we sold during the internment and we slept in beds with paintings on the boards. In the kitchen we had a sofa, a cupboard and a table with several stools. On ‘Bratya Miladinovi’ we had a built-in fireplace, something like a tile stove on firewood. The wood was provided at the right time and there came some people to cut them in pieces. On ‘Makriopolska’ I remember that we already used coal, which means that we were using the Pernik-type stove, which I still keep, for heating.

At home we used to have a lot of books – my father’s were in German and Bulgarian and I used to have my children’s books and magazines. Additionally, my father liked reading nespapers very much. I remember the caricatures in the ‘Papagal’ [Parrot] newspaper. They used to buy a lot of other newspapers like ‘Zora’ [Dawn] 8, ‘Utro’ [Morning] 9 and one of the reasons were the crosswords – my father’s favorite pastime. My mother was reading a lot and she used to be his constant consultant in this pastime of his. We had also stored some communist books belonging to uncle Mois, in order to keep them hidden. And here I can tell you an interesting story. The action takes place in the 1940s. At that time the so-called [police] blockades were taking place looking for politically unreliable individuals and evidence against them. Then my father wasn’t going to work and I was very happy because we were taking walks around our house to find some confectionery. He would buy me a chocolate bar and in these bars there were pictures that we would stick to a poster with the dream of getting a bicycle if we succeeded in covering the whole poster with pictures, without realizing, without understanding that daddy remained home because of that blockade. We were trembling with fear that if the police came home, they would find uncle Mois’s communist books. That is why we had carefully hidden them behind my children’s books but mum was using another excuse too. As my father was ill, whenever there was a knock at the door, she made him lie on the bed and said, ‘My husband is ill, this is a children’s bookcase’ and somehow they showed understanding and would leave us alone.

Our homes were always furnished modestly and it wasn’t necessary to put great efforts into keeping them neat and tidy. My mother used to do that as well as the cooking. From her I learned a recipe for leek croquettes. [In Ladino these croquettes are known as ‘Friticas di Pras’] Here is the recipe: you chop and boil two onions and six sticks of leek. You squeeze them well to get rid of the water. You grind them with a meat-mincing machine together with a boiled potato. You add two eggs and 300-400 grams of minced meat, but you can prepare them without meat if you wish. You form croquettes, roll them in flour and fry them, but as my mother had colitis, we would bake them in an oiled baking dish and on every croquette we would drip a few drops of oil. A washerwoman called Evtima used to come once a week. She used to always eat with us at the table. This was at the insistence of my father who was a democrat in his convictions.

When I was two months old there were nannies to look after me because mum was working as in insurance agent at Asicurazione Generale. [‘Asicurazione Generale’: a joint-stock company. The headquarters of the company were in Trieste, Italy. In 1927 the company opened a branch in Bulgaria. The company offered services in the sphere of life and property insurances. It existed until 1944.] I can’t remember where it was situated. The deepest traces in my memories were left by granny Natalia – a Russian. She was of noble origin. Her husband had been a general kiled by the bolsheviks 10. She fled the country with her three daughters by sea and all the jewels were sewn in a doll. When disembarking from the ship, the doll fell into the sea. After that she was living in poverty and she was forced to almost gather potato peels in order to provide for her daughters. She accepted to become a nanny in our family. She looked after me for three or four years as if I were her own child. I loved her very much. She didn’t use Russian with me; she used to speak to me in Bulgarian with strong Russian accent.

My mother played the most fundamental role in my upbringing and my life, my father used to go to work. And he died very early, when I was only eleven years old. My mother worked at the beginning, because she was educated – she had a college education. She started work as an insurance agent in an insurance company, but when I caught dysentery at a very early age she was forced to quit and remain at home to look after me.

Mum was strict, but very good at the same time, of course, and if I tried to show any stubbornness, she succeeded in suppressing those manifestations, so I grew up under her wing. Her star sign was Leo and I am a Piscean, maybe this is significant in some way, I don’t know… On remaining at home she started dealing with the housework with great diligence, she was imposing an order, which was even a bit of a burden. (My father, who worked as a bookkeeper, was compelled to take on more work from other companies. His last workplace was the ‘Fayon’ tannery, which was situated on the corner of the streets ‘Maria Luiza’ and ‘Tzar Simeon’.)

My father’s tastes and attitude were European. He liked the nice, beautiful things. He was a collector of expensive pens, he was always dressed smartly, and the colors of his clothes were always combined with a lot of taste. He was trying to cultivate this in me as well. He was aware that I had a favorite shirt, a favorite tie, but would always say ‘Reny, what should I wear?’ And I would say ‘The blue shirt and the suit.’ He insisted on mum’s elegance, too. Mum was always with a hat, with the high-heeled shoes. A seamstress was coming to our place, to sew clothes. My father would choose the fibres, he would choose the designs, and they were joking that she wouldn’t go to the toilet without his approval.

We always gathered around the table at dinner. I can’t say that we were a particularly cheerful family, but we were united. After dinner mum and dad would start dealing with the ledgers. This was my father’s additional job – to assist different companies with their bookkeeping and my mother used to help him finish his extra-work faster.

My father was a soft and yielding chap. My mother thought he was spoiling me. When Sunday came, he took walks with me. We started from the place we lived in, continued on ‘Maria Luiza’ until we reached the Palace. [The Palace of the Tzar in Bulgaria is situated in the center of Sofia, on Tzar Osvoboditel Boulevard. The Palace belongs to the state and it was built in the place of the old Turkish konak (police office). The reconstruction of the konak in 1878 was completed by the Austrian architect Rumpelmayer and its expansion and the application of the final touches in 1894 were done by architect Grunanger.] 11 There used to be a Viennese confectionary nearby and I would buy something sweet in that sweet shop and we headed home afterwards. My mother always made remarks to him that he was indulging me too much and that he shouldn’t satisfy my every wish. When I went out with mum she succeeded with her tactfulness, ‘Mum, buy me this…’ ‘There is something better down the street!’, ‘Mum, buy me that…’, ‘There is better down the street!’ and we reached home on relatively, you know, good terms. Yes, my mother was a strong-willed woman, with a very enduring spirit, with a desire to overcome the obstacles on the road that we had to follow and I am inclined to say that we managed to tackle with the difficult situation during the Holocaust thanks to her and thanks to her we succeeded in moving ahead.

Every Saturday or Sunday our family made outings three or four kilometers from Sofia, in Knyazhevo, for example. If my mother had some house chores to complete, she remained at home and I went out only with my father. He was an amateur photographer and during those outings he was taking a lot of photos. He was an admirer of nature and that is why the focus in them is on nature, not on man.

On Saturday evening we went to eat kebapcheta [grilled oblong rissoles]. On Sunday my father would take me to the children’s day performances at the National Theater but I can’t remember any titles 12. The three of us used to go to the cinema in ‘Moderen Teatar’ [Modern Theater] 13 and in ‘Odeon’ 14, but I can’t remember any movie titles.

My parents didn’t keep contact with the Jewish community. Apart from the kin, they kept in touch with other Jews from Vidin who lived in Sofia – Itshak Mindal’s family, for example, and Josef Perets’s family. We didn’t keep in touch with the Jews from Iuchbunar 15.

Sometimes during the holidays we went to the seaside alone, only the three of us, without friends or relatives. I remember Nessebar, then called Messembria, in 1936. Our departure for the seaside was an event to remember because we used to take a lot of household belongings, a mattress, crockery, everything, because there we would rent lodgings from local people and we had to do the cooking. In the morning, mum would cook and afterwards we would go to the beach with a donkey carrying our luggage, and after the beach we would return to the lodging again. I have a dim memory of the time spent there but I have a photo. We probably took the train to Nessebar, I can’t remember, but I keep the suitcase with which we travelled.

I remember the synagogue. I visited it mainly on high holidays like Rosh Hashanah, [Yom] Kippur, Pesach and not so much on Fridays. If we had ever been there on Friday it was when the visit was initiated by granny Dzhamila and grandpa Isak, who came to live in Sofia in 1919.

When some holiday was approaching my parents would buy me a new piece of clothing. After that, dressed in our best clothes, we went to the synagogue. Women went up to the balcony. I was present at my uncle Mois Beniesh’s wedding in the synagogue, or midrash maybe, in Odrin street in 1935. Uncle Miko got married when he was very young – only eighteen years old – to Milka, in 1928, a year before I was born. My mother was a witness at uncle Mois’s wedding. I remember that she was very elegant, wearing a fox fur borrowed from a friend of hers. I got startled when they broke the glasses during the nuptial ritual. This is the only thing I remember. My mother became very attached to her sister-in-law Rebeka, who was extremely beautiful. The two of them had a very close relationship throughout the years.

On Jewish holidays we convened mainly with uncle Mois and his wife Rebeka. I remember Pesach and Purim. For Purim mum liked to prepare a cake with walnut filling, she shaped the cake into the first letters of the names of my two aunts – Rebeka and Milka and gave it to them, no matter whether we convened with them or not. I don’t remember if there was any masking at Purim. Three weeks before Pesach mum would clean the house thoroughly, she washed all the clothes and scrutinized for breadcrumbs.

On holidays we sometimes convened with the family of my good friend, Viska Lazarova, and the mother of another friend and neighbor of mine who lived in the apartment house next door, Eti Rahamimova, used to make wonderful pastel – pasty with beef – and she would invite us.

For Yom Kippur, the house was cleaned, the fasting called taanit, started in the evening. We usually went to grandpa Isak, for a last meal so to say, at about 6 o’clock so that the fasting could start afterwards. It started in the evening and continued throughout the following day and then in the evening, after the visit to the synagogue, we could eat something. During the day we would smell a quince with cloves stuck into it so as not to faint because it was usually hot at [Yom] Kippur even though it was in September.

The first thing we had to put into our mouths after the fasting was bread dipped in oil so that it could easily slide into the organism. After that came the traditional hen with rice. There was a tradition to make kapora [Kapora is an old tradition, which required a rooster to be spun above the man’s head and a hen or pullet above the girl’s or woman’s head, a prayer was read, the idea being to transfer all the sins from the man to the animal after which it should be slaughtered. A new type of kapora nowadays is to give money with the same purpose in the synagogue. It is then distributed among the poor.] for [Yom] Kippur using a white pullet which had been bought in advance and kept in the house for some time. Before taking it to the synagogue to be slaughtered, my grandpa Isak would spin it above my head. The slaughtering of the animal was a torture for me because I usually got attached to the animal while it was at home. Usually it was my mother, who took the chickens to the synagogue, but once she was busy and I was sent to take two chickens to the synagogue. They were in granny’s garden. I dropped them because I was afraid and they started running. It was good that a man helped me to catch them. And I took them to the synagogue with grief in my heart. There was a special place for the sacrifice and a special shochet – a person who slaughters the animal in the most painless possible way. After the animal was slaughtered it was left so that the blood could flow out of it because the meat had to be cleansed of it.

My father, of course, didn’t keep the strict fast. Sometimes during the day he opened the lid of the pot with the meal for the evening. And he would take a bite. He didn’t stick to, I even remember that he liked to take us out of town and exactly on [Yom] Kippur to say, ‘Today we are going to…’. Whether it was to Knyazhevo, or somewhere else, I don’t remember, but mum was always beginning to worry, ‘I won’t be ready for the synagogue…’. Nothing to worry about, and he usually took us home when the ritual in the synagogue had already finished. But mum used to keep the fast. And this tradition – to keep [Yom] Kippur and to attend the ritual in the synagogue – continued almost to her death in spite of the severe colitis she suffered from.

I attended a Bulgarian school. Dad had never considered sending me to a Jewish school 16. Initially I went to a nursery school and then I started school earlier than the other children – at the age of six and a half. The first grades I attended in ‘Naum Simcha’ school near ‘Simeon’ – the building still exists today. There were thirty or forty children in my class, half of them were Jewish. We used to study Christian Religion and we all attended these lessons, I even imitated my Bulgarian classmates and crossed myself. I once asked my mother whether to cross myself or not and she told me ‘You are a Jew but you can do it if you want to.’

Although my father had European education and views his dream was to make me bat mitzvah when I become twelve but, unfortunately, he died shortly before that. My mother didn’t cook kosher. We used Bulgarian at home. My father was fluent in German, but he refused to use that language with me because he didn’t like the Germans, probably because of their fascist excesses as well. On the other hand, when I was in the second grade at school, there came a teacher in Italian who offered us to enrol a course in Italian and my parents didn’t object. This is how I learned to talk and write in Italian. We were not obliged to go to church and on the Jewish high holidays we were exempt from school.

Mum helped me with Bulgarian, mainly with the essays because dad asked her to, ‘Elvira, help the child…’. And she often replied, ‘She must get used to it, on her own!’. So I tried to write my essays alone. With arithmetics, I used to have a lot of difficulties, but later I started doing better. I didn’t like drawing. After finishing primary school I moved to ‘Konstantin Fotinov’ school [most Bulgarian schools bear the names of Bulgarian activists from the Bulgarian National Revival period or of heroes from the national liberation movement. ‘Konstantin Fotinov’ school still exists today under the same name.], which was on ‘Hristo Botev’ street. There were twenty-five or thirty students in my class, half of whom were Jews, because the school was near Iuchbunar – a quarter with a very solid Jewish population.

When I was in primary school I was a member of a Jewish society. It was called ‘Akeva’. I don’t remember how I had decided to join ‘Akeva’; I only remember that it was on the last floor of Bet Am 17. At one point, it was run by Rebeka Arsenieva, [Rebeka Arsenieva was a radio director for many years at the radio theater in the Bulgarian National Radio] Ani Mayler’s mother. There we used to sing songs, play, dance Israeli, Palestinian, called Jewish dances at the time, we learned the basics of Hebrew, we used to have meetings. Moreover, we had a uniform and an emblem – a piece of cardboard with three stars. This organization was Zionistic by nature. We used to talk often about the remote country of our ancestors – Palestine. I was sent to a youth camp in Tserovo through this organization. My memroies of the stay there are vague. In June 1942 I finished my primary education with excellent marks, and then we put the badges [yellow stars] 18.

I was enroled at the Third Girls’ High School because my mother wanted me to study medicine. Half of my classmates were Jews. There were already Branniks 19 in the class. They were easily distinguishable from us because they had grey uniforms and silk stockings. They put on those uniforms when there were demonstrative processions and celebrations. I don’t know who had given them that right as it may have been in discrepancy with the school regulations, and we used to wear black uniforms (aprons), badges and thick stockings. We envied them to a certain extent. We, the Jews, even when we wore badges, were not allowed at manifestations and other official, open celebrations. We were not supposed to be shown and seen. Before the first year had ended, before finishing the school term, we had to leave Sofia.

My first good friend was a Jew – Viska Lazarova. We were inseparable from the first grade until the internment. She lived on 32 ‘Serdika’ street. She used to come to my place on ‘Makriopolska’ street, collected me and we would go to ‘Fotinov’ school together. I had another friend – Eti Rahamimova, she was my neighbor as well. Our parents were friends, too. I also had Bulgarian friends. We are still close with a classmate from the primary school and we call each other on our birthdays. Her name is Magdalena Stefanova. Her brother, Kolyo, was my bodyguard. And as I was faint-hearted and some of the boys were teasing me, he didn’t let them touch me.

Mum wanted me to spend more time at home, not to meet a lot of children so that I wouldn’t catch some disease. I used to have some very interesting toys – a sleeping doll Freda, a little gramophone with records, a car that could be wound and made curves, a jumping monkey, the Monopole game. All those were bought from abroad and ordered by my father, probably to friends or colleagues. I can’t be sure. I didn’t like the dolls so much as a one-legged teddy bear. Usually the children came to me, to my place. Or, if I was ill, and I was ill very often, I put the toys on the windowsill and the children looked at them from the outside. When dad was ill and stayed in bed at home, we would play cards.

My big dream was to learn to ride a bike. Mum’s financial situation wasn’t very good and hiring a bike cost, with the old money, five leva per quarter of an hour and five leva was the cost of a loaf of bread, white bread. Mum could only give me five leva per week. And by the time I had taken the bike from the place where I hired it to my street, five minutes had alreay elapsed. Some of the other children would say, ‘Let me ride it for a while! Let me ride it for a while!’. And then I had to return the bike. So this is one of my unfulfiled dreams – to ride a bike.

I could say that until 1940 there weren’t anti-Semitic activities. No. My first memory of that dates back to after my father’s death. Mum sent me to buy cheese, yellow cheese, from that shop, which was on St. Nikola square. Coming back from the shopping I found myself in ‘Maria Luiza’ boulevard during the breaking of the window shops – for me personally this was the first manifestation of anti-Semitism in Bulgaria, the year must have been 1942. It was a very scary experience for me. I ran home, I was very young and said, ‘Mama, they are breaking the window shops!’, and this was my first clash with such manifestations. The second difficult moment was when we were made to wear badges; I was twelve at the time. I still keep the badges. After that I finish the third grade and as usual with excellent marks in everything but my teacher in Bulgarian, Dragneva, who liked me very much, said, ‘We can’t give you the big award because you are an individual of Jewish origin.’ And I was awarded a Bulgarian book – ‘Notes on the Bulgraian Uprisings’ [by Zahari Stoyanov] and a book about the tzar in which it was written – ‘Given to Reyna Buko Lidgi for her excellent marks – an individual of Jewish origin.’ I still keep that book.  

The year was 1941. My father was fired from ‘Fayon’ tannery. According to the Law for the Protection of the Nation 20, the owner Jew couldn’t hire clerks who were Jews. [According to the Law for the Protection of the Nation the Jews cannot own field. The Jews cannot take state, municipal or other positions of the public authority and private-legal organizations, cannot practise freelance jobs, trade, industry and crafts.] They told him, it must have been on 19th January 1941, ‘You don’t have a job from tomorrow.’ He exclaimed, ‘But I have a family, how will I support them?’ And because of the stress my father got an apoplectic stroke. He had problems with the heart, had suffered from severe pneumonia. Before leaving for work that day, the right part of his face paralyzed. It was a real agony the next three weeks. I witnessed it because I was in the same room. During these three weeks my mother and my aunt Rebeka, Mois Beniesh’s wife, looked after him. He died on 18th February, in the room where I was sleeping too. It seemed to me that my mother screamed when he died.

The coffin was put on the table in the apartment in ‘Makriopolska’ street. According to the Jewish religion the dead person should not be dressed, he should be placed in the coffin after being washed and covered in a white sheet. The coffin was then covered and afterwards nobody had the right to look at the dead man. All that was done. It was a rainy day. And they came to take the body. The women, then, didn’t have the right to follow the coffin. Only the men went. After he had been buried, my uncles and my aunts returned or Rebeka Beniesh, Mois Beniesh’s wife and Milka Beniesh, Miko (Nisim) Beniesh’s wife. And my mum and I had to sit on the floor, according to the Jewish ritual, and stay there for seven days. Apart from that, according to the ritual, the underwear is cut because it is nearest to the body and you have to feel the pain from the loss. They dressed me in black, removed the white collar from my black school uniform, they put black socks on my feet. Mum was entirely dressed in black. She went into mourning and even dyed her underwear black because her love was very strong. We didn’t change our underwear and didn’t take a bath for seven days as the ritual requires. While the sitting takes place, the so-called ‘insietti’ in Ladino, ‘insietti’ meaning ‘seven days’, the bereaved don’t have the right to prepare food for themselves. The food should be brought by relatives and they agree on who will bring food for lunch, who for dinner and they stay together with the bereaved, but they sit on chairs whereas the bereaved sit on the floor. These seven days are quite hard because the relatives ask the bereaved how the person died, what happened and what… and all this makes the situation terribly depressing. For me it was extremely difficult because I loved my father very much. And we had a lot of relatives who were bringing food, but not every day and sometimes mum had to stand up and prepare something for eating from our modest supplies, which had remained after dad’s death and so came the seventh day. On the seventh day the women have the right to go and see where the dead man is buried.

Mum remained without any resources because everything we had was mainly from the companies that dad had assisted and they paid him, or, as it turned out later, some of them hadn’t paid him anything.

And dad was buried at the lowest possible price, according to mum’s words, but I didn’t know what exactly that meant. Mum started to look for a job. Robert Kohen’s family, who was an acquaintance of uncle Mois Beniesh and owned a haberdashery in ‘Pirotska’ street, helped her initially. He gave her 2, 000 leva, somebody anonymously bought us coal and wood for the winter, then she got some other aid again, but the situation was terrible because mum was still without work. After dad died a neighbor, Marko Rahamimov, my friend Eti Rahamimova’s father, taught her accountancy. She had helped my father while he was still alive but she didn’t know accountancy. The knowledge she acquired was of help later.

Soon after dad died, while she was still without work and the situation seemed desperate, she thought of leaving a letter to my uncle Isak. She had a plan – to get up earlier and to jump under the tram because she couldn’t see a way out of her awful situation.

I will tell one of her dreams after dad’s death, which she told me on waking up and from which, she believed, she got information about the future course of our life. She dreamt that my dad and granny Sarah came near her bed and told her, ‘Come with us.’ She was in her night gown and while walking on a way she said, ‘I can’t…’. There were torns. She then saw a bloody trace in front of her, but he told her to continue and they reached the bank of a river. He said, ‘We will go to the other side and will throw something for you.’ And then she saw a big fish in the air but the fish fell into the water. Granny Sarah shouted from the other side ‘Don’t worry, we will throw something again.’ And they threw a small fish. She woke up. And she woke up later than the possible time at which she could wake to throw herself under the tram. And she told me the dream then. And I smiled and said, ‘Well, Mama…’, can you imagine to say that, at the age of twelve, ‘Mama, this is just wishful thinking.’ At that moment, and this is really strange, it is difficult to believe in these things, so at that very moment a neighbor, the wife of Rahamimov – the person who taught her accountancy, came to look for her. She said, ‘Elvira, I read that they are looking for electricity collectors.’ And mum, using the information from the advertisement, took an exam for electricity collectors in Sofia. The exam was very difficult, but she passed all the exams and they hired her in the electricity company. The situation was complicated, but as the company was international, they could hire her even though she was a Jew. They had that right and then again some strange force helped her. She started going round Sofia and taking down the indications from the electric meters.

One day, an assistant of hers from her previous job saw her and asked her, ‘Mrs Lidgi, what are you doing here?’, ‘Well, I am here at work.’. This work involved going round the streets, to measure and calculate the indications from the electric meters. And this woman went immediately to Mr Kastermans, a director of the electricity company, and said, ‘Mr Kastermans, I want to take Mrs Elvira Lidgi in my department, as my employee.’ and she actually went there, to a better position in the accountancy department of the electricity company.

And after that, just think about that dream! - one day she met the very director of the insurance company ‘Asicurazione Generale’, where my mother had worked until I turned four. He asked, ‘Mrs Lidgi, why are you in mourning?’, because mum was wearing black from head to toes after my father’s death. ‘Why? What’s happened?’ ‘Well, I remained a widow.’ ‘Do you have a job?’ She told him where she worked, after which he offered her a job – much better and well paid. In this way she changed her job for the third time after my father’s death. So she started work there, it must have been in 1941 and stayed there until our internment.

We received a subpoena that we had to leave for Vratsa and, additionally, one of dad’s cousins, his uncle Izidor Lidgi’s son, who regularly sent us a check to help us, sent us a letter at that moment saying that mum had to do everything possible so that we could leave for Vidin. Mum started preparing, she went to different commissariats and in the end succeeded in obtaining a permission for traveling to Vidin. We were allowed to take anything we wanted but this meant transportation and more money. Mum simply had to sell the furniture and part of our belongings. While mum was trying to get the permission, I had to pack the luggage. We loaded everything up the train. At the station we were seen off by Robert Kohen (who had given us 2, 000 leva) and my favorite teacher in Bulgarian, Nadezhda Dragneva. We had a close relation because I was a good student. She visited us often, she wasn’t afraid that we were Jews, my mother and I had also visted her home. She had two sons. We kept in contact even after 1944 and, now, without being afraid, she had come to the station to see us off despite the risk she was taking in that way. Uncle Mois’s family was interned to the town of Ferdinand [now Montana], and uncle Miko’s – to Sliven. Granny Dzhamila was still in Bulgaria but I don’t have information how she survived the Holocaust. She was probably interned to Ruse. My mother’s problems after dad’s death were so many that obviously granny Dzhamila was in the background.

In Vidin we lived in Izidor Lidgi’s big house. It was one of the most impressive houses in Vidin. There was a piano there. My mother and I lived in one room on the floor below, Izidor Lidgi, his wife Liza and their children Marcel and Sofka – in the room next door. His mother, granny Sophie, lived in a separate room. On the floor above lived Buko and Lika Pinkas and their son Bentsion, in the other room – the Zilbermans. In the third room was a friend of the family – Liutinger. All the other Jews lived in much worse conditions in the building of the school in the old part of the town called ‘Kaleto’. There the conditions were tough and they were foddered.

There was a curfew and we were allowed to go out only between ten and twelve o’clock in the morning. The rest of the day we used to spend inside. My mother, in her attempt to make up for the food we were given, began cleaning the floor below and the toilet outside regularly. Getting supplies was a major problem. Marko Kohenov sent us parcels from the town of Kula, where he lived because he loved mum very much, as a wife of his favorite cousin, Buko Lidgi. My mother and I ate together with granny Sophie and Izidor Lidgi’s family. Granny Sophie would sometimes give us a 100 leva note so that we could have some money.

The time was passing slowly although we talked to each other in the house. Through Bentsion I came into contact with the progressive [leftist] youth – the members of RMS [The Union of Young Workers (UYW)] 21. We had meetings with them, took off the badges and sneaked through the gardens in order to meet other Jews from ‘Kaleto’. In spite of the hard life, I didn’t have a clear idea of what was actually going on. We didn’t know about the concentration camps in Europe but there was something in the air… There were rumors that we were going to be sent to Poland, but nobody knew what would happen afterwards. The word Poland was a threatening word…

The other problem was my studying at high school. According to the regulations only two per cent of the Jews in a certain town could attend high school and, of course, the local people had an advantage. My mother couldn’t imagine that I wouldn’t get proper education and she wrote a letter to the then minister of education, Yotsov, who replied that I should stick to the regulations as a Jew, but I had the right to attend the high school as a private student. We started looking for teachers to prepare me. Mum succeeded in finding the teachers needed and I, in this so complicated situation, started preparing for the exams. [According to the Law for the Protection of he Nation, the admittance of Jews to the schools was limited. Nonetheless, in most of the schools – talking about the middle class Jews – they continue their education in exactly this way – as private students.] We often heard shots and could see the smoke from the Romanian bank opposite because they were bombing Kalafat – they would sound the alarm whenever planes of the English-American union passed over Vidin. On such occasions, we would leave the town and hide in airraid shelters. [On 27th September 1940 the Tripartite pact was officially signed – in fact that was a union between Germany, Italy and Japan. On 1st March 1941 the government led by Bogdan Filov signed a protocol and Bulgaria joined the pact. On 12th December the same year Bulgaria discontinued its diplomatic relations with the USA and Great Britain and declared war on these states. As a reaction to this decision the allies Great Britain and the USA declared war on Bulgaria. The English-American airraids on the Balkans were particularly intensive from September 1943 – on 13th the towns of Stara Zagora, Gorna Oryahovitsa and Kazanlak were bombed, in October – Skopje, Veslets and Nis. In the period between 1st Novemver and 20th December the headquarters of the strategic airraid forces of the USA in Europe formed the 15th Air-borne Army for bombing Bulgaria. In December Sofia and Plovdiv were bombed. At the beginning of 1944 after the second massive airraids on Sofia, the allies attacked the air space over Skopje, Vratsa, Kunino and Beglezh.] I managed to prepare for the exams in May 1944. I sat for all the examinations, passed them and got a certificate that I have finished the fifth grade.

We welcomed 9th September [1944] 22 in Vidin. Our boys managed to enter the District Administration and they said that there were found lists according to which the male Jews should have been sent to Poland, whereas the women and children were supposed to be put on barges and sunk into the river. I don’t know whether this is true.

Two days before 9th September the fascist authorities sounded the alarm. We were taken out of the town, but I can’t say if all the Jews were made to leave it. In this way the German forces quartered in Vidin were given the conditions to leave town unobstructed. The troops withdrew from the town but dug themselves in on some heights near Zaychar – to the west, on Yugoslavian territory. When the Russian troops headed for the border, the Germans started shooting from the high grounds and turned them into bloody meat. They drove the Russians to Vidin like that, in the trucks. On 20th September left the first Bulgarian forces, which were joined by a lot of Jews volunteers. The first victim was claimed – Zhak Kohen.

We started thinking of returning. Mum left for Sofia first in order to prepare things and there she accidentally met my uncle Mois Beniesh who had been interned to Montana [she means Ferdinand]. She succeeded in finding some lodgings and came back on a train full of Russian soldiers. We packed our luggage and left for Sofia, settled into the lodgings but the conditions were horrible. A friend of mine put us up temporarily at her place. Her name was Florentina Presenti. Meanwhile, mum managed to find a room on 22 ‘Macedonia’ square where we lived for thirty-four years.

My mother started work at the Insurance Company, which after the nationalization, became SIC (State Insurance Company). She retired there. I started the sixth grade in the Fifth Girls’ High School in ‘Tzar Ivan Shishman’ street. At that time uncle Mois starts work at Radio ‘Sofia’. Later, in 1946, he left for Moscow as a spokesman for Georgi Dimitrov, an announcer at Radio ‘Moscow’, and there he enroled at GITIS (The State Institute for Drama Arts). He graduated in 1950 and came back to Bulgaria with finished theater education and became a drama director at the National Theater. Uncle Miko, on the other hand, immediately after 1944 started some technical job. Auntie Rashel was in Bregovo village. Sarah, Clara, Solomon and their mother Dzhamila were already in Israel. They left as early as 1941. In 1948 my friend Viska Lazarova, whom I haven’t seen since 1944, left for Israel. I know that she had been interned to Pleven and after 1944 we went to different schools. I was probably sad but the events were tempestuous and the vortex big to leave us any room for such feelings. My other friend, Eti Rahamimova, also left for Israel with the first wave [Mass Aliyah 23. She became a doctor there. Immediately after uncle Miko’s death his son Isak left for Israel in 1949 and his sister Sarah left in 1951. His brother, Mony, left in 1961 or 1962 and Yakim – in 1966.

The migration of Jews to Israel wasn’t an issue of interest for us because my incle Mois, who was regarded with great respect by my mother, was a communist and his life was entirely devoted to the building of the new life here in Bulgaria. Moreover, she insisted very much on my studying and at that time I was only in my second year at university.

I have left-wing political convictions and have always believed in the system which saved our lives. After 9th September I became a member of UYW [The Union of Young Workers] while I was still studying at the Fifth Girls’ High School. This union later transformed into Dimitrov’s Communist Youth Union [Bulgarian Komsomol] 24. Right after that I was offered a memebership in the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) but I refused because I considered myself to be too young for this responsibility. I didn’t manage to become a member of the Party anyway but I was always very active in the organizations of the Fatherland Front 25 like my mother who was very active as well. She used to give lectures, took part in gathering aids and membership fees, we organized programs and celebrations.

After finishing my highschool education I decided to take the entrance exams for Sofia University 26, I wanted to study Russian Philology despite the fact that this was in contrast with my mother’s exopectations. She wanted me to study medicine. I have made my choice because of the memory I have retained of our meeting with the Soviet forces in Vidin during the internment. Something more, some of them stayed in uncle Izidor’s house and their presence was unforgettable for me. I remember that, being a fifteen-year-old girl at the time, I fancied one Russian soldier very much. He was tall, fair-haired, with blue eyes. His name was Mihail Sarancha. He had luminous eyes and there was this feeling of warmth about him. I remember asking my mom to let him stay for one night in our room in uncle Izidor’s house because he didn’t have where to sleep. Mum was against it at the beginning but I was begging her so persistently that in the end she gave in. On the next morning we found out that he had brought lice into the room. I was deeply moved by the spirit of selflessness of the Russian soldiers and their will to achieve victory.

During the four years of study and because of my membership in the Youth Union (UYW) I was chosen for a courier of the faculty. I was delivering the correspondence of the Youth Union, and then, you know, of the Komsomol, as we used to call it. I would invariably sit at the first desk and, as we didn’t have textbooks, I was taking notes in all subjects. Of course, I liked studying Russian most of all. I was better prepared than the rest of my colleagues because I had practised the language, of course not very correctly, with the Russian soldiers who were in Izidor Lidgi’s house, and because I had taken some private lessons when I prepared for the high school exams in Vidin, I also studied French at Sofia University, which I developed and perfected later in language courses.

My last academic year was over in 1950 and we were the first Russian Philology trainees in Bulgaria. After leaving university I had to find a job. And the first job in my life was as a teacher at the school of technology ‘ORT’ 27 – a Jewish school of technology. It used to be opposite the nowadays hospital of the Ministry of the Interior, in the building of the Jewish orphanage. There I taught Russian to all classes. The education in the school was five years. The purpose was to prepare the speacialists for the future work in Israel.. There were all kind of specialities with weak currents. Not only Jews studied in it but some Bulgarians as well. [‘ORT’ leave Bulgaria most probably in 1948 and they open a similar school in Israel. The first teachers were the ones who were teaching in Bulgaria. Until the present day in the office of the international ORT there is a carpet which was made by the students in Sofia. It is one of the best schools in Israel. The organization returned to Bulgraia a few years ago and is now working together with school No134. The official closing of the school took place in 1951. The school took part in two international exhibitions – in Switzerland and Great Britain – with the above-mentioned carpet.] One of my famous students was the singer Sabin Marcov, and professor Mento Menteshev, Aaron Abramovich and others, as well as the Bulgarians Lyubcho Mitsev and Mitko Gulubov. But the fact that I have finished my studies at university didn’t mean that I had graduated. For a year I was preparing for my last exams in Russian and Soviet Literature. And in 1951 I graduated, with excellent marks. Then the marking system was based on five grades and I had 5.54. But then the problem with finding a job appeared again. My mother had problems with her kidneys, she had acute pains in her kidneys. I started looking for a job. I was offered a place at the Air Force Headquarters. I took a difficult exam, passed it but I was told that there was a protégé of the general of the headquarter. They told me they were ready to give me references but that they couldn’t hire me. The shock was extremely strong. I started wondering what to do, I was twenty-one and applied for a job in ‘Himimport’ [a state company]. There was such an organization then – ‘Himimport’. At the oral interview they asked me whether I had any relatives in Israel. I, of cousre, didn’t have intentions to hide anything. I said, ‘Yes, my mother’s sisters.’ ‘Thank you, we will let you know.’ And I realized that this was the reason for rejecting my application at ‘Himimport’; instead of me they hired a woman from the whiteguards who even lived in my quarter. Then I met accidentally an acquaintance of mine, a colleague so to say. And she asked me ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m looking for a job.’ ‘They are looking for a translator at the Union of the Bulgarian-Soviet Societies, go there. Tell them I have sent you.’. So I went there, introduced myself, showed them my excellent diploma. They asked me about what I could do and told me they would call me. And surprisingly, one morning, at seven o’clock, the doorbell rang. It was my colleague Todor Minchev with whom we had studied Russian Philology. I didn’t know he was working at the union. They asked him about me and told him to invite me to start work. And, on 26th July 1951, I started work as a translator at the Union of Bulgarian-Soviet Societies. I worked in the Cultural Relations Department where we translated current materials on the activities of the Union, apart from that we prepared materials for exhibitions, we carried out contacts with creative unions and once a year we accompanied Soviet delegations that came for the month of Bulgarian-Soviet friendship. When I worked for the Union of Bulgarian-Soviet Societies, I would accompany different delegations from the socialist countries. Once I had to accompany a Polish delegation. I listened to them talking to each other and understood most of the things they said. I decided to attend two-year courses so that I could learn and use the Polish language.

I worked for the Union of Bulgarian-Soviet Societies from 26th July 1951 until 1st September 1955. In August or at the end of July 1955 the then prime minister Vulko Chervenkov 28 took the decision to disband the Union of the Bulgarian-Soviet Societies because, in his opinion, the movement had spread throughout Bulgaria and there was no need for a separate organization. And we were left to look for a job, wherever it was.

In August I entered a competition in the Bulgarian State Conservatory. I had found out about the competition from the ‘Vecherni Novini’ newspaper (Evening News). I decided to enter the competition without any experience with university teaching. The exam was rather complicated, there were twelve other applicants and as I was fluent with the language, came first in that competition and started work on 1st September 1955 as a teacher of Russian in the Conservatory. My work at the Conservatory made me delve into the musical terminology and I have never stopped expanding my knowledge in this sphere.

In 1961 while I was on holiday in Velingrad I met a woman from Spain. Her name was Reyes Bertal. In our conversation I used Ladino and she spoke in Spanish. We understood each other perfectly. I decided to expand my knowledge in Spanish with a language course at Allians. Until 1966 I was only teaching. We had long holidays so I decided to enrol a course for tourist guides. After completing it I decided to offer my services to the Concert Directorate [created in 1948 its name was changed several times. In 1949 its name was changed to Directorate for Musical, Creative and Performing Arts at the Committee for Science, Arts and Culture and in 1960 its name was changed to Bulgarian Concert Directorate. In 1969 it moved under the authority of Main Directorate Bulgarian Music.] as an accompanying interpreter. Because of my job I met a lot of guest-musicians and I traveled with them throughout the country. I became an assistant in most of the big international competitions and festivals like Sofia Musical Weeks, the Ballet Competition, The Competition for Young Opera Singers.

When I turned fifty-five, I was awarded the Golden Badge from the Musical Workers’ Union and when I turned seventy-five, I received the Golden Harp – an award from the same union. During my entire almost fifty-year work for the Musical Academy there were two cases that have insulted my Jewish self-awareness.

The first was in 1956 after one of the wars which started in Israel. I went to class… It was a habit of mine to talk to the students about some current event before starting the seminar because I wanted to make them say a few words in Russian about a certain piece of news and one of my students says, ‘I have always believed that the Jews are cowards.’ And I replied, ‘Are you aware that I am a Jew too?’ ‘Oh, no, I didn’t know that.’ But they managed to cope with the situation. And the second case was again because they didn’t know about my origins.

The second case: a student on another occasion threw in ‘But he is chifut 29.’ You can imagine how I feel when the word ‘chifut’ is being used as this word is associated with the most difficult years from the Holocaust and I say, ‘Do you know what this word means?’ ‘Well…no.’ ‘This is the most horrible word for a Jew, and I am Jewish.’ ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ I informed the Party Secretary. She didn’t pay serious attention.

We didn’t keep strictly the Jewish traditional holidays. Usually on Pesach and Rosh Hashanah we used to convene in the house of aunt Rebeka and uncle Mois, but we continued to keep [Yom] Kippur – especially my mother, for her it was a law to keep it.

I have never questioned the existence of the state Israel but, on the other hand, I have never thought seriously about that because I knew that our kin were there and I could join them whenever I wanted to. I have never had any administrative problems in this respect. In general, I believe that the state Israel is necessary for our people who had suffered so much. I’ve been to Israel several times – I visited it in 1960, in 1993 and twice in 1996.

I’ll tell you a story – in 1967, for the first time I got the chance to visit my beloved, craved for Soviet Union - as a teacher of Russian for a qualification course. This coincided with the Six-Day-War 30, which started on 6th June 1967. I was in Moscow. A severe campaign against Israel started there. There started a TV program in which all the eminent actors, writers, artists were included and they had never even suspected they were Jewish, but there started a campaign against Israel, against the Jews. I called Sofia to ask what was going on, whether I needed to leave for Bulgaria right away. But mum told me ‘Don’t worry, here in Bulgaria there is nothing wrong.’ So I continued my stay in Moscow but there the reaction against Israel was appalling and then Bulgaria discontinued its cultural and its diplomatic relations with Israel 31. But we didn’t break our correspondence with our relatives and in 1961 my aunt Sarah Beniesh came to Sofia for the first time. We sent her a declaration to testify that she would stay with us but, due to change of circumstances, she was put up at uncle Mois Beniesh’s house. From the militia, they came to our home to ask why she wasn’t staying with us. Of course, I got a little scared, but I explained to them that my mother was on holiday; I couldn’t receive her so she had to go to my uncle’s. Everything that happened was closely monitored in that way.

I haven’t spent much time thinking about the political life and what was happening around us. I have always been leftist in my political convictions although I’ve never been a member of BCP, I actively participated in the Fatherland Front movement. My disappointments with the latter communist system appeared after 1989 because I found out a lot of things, which had been kept secret before that. During the coup d’etat on 10th November 1989 32, I was accompanying my mother to the polyclinic and while she was being examined I listened to the radio. At the moment when I heard ‘Todor Zhivkov is down!’ 33 I was so amazed that we started sayng together with doctors and my mother ‘Mama, Todor Zhivkov is down!’, which for me was a real… quite of a…, even a shock you may call it because we were used to his being at the head since 1956. My life after the changes wasn’t much different from a financial point of view because with my mother we owned that apartment in Mladost quarter, I went on working at the Academy but as a pensioner. I retired in 1989 but had regular classes even after that. My stress from the changes were of a different nature. I had regular classes, I went to the Academy, the students didn’t come, I went back home and started crying because for a person with so many years of experience not to have students… My mother tryed to console me, ‘Reny, child…’. This is what she called me usually…’We will live on our two pensions’. My answer was, ‘Mama, it’s not about the money. I suffer because of that morality, that they associated politics with the language. And one of my best students told me, ‘Comrade Lidgi, it’s not because of you but because of the language.’

And there started this succession of events. Firstly, the students refused to, they didn’t attend the classes in Russian due to the common desire for a new order and new democracy after the coup of 10th November 1989. Secondly, my mother’s worsened condition which led to a operation and her death… And I can tell you that I would never forget one day when I was supposed to stay beside my mother’s bed and look after her but I had to go to the Conservatory. It was right after 10th November 1989. At that time the desire for a new order and freedom led to all kind of situations, especially among the young people. I had to take something from my cabinet in the Conservatory. A group of students met me at the door, ‘Where are you going?’. I said, ‘I need to take something from my cabinet, something…’ ‘You can’t do that, you don’t have the right.’ I said, ‘Who is in charge of you?’ ‘We have a commandant but he went to a happening.’ I said ‘Will anyone of you accompany me upstairs because I need to take something from it.’ It was a shock for me because the students turned against their teachers.

I started participating in activities in the Jewish organization at some time in the spring of 1990. Stella Ilel, who chaired WIZO 34, invited me to the Jewish organization. I first became a member of WIZO, the women’s organization, and after that I was drawn into the town union. I started to contribute regularly to ‘Evreiski Vesti’ (Jewish News) [This is the only Jewish newspaper in Bulgaria which has existed for seventy years.] And when my mother died it seems to me that this organization gave me moral stability, the stability to know I have where to communicate because my mother’s death was a great stress to me. There was another fateful event. On 7th November 2000 I survived a car accident. I woke up in Pirogov Hospital. Later it turned out that I had a concussion, my two legs were broken and my pelvis was cracked. My body was a ruin to put it in a few words. My friends from club ‘Health’ at the Jewish Center [Bet Am] immediately took matters in hand. Sofka Danon and Morits Assa asked from the administration and Robert Dzherasi that, after being discharged from hospital, I should be put up for some time at the Home of the Parent, until I recover. The rehabilitation, the people who looked after me so much, helped me recover to a much bigger degree. In fact, my comparatively quick recovery was due to my physical preparation at club ‘Health’ before that because I acquired the things shown to me by the rehabilitator very quickly. It seems to me that I wouldn’t have recovered at all if it wasn’t for the Home of the Parent. Even now I am a member of Club ‘Health’. Sometimes I show the exercises. I go there every Monday and Wednesday. Every Tuesday afternoon I go to club ‘Ladino’. Every Thursday I go to a philharmonic concert – I have a subscription. Every Saturday afternoon I am in the ‘Golden Age’ club. On Sunday my friend David Kohen and I usually take a walk to Pancharevo. Once a week I find the time to visit my aunt Rebeka. I keep in touch with Sarah Meyuhas’s family in Israel. We talk on the phone. I am in a correspondence with a first cousin of my friend Viska Lazarova – Violeta Mendel. I also write to Florentina Presenti who lives in Canada. I have an active life. And I am very happy to have joined the Jewish organization.

Translated by Dimka Stoeva

Glossary

Aron Nissim Alkalai

Dupnitsa

Bulgaria

Date of interview: July 2005

Interviewer: Dimitar Bozhilov

Aron Alkalai is one of the few Jews from the older generation remaining in Dupnitsa. He managed to save his Jewish identity, although he denies that. He thinks that the observation of Jewish laws was truer of his ancestors. He lives in a modestly furnished, but cosy flat in the center of the town. He is sociable and likes spending time outside talking with neighbors and friends. He is a very good cook and makes an amazing rose hip wine. He lives with his wife Ida, and they both miss their children, who recently immigrated to Israel.

I know that my family name Alkalai is a geographical name. It comes from the Alkala Mountain in Spain. It seems my ancestors had that family name and it remained when they moved to the Balkans. 1 The families of my parents are from Kyustendil. My paternal grandparents married in Kyustendil and all their children were born there. Then they moved to live in Dupnitsa [a town in Western Bulgaria]. I do not know when they decided to move. That happened before I was born. The reason to move was work, I suppose. Probably there were more opportunities for trade in Dupnitsa. I have heard that my paternal grandfather Avram Alkalai while living in Kyustendil came to Dupnitsa to sell whole carts full of sea-salt. He bought it from the wholesalers and resold it. He also sold other goods. At that time, merchants sold a lot of things – gas, oil, wool, cotton, paints. My paternal grandfather also had an oven, in which he used to bake prunes, which he sold. My father also did the same. My paternal grandmother Rivka Alkalai was a housewife. I know that she gave birth eleven times. Two of her children died and nine remained. My father was the oldest of them.

I know almost nothing about my mother's parents. I remember that they lived in Kyustendil, where I went in the summer during my vacations. My maternal grandfather Rafael Lazar had a small goatee. I do not know what he worked. I do not remember my grandmother Vinucha Lazar. She was a housewife.

In Kyustendil I visited my mother's relatives and my father's brother who lived there. Once my parents decided to go to Kyustendil. I was not allowed to go with them then. I was very young. But I had decided that I should definitely go. I got on a truck, which was on its way to Kyustendil and so I arrived in the town. I sat on the sidewalk there and waited. My parents saw me and were absolutely surprised. They had to leave me at one of my uncle's for some time.

I do not know how my parents met. When they married, my father was living in Dupnitsa. After they married, they lived in various rented flats in the center of the town. My parents spoke Bulgarian, but their parents spoke Ladino 2. After they married, I was born in 1921, my brother Rafael in 1923 and my sister Riri in 1928. The house where I was born had two rooms and was very humbly furnished. When I was young, we did not have electricity, we used gas lamps.

My mother's name is Regina Alkalai and she had two brothers and two sisters. Her eldest brother's name is Yosif Lazar. He was a lawyer and lived in Plovdiv. Her other brother's name is David Lazar. He was a merchant and lived in Kyustendil. One of my mother's sisters was Buka and she married in Sofia. Her other sister was Matilda and she lived in Dupnitsa. Her husband's name was Konorti and he was a tailor. Unfortunately, that is all I know about them.

My mother was a teacher in the Jewish school in Kyustendil. Probably she also worked as a teacher in Dupnitsa but for a short time. After she married, she stopped working under the influence of my father. He wished that she would only be a housewife. My mother knew French very well. She also played the guitar and knew songs in Ladino and in Bulgarian. I have seen her singing a melody and playing on the guitar to herself. In the evenings she would go on the balcony and hum a song for 'good night'. Times were more peaceful then and people were less demanding. We did not buy many clothes, did not rely on material things so much and people lived more peacefully than they do now.

My father Nissim Alkalai had a lot of jobs. He had a hard life. At one point he was even a bartender and a cafe owner. When the water-conduit for Sofia was being constructed, he had a small canteen in the Rila Mountain. He cooked for the workers, who were around 150 people. But my father was a very good man and often gave them food on credit. That is why, he did not get rich from that job. There were some Italians who owed him a lot of money. At that time our house was mortgaged. My father had taken a loan from the Jewish bank 'Bratstvo' [Brotherhood] 3 to buy the house, in which we lived. My mother told me that once my father threw in the stove some papers issued to him by a judge and with which he had to collect the money he was owed. He had won a trial against the people who owed him money, but at the last minute he reconsidered. My mother asked him why he was throwing those papers in the fire. He answered that the people had no money to pay him back. For example, one of them had only one cow. If he took it, what would the man have to eat? So, my father was very considerate about the others. The fact that there were five of us and our house was mortgaged was in the background. Because of that nobility and kindness my father was much respected man. He had a lot of friends among the Bulgarians too.

My father was a cashier in the Jewish bank 'Bratstvo' in the years around World War II. It was a local bank governed by the Jewish municipality in Dupnitsa. In 1941 under the Law for Protection of the Nation 4 the bank was closed and my father was left unemployed. I was in the labor camps 5 then, but when I was at home I tried to do some work to help them – as a cobbler or in the tobacco warehouses.

When I was a child, my father could not afford to take us on vacation. We went on excursions in the mountain (Dupnitsa is in the foot of the Rila Mountain). Once I remember that we went to the Rila Monastery with four other Jewish families. Every family had three or four children. There was a special tent for cooking and a tent for sleeping. There was a Bulgarian Aleksander Pilev who transported beer from Samokov and bottled it in Dupnitsa. He had a pub in the town. The beer was left in a well to get cold. A boy, Kole the Blacksmith and I were sent to get them. But we decided to drink secretly and fill up the bottles with water. But the people found that out and criticized the pub owner. He could not say what had happened. In the end the people found out the truth. Another time, once again during an excursion in Rila, we had taken a keg of wine. We sat in a meadow above a river. There were trees around the river. The keg slid, fell down and crashed. My parents went on excursions in the mountain every summer for about 10-15 days. My father was much respected and had a lot of friends among the Bulgarians. We went on those excursions both with Jewish and Bulgarian families. I do not remember if we sang songs. They were more of daily excursions in the open.

There was a cinema in Dupnitsa where I regularly went. It was a private one and was known as 'Doncho's cinema'. Probably its owner's name was Doncho and that's why it was called that way. I went to buy tickets early in the morning to get cheaper seats. Unfortunately, I do not remember the names of the movies, but when we were young, we were much influenced by them and tried to copy the behavior of the characters in them.

My father had four sisters and four brothers. After him his sister Kalina (Leonova, by husband) was born. She married in Dupnitsa. Then Rashel was born. She lived in Kyustendil and she did not marry. After her is Sara, now Hazdai, who lived in Dupnitsa and Vita, now Isakova, who also lived in Dupnitsa. All my father's sisters were housewives. My father's brothers are Mois, Leon, Solomon and Azarya.

One of my father's brothers – Leon – remained to live in Kyustendil. He sewed ladies' clothes. He had a family with two children. His son Aron later became a painter in Israel. Another brother of my father's – uncle Mois – was a teacher and headmaster of the Jewish school in Dupnitsa. Before that he had worked as a trainmaster. He could speak very well in public. He gave lectures in the Jewish school and was well-known in town both before and after 9th September 1944 6. His first wife [the interviewee does not know her name] was a midwife, but she died early. Then he remarried. He married Sofi from Sofia. He has two daughters - Bela, who was married to the famous Bulgarian historian Ilcho Dimitrov 7. Kalina, my father's sister, went to live in Sofia. She sang very well. When there were operettas in town, she took part as a singer, and so did my aunt Vita, another sister of my father's.

My father had a brother, who had anarchist beliefs. His name is Solomon Alkalai. He took part in the civil war in Spain. 8 He wrote a letter from Spain saying that his dream had come true. I suppose that his dream was related to the ideas of the civil war in Spain. Firstly he went to France, because probably he had been persecuted in Bulgaria. He had said officially that he would study to become a dentist there. He was a very well-read man. He was also a healer and helped people with natural remedies. So, he went to France and in the 1930s when the civil war broke out in Spain he took part in it. Then he went back to France but he was sent to a Nazi camp. He managed to break away and joined the resistance [the interviewee means the French resistance during World War II]. In the camp he shared his food with the others and they all loved him. He wrote about that in his letters. I also know that he was a vegetarian. The daughter of uncle Mois, Bela, visited him in France. She noticed that the collar of his shirt was slightly torn. He sensed her surprise and showed her how many shirts he had at home but he explained to her that he gave them away to poor Spanish people.

Rashel did not marry. She had problems with her eyes. At first she lived with her parents in the old house and then we rented a room for her, which was close to us. I know that they took her to Vienna to treat her when she was young, but unsuccessfully. Now I have a blanket, which I received as a gift from her.

Sara lived in Dupnitsa. She married a cobbler and she had three boys – Leon Hazdai, Aron Hazdai and Hertsel Hazdai. Leon and Aron left for Israel and as far as I know they died. Only Hertsel is still alive and lives in a villa near Dupnitsa. There are beehives, rabbits and a goat there. He was a constructor in a factory for prints and pressforms. He was a very skilled specialist.

Vita had one daughter – Lida Isakova, who became a doctor. Her husband Leon Isakov was mentally ill. His father had a grocery and he worked there. Then he married my aunt. They moved to Israel.

Azarya was a watchmaker. He lived in Sofia. When we were in labor camps, we were close to one another and I often visited him. He had made an improvised underground stove in the ground to keep warm. We were in the camps during the winter. He was very inventive and so, he decided to make that stove. And it was working very well. He was also a very sociable man. He is still alive and is living in Israel. His son Avram is also a watchmaker and brings him some watches with bigger parts to repair because he has problems with eyesight. Uncle Azarya loved his profession and was addicted to it. He was a very kind man and always treated us very well. He lived on Pirotska Str. in Sofia.

I had friends in Sofia. Once my uncle Azarya went out so that we would all gather in his flat and have a party. My friends in Sofia were both Jews and Bulgarians. I met them when they visited the family of uncle Azarya. When I was 17 years old, I went to Sofia on foot. The distance to Sofia is 52 km. I started late in the evening and arrived in Kniazhevo [a district in Sofia] at 8 o'clock in the morning the next day.

The population in Dupnitsa was around 16 000 people and the Jewish community was around 1 800, I think. There was a synagogue, which was built in 1599. The Jewish municipality had its own building and bank. There was a chazzan and a shochet in the synagogue. As far as I remember the name of the chazzan was Haim. I do not remember the name of the shochet. He was in a separate building. The chazzan went to slaughterhouses to look at the meat and said which meat was kosher and stamped it so that the Jews would know which meat to buy. I know an interesting story in a slaughterhouse. Once the chazzan went to the slaughterhouse and the people offered him an anesthetized and nice-looking lamb. But when the chazzan saw him, he told them that that animal was not for our people. The Bulgarians who worked there were shocked. They thought that they had chosen a very nice animal. After they slaughtered it and opened its skull, it turned out that the animal was not well and that the chazzan was right.

There were a lot of tobacco warehouses in Dupnitsa. The tobacco industry was very well developed. A lot of Jews from town earned their living thanks to those warehouses – they worked there. Before the tobacco was sent to the warehouses, while fresh, it was strung in strings of two meters, which were hung into frames to dry. I also went to string tobacco leaves when I was a child to earn some money. When the leaves were dry enough, they were made into bales. Those bales were transported to the warehouse and there they were processed and sorted depending on their quality. Many of our Jews worked in those warehouses – both men and women. The other Jews in Dupnitsa were craftsmen and a small part of them merchants.

The famous tobacco dealer Zhak Aseov had a number of tobacco warehouses in Dupnitsa. I know a story about him. He studied law in Germany. He was very funny and sociable man. Once while he was in Germany, he had an evening walk in some town. There was a ball on the first floor of a building. He went inside and since he was very sociable and knowledgeable, he impressed the people there. There was a tobacco dealer at the ball. When he found out that Zhak was from Bulgaria, he offered him to buy tobacco as his middle-man and export it abroad. So, they got rich. They had tobacco warehouses throughout the Balkan Peninsula. Everyone who had worked for him said that he was a very kind man. He gave money to Jews in need. He also gave money for the construction of a waterfall in the Rila Mountain. It was very beautiful and close to the village of Samoranovo. Zhak also supported gifted students to graduate high school. In Israel he built a senior home for Bulgarian Jews. I have visited it. It was in a small town whose name I do not remember. I was driven by car then and I did not pay attention to its name. All books in his library had leather covers. He had a very nice restaurant and a garden. He helped people much and was involved in charity.

There were only Bulgarians in the neighborhood where I was born and grew up. While I was a child, we always got on very well with them. We played together, we made pools in the Dupnitsa River and bathed in them in the summer. When the Law for Protection of the Nation was passed, our neighbors did not change their attitude towards us. They always treated us very well. We did not feel any animosity or disdain. People treated us the same way as they did before the war. We greeted each other in the street and talked as neighbors do.

My paternal grandparents lived in a small house in the Jewish neighborhood. I visited them for the holidays. On Purim we went to their place with a purse so that they would give us some money. Also, in the evening, some of the children put on masks and we went to the houses reciting poems and the people gave us some small change. On Las Frutas 9 we roasted peanuts, almonds, walnuts and put them on the table. I do not remember if they prepared purses for us. On Chanukkah we did not light candles.

On Pesach I went to the Jewish neighborhood. I played walnuts there with the other children. We placed the walnuts in small heaps and aimed at them. We did not eat bread on Pesach. My mother made boykos. These were very hard small flat loaves. Mu mother did not have separate dishes for Pesach, but she boiled her old ones for the holiday. She used wood ash and put it in the boiling water. In this way they got cleaned better. I do not remember if we observed kosher every day. But I remember that I brought the hens to the shochet to slaughter them. The shochet slaughtered the hen without removing its head and waited for some time, then I brought it home. We gathered at my grandfather's place for Pesach but I do not remember what ritual we observed. I do not remember having a bar mitzvah. But I was circumcised. My sons are also circumcised. Each circumcision was accompanied by a celebration.

My parents loved reading. My mother did not have much time to read because of the housework, but my father read all the time. They observed the Jewish traditions more strictly than we did. My father had books in Ivrit and in ancient Jewish, which I have now, but unfortunately I cannot read them because I do not understand the language.

We did not observe kosher at home, because we did not have enough money to be choosy about our food. There were times when there was hardly anything to eat. During the war [World War II] we used coupons to buy food.

Our synagogue was not big. There was a separate building for midrash in the yard. There were benches inside. Jewish weddings were made in the synagogue. I remember that the newly-weds broke glasses. The interesting thing was that there were amphorae built into the walls for better acoustics in the synagogue. It was destroyed at the end of the 1970s. Then my uncle Mois Alkalai, who was secretary of the Jewish municipality was accused that he and some other Jews had agreed to the destruction of the synagogue. But the truth was that nobody asked them about that. Someone in Sofia decided on that and it was destroyed. [There is no further information on this fact]. There is a Home of the Technics in its place now. Then some people took a brick as a remembrance of it. There was great resonance inside. There was also a choir and a special place for the people. Men always wore a tallit when entering. Hats were not taken off in the synagogue and the chazzan wore a special hat. There were not kippahs then. The Jews in Dupnitsa did not have payes.

I studied four years in the Jewish school. We studied half a day. We studied everything in Bulgarian except our classes in Ivrit. I cannot say that we learned the language. We had a strict teacher in Ivrit – Monsieur Revakh. Monsieur Revakh made us stand in the corner of the room when we did not know our lesson. I remember that the teachers took us to the synagogue. We had a big gym and a stage in the school. That was the only school in town where there was a stage. We performed theater plays there. We placed chairs in the gym. Our parents came and we performed in front of them. I do not remember the names of the plays.

There were two Jewish organizations in Dupnitsa. One of them was the Zionist's one 10 and the other was bigger and its name was 'Saznanie' [Conscience] 11. It was a cultural and educational organization with left ideas. It organized operettas and drama plays. The cultural life of Jews was rich. My father's sisters Kalina and Vita took part in the choral groups at 'Saznanie'. They also had a table for ping-pong for the young people. It was a very good organization. There was a fight for the leadership of the bank and the Jewish municipality between the Zionists and 'Saznanie'. People organized debates and made discussions. The organization had a community house and a big library. As far as I remember they did not have ideological discussions. I was a member of 'Saznanie'. We gathered there as youths and took books from the library. The Zionists appeared to be the richer Jews in town. 'Saznanie' was considered more of a left organization, that is, closer to the socialist ideas. That is why my father, who had left beliefs, was a sympathizer of 'Saznanie'.

After the Jewish school I went to study in junior high school – in the district school 'Evlogi Georgiev' 12. Then I went to study for a cobbler. My father told me that if I did not study, he would send me to work as an ironmonger which was very had work. I enrolled in evening classes in the vocational school. We studied four hours a day - from 6 to 10 pm. They gave us some food – tea with cheese and bread. We studied the anatomy of the human leg, Bulgarian language, literature and calculation of materials. I graduated the school, but I had to repeat one of the years. When I was told that I had to repeat the grade, I went to my practice teacher to ask him if there was some mistake. His name was Mr Peshev. He opened the teacher's book where he had made a note that I had refused to complete the tasks he gave to me. That is why he made me repeat the grade. Then I went to my father and told him that I was made to repeat the grade unfairly and that we should call for a commission from Sofia to review my case. I would work in front of the commission and if they decided that I should repeat the grade, I would. My father talked to the director of the school. When the director heard his story, he advised him not to call for a commission from Sofia because they would probably respect the teacher's decision and he would have to pay for their expenses. So, I repeated the last year of the vocational school. I worked silently the whole year and the teacher gave me as an example to the others. At the end of the year I received my certificate with a prize. I went for a master's exam in front of a commission, who had come from Sofia. At that time there were no materials and everyone brought their own. At the start of the exam, I started working right away. The members of the commission told me that I should draw a ticket first. I answered that I had materials only for ladies' shoes. But they said that if my ticket said men's shoes, I would change my materials with someone else. I answered that I did not want to give my materials to someone who would ruin them. Yet, fortunately, my ticket said ladies' shoes. I had chosen a simple but nice model for shoes made of suede. I designed and sewed them in the first day. The deadline was in three days. I presented them to the commission and received a master's certificate.

When I graduated vocational school, my father sent me to Sofia to work in a confectionery on 52 Iskar Str. owned by a cousin of his. I could not get used to the life there and went back home. Later in 1941 my father sent me to Sofia again to work for a cobbler. At that time the war had already started and there were Germans in Sofia. I lived at the place of aunt Kalina. I once again did not like life there and wrote by myself a letter addressed to me, in which my father was asking me to go home to Dupnitsa. I showed it to my master and he was surprised at first but let me go. There was no work in Dupnitsa but we managed to make ends meet. I went to work as a cobbler in various workshops. I also worked at home.

We started wearing [yellow] stars in 1942 13. There was a curfew and we were not allowed to go out in the evenings. We could only walk along the river in the Jewish neighborhood. There were special shops for the Jews. There were shops with the notice 'entrance forbidden for Jews'. But there were some very kind Bulgarians who helped us. My uncle Azarya and his family came to Dupnitsa. He was interned from Sofia 14. Relatives of his wife Sara also came. In every Jewish house there were interned people from Sofia.

All Jews who had not done their military service were sent to labor groups, created especially for us. In 1942 I was sent to the Tran gorge to construct roads and in 1943 I was in St. Vrach (present-day Sandanski), where a railroad was being constructed. We had a production quota of 4 cubic meters of soil to dig out and throw away at some distance. We remained working at the site until we fulfilled our quota. There was no mercy. We slept in sheds, there was no bathroom, we all had lice. Sometimes a special car came, in which we put our clothes to be boiled in steam against the parasites. In winter I put my socks over the fire and heard the lice creaking. Some people burned their clothes because they could not clean them. We dug manually crevices 2 meters deep in the rocks. I had to carry on my back three bags of cement, when we had to unload wagons. In 1943 the Aegean Jews deported to concentration camps in Germany passed by the labor camp in St. Vrach. [Editor’s note: They were deported to the eastern parts not of Germany, but of the Third Reich. Poland was called that way then. The Aegean and the Macedonian Jews were deported to the Treblinka camp, not far from Osviencim (or Auschwitz). The Treblinka camp was set up and started ‘functioning’ in 1942. From 1942 to 1944, 77 000 French, 26 500 Belgian and 50 000 Greek Jews were killed there.] 15 It was a narrow-gauge line with small wagons. We stood on the railway and stopped the train. There were people among us connected to partisans and supporters of them working as railway workers. It seems that the people in the train knew that they would be stopped, because they stopped quickly. The train was full of Aegean Jews, among whom sick and old people. We gathered food and clothes and gave them to them. And instead of us encouraging them, they shouted at us, 'Courage, hermanos [Ladino: brothers and sisters]!' and they went on. Now people say that the Jews in Bulgaria were saved because of the deportation of those Jews. It is hard to prove that.

While I was in a labor camp in 1943 the Jews in Dupnitsa were detained at their homes for a couple of days – they were not allowed to go out for some days in order to be ready to be deported. Then the Bulgarian politicians, church officials and intellectuals intervened and the deportation was not started. 16

Our Bulgarian neighbors also helped us. There were Bulgarians who brought us bread from the shops forbidden for Jews. They bought what we needed and brought it home. Life for Jews was not easy then. We had to stay at home and could not travel anywhere.

On 9th September 1944 I was in Dupnitsa. Before that other Jewish craftsmen and I were ordered to go to the barracks in the town to sew soldiers' boots. In Dupnitsa there were soldiers from 7th Rila Division [a unit of the Bulgarian army before 9th September 1944]. On 8th September we left the barracks because we could see the turn of events. On 9th September 1944 the partisans came down from the mountain and took over the town. I enrolled as a volunteer in the Bulgarian army. The Bulgarian army turned on the side of the Red Army. 17 We, the Jews, valued what the communists had done for us and sympathized with them. I have heard that there were 50 volunteers to serve in the army from Dupnitsa only. I was a soldier in 3rd Guard Regiment at elevation 711 near Boyanobats in south Serbia. Elevation 711 was controlled by the Germans who did not have many soldiers. They had a good elevated position. One day our aviation and artillery attacked that elevation and the next day the Germans withdrew. Then we headed for Skopje but we did not manage to get there and we returned to Bulgaria. There were Albanians shooting at us from the forests. The commander of the partisans from Dupnitsa was Zhelyu Demirevski 18. He died during an attack at the front.

After 9th September 1944 the rights of the Jews were restored. Then my father became a supervisor of a warehouse in 'Grain Foods'. 19 After that he worked in the Oil Factory and then he was a cashier at the Industry Works 20 and he retired at that position. He died in Dupnitsa in 1967.

I married in 1945. My wife Ida Shekerdjiiska is from Dupnitsa. We married only before the registrar. We knew each other well because when we were young we went out with the same friends. In 1946 our first son Nissim was born and in 1951 – our second son Zhak. In 1948 the big aliyah began 21

Many of our friends decided to leave. I was not determined enough to immigrate to Israel. My parents did not want to leave and influenced me. So, we stayed in Bulgaria. My wife was a housewife and also worked in the Galenov factory producing medicine. When the children were very young, we went to seaside resorts. After 9th September 1944 we could afford to go on vacations.

My brother Rafael Alkalai graduated high school in Dupnitsa and a technical secondary school in optics in Sofia. After 9th September 1944 he enrolled in courses for technical professions organized by the Joint Foundation 22 [One of the main tasks of the American distribution committee Joint was the funding of the association 'ORT' in Bulgaria. It was officially registered in the country on 1st January 1935 and its goal was to disseminate the industrial and agricultural labor among Jews in Bulgaria. The 'ORT' association was directly subordinate to its headquarters in Geneva.] In Sofia Jewish co-operative societies were established with machines from the USA so that the Jews would have opportunities to work. My brother started studying some technical discipline but he did not finish it because his courses were postponed for some reason. So he started working as an optician. He has a family and a child. My sister Riri also lives in Sofia. She graduated the Pedagogical Institute in Dupnitsa and was a high school teacher. Now she is retired. She lives with her husband Yosif Kalo who was a pharmacist before he retired.

I opened a cobbler's workshop in 1945. It was in the center of the town behind the military club. At the beginning I worked with an older cobbler from the 'Saedinenie' [Unity] workshop. He gave me advice. One day the director of the vocational school came to my workshop to make him shoes. He even brought his own material. I charged him a bit more than I should have which I regretted later on.

In 1948 we established a cobblers' co-operative. I am one of its founders. We entered it with our stock and received 20 000 levs so that we would have capital with which to buy materials. After that we established the so-called 'Zancoop' – a co-operative of all crafts organizations. I was a member of a commission sent to north Bulgaria to see how those 'zancoops' functioned there. Most of the people were not very happy because an enterprise functioned better when it was independent. But they said that if we did not unite, nobody would give us materials. You could not buy materials from the store then, they were provided by centralized institutions in Sofia. So we were forced to become a 'zancoop'. After that all craftsmen became part of the Industry Works. Later a shoe factory was established in which 1200 people worked. Everything was owned by the state and we were given working clothes and shoes. We had a permanent market for our products. Everything was planned. I was a worker there until I retired. As a pensioner I worked in the orders department. That was in the 1980s. But then I had a quarrel with the deputy director and I quit. I suggested to the director to create a department in the factory in which to make shoes from left-over materials – mostly sandals and slippers. I worked there for a couple more years and then a colleague of mine, who was a teacher in shoe making approached me. He asked me how much money I received in the factory and he offered me a higher salary if I worked for him. I agreed and left right away. That took place in 1991. I made a small workshop in our neighborhood near my house. I was very happy because I did not depend on anybody. I communicated with many people. But one morning when I woke up I felt something wrong with my hand. It seems that I had had a light heart attack during the night. I could work no longer and I closed the workshop.

Later I tried working from home for pleasure. I made a hundred pairs of ladies' sandals, 30 pairs of which I presented as a gift to the Home for Children and Adolescents in Dupnitsa [an orphanage]. First I asked the director about the shoe size of the children and then I made the sandals. I also gave as gifts 30 pairs of warm boots to poor families. I helped in campaigns raising money for the refugees from Macedonia during the war in Kosovo. There was an announcement at the Jewish club for the money raising. I also take part in charity work for SOS Children's Villages. [SOS Children's Villages is an international child welfare organisation providing long term care for orphans and children in need.] They send me a magazine with a form, which I have to fill in order to send them some money.

My wife and I went to Israel a couple of times. I bought a mezuzah from there and now we have one. During the totalitarian times it was more difficult to go to Israel than it is now. My wife and I went there twice after 1989. 23 We applied for passports and visited our elder son Nissim.

I have a special attitude towards mezuzot. It is nice to be a pious person but every pious person should observe God's laws. There is a poem by Nikola Vaptsarov 24, which I always give as an example about religiousness: 'He slew his father with the ax/ He washed himself, went to church and felt better'. Can such a man be considered a good man – a pious man, but a murderer? He believes in God, goes to church, but he is a murderer. As for mezuzot – we might kiss them on entering and leaving our flats and yet we might not be good people. That's why it is more important to me to be a good person and to do good than to kiss the mezuzah regularly. That is why I do not kiss it.

After 9th September 1944 there were no bad attitudes towards Jews. I do not remember the Jews in Dupnitsa being treated badly. I know that during the wars with the Arabs 25 26 and sometimes before that, some Jews in Bulgaria who were in high positions were replaced. I think that the authorities in Bulgaria suspected the Jews of having links with Israel. Otherwise, on a local level in the neighborhood we did not have any problems.

After 9th September 1944 we managed to pay and build another floor on our house. My parents lived with us on the upper floor. After one of our sons Zhakie married, we went to live on our parent's floor. We worked very hard to renovate the house. My younger son had decided not to do carpentry and took some machines but he did not have much success and he gave up.

We did not have any problems observing the Jewish holidays at home before or after 9th September 1944. We always celebrated Pesach at home. We had a festive dinner with matzah and boyos. On Pesach we always slaughtered a hen. That was a tradition especially when my parents were still alive. Now we also observe Pesach. My wife prepares traditional Jewish meals such as pastel, masapan, burmolikos 27 [typical dishes in the Sephardi cuisine] and leaks balls. In the past we prepared the matzah at home. It was also sold at a Jewish bakery. A Bulgarian worked in that bakery whose name was Eftim. Later, after 1944 we received matzah from Sofia.

My wife Ida and I always fasted on [Yom] Kippur. Traditions should be observed so that a people would be preserved through the times. The fact that we preserved ourselves as a people for 2 000 years is due mainly to our faith and traditions. My father had a book from which he read the Haggadah. Uncle Mois came to our place. First kaddish was said. Then some celery or something sour was put in a small cup – it symbolized the bitterness that Jews experienced in the desert.

My children were raised in the spirit of the Jewish traditions thanks to the holidays. We did not place special attention on our origin. But from an early age they knew about Pesach, Purim and the other higher holidays. We did not distance ourselves from the Bulgarians and neither did they. Our Bulgarian friends were not interested in details about our origin and did not pay attention to that. I was told once that during the Jewish labor camps local villagers came out to see what Jews were like because they did not know what we looked like and they had not heard about us. Now there are not many Jews in Dupnitsa and our friends are mostly Bulgarians. I meet people from the neighborhood when I go for a walk and we discuss the news in our town.

We had a grandson in 1978. Then we were not allowed to give him a Jewish name. We wanted to name him Aron, but that name was not included in the name lists. Those were lists with names, which could be found in every municipality and from which you could choose a name. Yet, the parents of my daughter-in-law managed to receive permission for our son to carry my name. [There is no official regulation on names but at the same time until 1989 there was a name list with all names allowed in every maternity hospital. The list included typical Bulgarian names. Permission had to be obtained from the citizen's department at the municipalities for the more unusual names.] I remember that when I graduated the third grade in the vocational school they had put Bulgarian endings to my name in my Bulgarian certificate – Aron Nissimov Alkalaev. After the Law for Protection of the Nation was passed my name was changed to Aron Nissim Alkalai in order to emphasize my Jewish origin. I was not bothered by that. Now there are Jews who adopted Bulgarian endings for their names voluntarily.

Our younger son Zhak married a Bulgarian, whose name is Zhechka and our older son Nissim – a Jewess. I cannot say that we raised them to find a wife of Jewish origin. My older son was in Sofia and he met his wife there. Her name is Roza and she is a Jewess. My son Nissim started work in telephone shafts and was promoted to director of a regional office in the telephone company. Here in Bulgaria during those times in the beginning of the 1990s he had founded a construction company and was its director, but he left everything and immigrated to Israel. It was his wife's decision. She wanted that. Now he has problems there because when they left he was 40 years old and he could not find job in his sphere. Now he works in the maintenance of a shopping mall. His two children grew up and married there and have their own flats. My other son Zhak graduated the Pedagogical Institute in Dupnitsa and was sent to work as a teacher in north Bulgaria – in the town of Dalgopol. There he met his wife who is a very nice girl. They have one boy. They also left due to economic reasons. My younger son now works as a cleaner in two places. My son's wives are housewives in Israel.

Now my wife and I are worried about our future because our children are in Israel. They often call us and ask us to go to live with them but we think that we are better off here. We are too old to learn a new language and get used to a new way of life. We often think about that.

After 1989 most of the people here live a worse life than before. According to statistical data of the government we live a better life. But there is corruption now, a lot of factories were plundered. Politics is a dirty business. A lot of plants were sold at extremely low prices and a lot of people were laid off.

My wife and I live a normal life. The Jewish municipality helps us with food coupons. That is a great help. Sometimes they also give us medicines. We manage to cover our expenses. The women from the Jewish organization 'WIZO' 28 gather every day in the Jewish municipality. Sometimes we, the men, also meet there. Now there are very few of us and we meet more rarely. Now we live well although our life is very expensive.

Translated by Ivelina Karcheva

Glossary

Bitoush Behar

Plovdiv

Bulgaria

Interviewer: Svetlana Avdala

Date of Interview: May 2006

I think that the most idiosyncratic feature of Bitoush Behar is the sound spirit of a craftsman he carries about himself. I have come across such people. They walk firmly on the ground and have the self-confidence of people who are able to provide for themselves. They are not rich; they haven’t gathered a fortune but feel free enough because they don’t depend on the winds and storms of the times they live in. Their words are always sincere, frank and clear. For them two plus two makes four in most of the cases. They are not prone to talking about things in a philosophical way and they don’t look for ‘a calf under the ox’, as the Bulgarian proverb has it. Their spiritual health is obvious and they are not susceptible to the diseases of the soul. For them the most valuable things are simple – family, marriage, children, home, work and having order in their lives. That’s what Bitoush is like. In appearance – a massively built man with dense presence.

I met him for the first time in the café of ‘Shalom’ in Plovdiv. He was playing cards. He told me he was taking a nap every afternoon and every evening he came to the club to play cards. He didn’t agree right away to give an interview, but after a conversation in which we found a lot of things we had in common, he agreed. He was very punctual when coming to our meetings, with preliminary prepared photos and the necessary documents. In the end we separated as old friends.

My name is Bitoush Yuda Behar. I was born in Plovdiv 1 on 2nd August 1930. I have a brother Samuil Behar and a sister Victoria Tadzher (nee Behar). My wife’s name is Yovka Behar (nee Zlatanova) - a Bulgarian. We have two daughters – identical twins – Liza Zhelyazkova and Dora Spasova.

We are Sephardi Jews 2 both on mother’s and on father’s side. We came form the town of Behar [Bejar] in Spain more than 500 years ago 3. I have drawn this conclusion from the fact that there is a town called Behar in Spain and last year [He is talking about the meeting of all the people with the name Behar from the whole world, organized in 2004] there was a meeting of the Behar families from all over the world. I was invited as well. The organizing committee of the event in Sofia sent me a letter but the journey would have cost $ 1800. I couldn’t afford it and didn’t go.

I don’t have any recollections and don’t know any stories about my great-grandparents on either side. I only remember my grandparents.

The name of my father’s mother was Rahel Behar (nee Kovo). I don’t know when she had been born and she didn’t have any idea about that either. When I was a child, she would often say that the Russian – Turkish war 4 was in progress when she was twenty years old. She remembered those times because she got engaged then. She told me how she had seen my grandfather – her future husband Samuil Behar (? – 1936) for the first time on his way to the synagogue. He was walking past the house and she saw him, she was in the garden, and her father told her: ‘This is your future fiancé.’ My grandfather wasn’t rich, just the opposite, he was very poor but he was said to have two pairs of hands and two of feet, and his feet could work as well. That meant that he was not only extremely laborious but also very skillful. His work was connected with household utilities – locks, doors, he was the best installer of stoves on wood and coal and he was skillful in making pipes which were passing through the whole room in order to heat more. He was the only one who could make such pipe serpentines.

He didn’t have any education but spoke Ladino 5 fluently and could also write in that language. He also knew Hebrew. I don’t know how he had learned those languages, somewhere on the roads probably. My grandfather died when I was six, in 1936. I have dim memories of him. For example, I recall that he used to have a white beard and mustaches. He washed his head and beard with water and soap every Friday. My granny was pouring the water and it was falling into a basin. Afterwards, he used to go to the synagogue and he was taking me with him. He was religious although his son – Yuda Samuil Behar (1896 – 1959) - and I are absolute atheists. I remember that my father and grandfather had their own places in the synagogue. They had to pay for those places in the Jewish municipality. The places to the fore were more expensive, the ones to the rear – cheaper. The women’s places were on the balcony.

The house that was occupied by my grandparents – my father’s parents, was in a big yard and there were living a lot of other Jewish families. It was like a ghetto. The house was a two-storey building and other Jewish families were living on the ground floor. My grandparents used to have a room and a kitchen. I visited that house when only the two of them had remained to live there as all their children, my father’s brothers and sisters (Bouka, Nisim, Sofi, Rebeka, Stela) had already got married and had gone to live elsewhere.

My granny Rahel Behar (? – 1956) had a lot of siblings, too. I don’t know their names. And because of that she was brought up in Asenovgrad [A town in Bulgaria, situated on the northern skirts of the Rhodopi Mountains, at the exit of the Chepelare River called Chaya. The name of the town was Stanimaka until 1934. Nowadays there are about 44, 800 inhabitants. In the town there is well-developed food industry, timber processing, well-developed vine-growing and agriculture. The town is an important transport center on the road network that connects Plovdiv, Smolyan and Kurdzhali]. Her parents gave her to an aunt of hers who lived there – I don’t know her name. At that time, only the Greek language was spoken in Asenovgrad and there was a saying: ‘If you don’t like Bulgaria, go to Stanimaka.’ The Jews there were speaking Ladino but you could mainly hear Greek in the streets. My granny knew Turkish, she knew Greek, she knew Ladino and least of all she knew Bulgarian. I’ll tell you a story. I recall that she took me to the shops once in Plovdiv when I was about ten, so it must have been around 1940. We went to do the shopping. The action took place on Chetvurtuk Pazarya (Thursday Market Place). We lived just next to it. And we were looking after some hens. Granny asked the seller: ‘How much money for hens?’ He said: ‘Two napoleons.’ And one napoleon was twenty levs. And she was looking at the chickens, touching them, touching them and asking in a way typical for the Ladino language turning all the words of feminine gender to masculine. So she changed the Bulgarian word for ‘hen’, which is feminine, to masculine. [The woman was speaking Bulgarian by using endings and grammatical forms typical of Ladino.] But she was able to understand and, most importantly, she was understood. After 1936, 1937, after grandpa died, granny started living with us. Granny told me a lot of fairy-tales and stories about Ally Baba and the forty bandits [a classical story, told by Scheherazade]. There was also a story about a pot full of gold but I don’t remember it very well. On Saturday she usually visited her older daughter Bouka at lunch. I recall that she would always bring us sweets hidden somewhere in her clothes. She used to take them from Bouka’s son Isak, who owned a sugar and sweets workshop.

My mother Liza Presiado Behar was born in Sofia. Her maiden name was Benataf. In Israel the surname Benataf was transformed to Benatov (that means good, ben – very well). My maternal grandparents - granny Vintoura (? – 1940) and my grandpa Presiado (? – 1943) used to live in Sofia and every summer we spent our holidays with them. I knew only one of my granny’s brothers but I can’t remember his name. My granny was illiterate but grandpa had finished a French college 6. I can’t say whether he had a secondary education but he spoke French and German. His name was Presiado, which is a synonym of Yuda. I wasn’t named after my grandpa because my father’s name was Yuda, too. That’s why I was named after my mother’s grandfather Sabitay. Sabitay and Bitoush are synonyms. I know that the names Presiado and Yuda, as well as Sabitay and Bitoush are synonyms and mean one and the same thing in Ladino, but I can’t comment on anything else. I don’t know when granny Vintoura was born but she died in 1940. My grandpa died in 1943 during the Holocaust. He was interned to Plovdiv and died here. In Sofia my parents were living on the corner of ‘Opalchenska’ and ‘Bregalnitsa’. Their house doesn’t exist anymore. In its place was built the overhead crossing between ‘Stamboliiski’ Boulevard and Ruski [Russian] Monument. I remember it was a two-storey house. My grandparents paid a rent. They weren’t rich. Grandpa used to sell fruit and vegetables, he used to have a greengrocery at some time but he went broke. The shop was in Halite [a covered market popular to the present day – it is situated in the central part of Sofia, not far from Sofia Mineral Public Baths, the famous Baths bashi Dzhamya and the Sofia Synagogue. The ‘Halite’ store was designed by Ts. Torbov. The architectural style of the building is considered to be Neo-Byzantine.] He had six children – my mother’s siblings. They had an older sister, whom I don’t recall, she died. Apart from her – uncle Haim, aunt Mati, uncle Yosif, aunt Nemka, uncle Lazar.

My father Yuda Samuil Behar was born in Plovdiv in 1896 and died in 1959 there. There were six children in the family which means that dad had five more siblings – Bouka, Nisim, Sofi, Rebeka, Stela. He finished the fourth grade at the Jewish school. And irrespectively of the fact that he had only primary education, he was quite a specialist on Bulgarian grammar. He knew it better than the majority of people because he worked as a typesetter for years and years on end. When he turned twelve he started working as an apprentice at a printer’s. At that time the local, Plovdiv, newspapers were printed there as well as the Jewish newspaper at that time ‘Shofar’ 7. In his spare time he was reading books with a pencil in hand and we could often hear him say: ‘Oh, bullshit! Here a dash must be put, here – a comma, and here – a semi-colon.’ I remember a very interesting occasion. I had a little book with his corrections. After his death I decided to give it to the greatest specialist on the Bulgarian language at the time – the teacher Vera Gulubova. At that time I was a student at the Rabfak [Worker’s Faculty] 8 and she was my teacher. ‘Comrade Gulubova, I want you to tell me if this correction is accurate.’ And about a month and a half later she brought the book back and told me: ‘Behar, who has done that correction – because that is a person who is perfectly familiar with the grammar of Bulgarian.’ I told her that it was done by my father – a person who had finished the fourth grade but who worked as a typesetter for 52 or 53 years. He didn’t know what the rules were for the usage of commas and dashes but had an intuitive feeling as to where to put them. My father had always been a well-informed man, he worked at the printer’s after all. Apart from being a typesetter, he was also a stamp-cutter – he was making stamps. On top of that he was very skillful and could engrave with slate pencils. Yes, he was skillful indeed – he was making his living with his two hands but the money he was earning was only sufficient for a meal every day and for bread.

My father had taken part in World War I 9. He was a signaler. He was wounded in the leg by a metal fragment but I don’t know more details. In 1924 he married my mother who was born in Sofia. At that time he was 26 or 27 years old. Before that, they had met in the capital city while my father was working there for a year and a half. I can’t say what exactly he was doing and why he had decided to live in the capital for a while. I don’t know any details about the first meeting of my parents. It was probably someone from the family who talked to my father about her or they were introduced to each other on purpose. I can’t say what the circumstances were but they liked each other – this is something I can state without any doubt. They were engaged for a year and they were having a great time while engaged. They used often go on outings, to Vitosha Mountain – there were two more couples and they were having a really good time. They got married in the synagogue in Plovdiv according to all the traditions. They were living in agreement afterwards.

In our neighborhood my father was known as Zhoudi. He was very sociable. Everybody in Plovdiv knew him. He was friends not only with Jews but with Bulgarians as well. I recall that he was the heart and soul of the group of friends he communicated with. He used to often go to the chitalishte 10 after 9th September [1944] 11. At that time there was a dance school and my father was teaching quadrille and polka. He was perofrming at the dancing-parties, he was going out on stage and was telling jokes and funny stories. He never joined a Jewish Zionist organziation because he was a socialist. He became a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) 12 in 1936.

He used to be a right-wing socialist and then he became a left-wing, revolutionary socialist. [origin of Bulgarian Communist Party] 13 He was in jail because of the Jewish conspiracy. There was a Jewish conspiracy in Plovdiv (its members were communists and BCP was banned at the time 14).  They were accomlishing educational activities and defended the interests of the poor, mainly of the workers. At the beginning the conspiracy didn’t have a name but later it took the name of its leader Pardo. I can neither say the names of the people who took part nor where their headquarters and sphere of activities were. It started operating in 1935 – 1936 when I was only five or six years old.

After a failure my father was sent to jail. The charges were that he had faked a stamp in order to forge the ID card of someone from Silistra region [a town in Northeastern Bulgaria]. And I saw what real friendship means. In his group from the conspiracy there were only three married men, all the others were bachelors. At that time my father was already married. And the leaders took a decision which ordered the bachelors to take on the blame and to back up the married ones so that the married men would get a suspended sentence and go out to look after their families. And one of the accused said at the trial: ‘Mr. Judge, sir, if there is a man with a gun standing in front of you, you would do what he tells you to do. That’s why Yuda faked the stamp. I was with a gun pointed at him.’ And my dad was released because he had made the stamp under threat of being shot. And that wasn’t true. Yes, that’s esprit de corps, a sacrifice in the name of your comrade. There were people from the conspiracy sentenced to fifteen years in jail and they were released on 9th September 1944.

My father had already had two children when he was in jail – my older brother Samuil Zhoudi Behar who was born in 1925 and was eleven. I was six. My mother was pregnant with my sister Victoria who was born in 1937.

My brother Samuil Zhoudi Behar (1925 – 1974) was the oldest and most responsible of us all. We had always felt his presence as a support. That was especially true for my sister who was taken under his guardianship. He was happy to look after her and later when in 1942 he was dealing with some illegal activities he was taking her as a cover-up. He was very skillful, too, but not as mush as my father or me. And he was studious. And he had finished, like my sister and me, a Bulgarian school which was cheaper and which we could afford. After finishing the junior secondary school in 1938 he told my father: ‘Papa, I want to study.’ ‘Impossible, my boy, we don’t have money – there are six mouths to feed. You have to start work.’ And he started work at ‘Napreduk’ [Advancement] Printing House where my dad was working. He was a machine operator and a typesetter and so on. He had become a member of BCP before 9th September. Because of his illegal activities he was sent to jail in 1942-1943. After 9th September he finished the Party School. Then he was a militiaman for some time and by decree he started studying at something like Rabfak and he obtained a secondary education. For a certain period of time he worked as a secretary of the second region of the municipality council in Plovdiv. Much later he studied Chemistry at Plovdiv University. He studied there together with his daughter Lily. He graduated and became the director of the ‘Drouzhba’ glass works in Plovdiv.

He is married to Amada – a Jew, whom he met in the period of his illegal activities. They have two children – Lily and Zhoudi. Lily has a daughter Maria. Zhoudi is married to the Bulgarian Maria and has a son Samuil.

My sister Victoria Tadzher (1937) also finished the Bulgarian school and afterwards she studied at a vocational school of design. She is rather skillful, too – it obviously runs in the family. It seems to me she could have become an excellent designer. She is skillful but she doesn’t like this profession. She is capable of making a piece of clothing for you that would fit you perfectly. She worked as a designer but didn’t like it. She was a worker for some time and then she worked in the personnel department. She was head of a production shop for some time but now she has been a secretary of the Jewish organization ‘Shalom’ in Sofia 15 for twenty years. [Until she retired. Nowadays she is working as an organizer of club ‘Health’ where over fifty men and women practice some sport, celebrate their birthdays and make cultural programs. She is also working at the Day Rehabilitation Center of ‘Shalom’ Organization. An eminent public activist] We are extremely fond of each other. We talk on the phone every single day – I call from Plovdiv, she – from Sofia no matter that when we were children my brother had turned himself into her guardian. There is some gap between our interests because I am seven years older. When I started showing interest in girls, she was still keen on her toys. My brother had a big share in her bringing up. He replaced my father to a great extent because he died relatively early – when she was 22. She married in Sofia to the Jew Solomon Tadzher. She has a daughter – Ely and two grandchildren – Bozhidar and Monica.

My mother was born on 23rd January 1900. She had six siblings – uncle Haim, aunt Mati, uncle Yosif, aunt Nemka and uncle Lazar. They had an older sister Bela but she died while giving birth. According to the Jewish tradition the second oldest girl should take the place of the late bride and marry the widower. But my mother refused, she married my father instead. How their parents accepted that I don’t know. She spoke Ladino and Bulgarian. She had only finished the fourth grade at the Jewish school but she was a very curious, energetic and quite intelligent Jew. She loved us very much although she never kissed us but her love was visible in her eyes. All the people in the neighborhood were very fond of her, they were absolutely delighted when talking about her. When the moment came for some pregnant woman to give birth mum would tell her: ‘I’ll take you to the hospital on foot.’ And she took maybe about ten women giving birth for the first time to the Public Hospital and she was talking on the way: ‘The more we walk, the easier your labors will be.’ She was giving advice to the young mothers, she was knitting baby clothes, she was cutting out diapers.

She was an exquisite cook. I loved almodrati most of all – baked aubergine, chopped, mixed with eggs and cheese and baked in the oven. Superb… you can’t imagine how delicious it was. She also prepared apio with celery, andjinara – pickled marrows, agristada – something like fricassee but with eggs and a little sugar. [Some chicken is also added to this dish.]

I like Plovdiv very much and am greatly committed to this city. I call myself a great-Plovdiv chauvinist. Several times I changed Plovdiv for other towns and lived there for some years but I have always returned. At that time – the 1930s – the years of my early childhood, I recall that there was electricity in Plovdiv. We used to have electric bulbs but there were houses in which one could see the gas lamps shedding light until late in the evening. Those made about fifty per cent of the houses. Not only did our house have electricity but it had sewerage as well. 80% of the houses didn’t have sewerage. There was this profound smell which could be felt everywhere because the cesspits were in the yards and everything was done there, people even bathed there in the summer. When the cesspits were full, gypsies were hired to clean them with buckets. The payment was per bucket. Much later, in the 1940s, the sewerage was regulated. At that time the tunnel was built which helped the traffic in Plovdiv. Before that there were awful traffic jams because the traffic was taking place on one main street and there were horse phaetons, horse carts and cars moving on it. There was the noise from the horse clatter and the horns. The phaetons were waiting for clients at the station.

The Maritsa was not only part of the landscape – it was the place around which we spent our childhood. There was more water in the river at the time than there is now. Now there are a lot of dams. And it was clean and clear, transparent... we were in the water all the time. The current wasn’t very strong because there were islands which separated the river into branches – one of them was shallow, the other one – deep and the island in between. We always bathed in the Maritsa River and our mothers would ask us: ‘Were you in the Maritsa?’ We wouldn’t admit anything. Then she would strictly say: ‘Let me see your leg.’ And she drew a line with her finger along the leg and, as the skin was dried, there appeared a white line on the leg. Then followed a lecture about the dangers of getting drowned. Another site of Plovdiv was the market places. The Chetvurtuk Pazarya [Thursday market] was only on Thursday and not every day as it is nowadays, Subota Pazarya [Saturday market] was only on Saturday. Ponedelnik Pazarya [Monday market] was only on Monday. They had their own locations. There didn’t exist permanent market places like the ones that we have today. After that there was a grape market where only grapes were sold, a grain market. The grain market was east of Chetvurtuk Pazarya. There was a potato market, too. The shopping at home was done exclusively by my mum, dad and granny – I only helped them with the bags.

Our house was near Chetvurtuk Pazarya in ‘Angel Kunchev’ Street and was in the Jewish quarter. Most of the Jews were shoemakers, saddlers, tinsmiths, plumbers, carpenters. There were families that dealt with knitting and sewing. Some families were manufacturing knitwear. Only few people were doing with mechanical work – only two families – one of those were millers and the others who were dealing with knitting and sewing. There were some excellent seamstresses. Some families were making knitwear. More than 60 per cent of the Jews in Plovdiv were poor. And out of the other 40 per cent, not less than 20 per cent were craftsmen who could make a living. There were doctors; those of them who were wealthy used to have houses with surgeries in them in ‘Ivan Vazov’ Street – like Dr. Syarov, Dr. Moskona. There were some other people in the medical profession – doctors, dentists, midwifes.

We were living in rented lodgings – five or six of us were living in two rooms and a kitchen.  After 1936 – 1937, after grandpa died, granny came to live with us. During the Holocaust there were ten of us because my aunt Sofia and her family came to live in our house. We lived in a big two-storey house surrounded by a yard where six Jewish families were living – Assa, Lafchievi, Barouh, Bouka Pasi, Albert Shini, Varon. We were often completing different household chores together in the yard. For example, whenever one of the families started preparing ‘liutenitsa’ [a typical Bulgarian dish of stewed onions, peppers and tomatoes] everybody would take the ‘kalmour’ – do you know what ‘kalmour’ is – a sieve made of copper and they were all helping the family with the straining of the vegetables, if coal was needed for the fire, we were eager to help by carrying a bucket of coal for the family who were boiling the dish. Every family had their own cellar and the products for the winter were stored there but the point is that we were preparing those products together. The Bulgarian families took part too because in the Jewish quarter, where we were living, there were mainly Jewish families but there were some Bulgarian families as well. We were friends not only with Jews but also with Bulgarians. They knew some words and even whole phrases in Ladino. During the Holocaust not a single one of them turned against the Jews. We were on very friendly terms with them. Our families were visiting one another. What were those visits like – a cup of coffee, a spoonful of jam, a glass of water and you get the album with the family photos on your knees right away. The same album each and every time.

When the Bulgarian people celebrated Easter they were giving us Easter cakes, painted eggs while we were eating ‘boyos’ for Pesach and were treating the Bulgarians to ‘burmolikos’ 16. We were preparing the ‘boyos’ ourselves from dough made of flour, water, but without salt, which we baked afterwards. The result was a pretty hard round loaf. The ‘burmolikos’ we made from matzah which we bought from the synagogue for Pesach. It has nothing to do with the matzah we are buying these days because it was thick and hard. In order to prepare the burmolikos we put the matzah in water in advance so that it would become softer. After that we kneaded it, added eggs and fried it. There were two types of ‘burmolikos’ – salty ‘burmolikos’ with salt and black pepper and sweet ones dipped in cold sugar syrup after having been fried. At Purim we treated our Bulgarian friends and neighbors to different sweet things.

Our house was furnished poorly. We used to have two iron beds where my parents were sleeping. My sister was sleeping together with me. There was a wooden bed for granny. My brother and I were sleeping on a hard sofa in the kitchen. We had one single wardrobe. Well, after all, we weren’t so needy because we used to have decent furniture although sometimes food turned out to be difficult to obtain. We always had something to eat but we couldn’t afford to do whatever we wanted to do. A certain dish was cooked in the morning and we would eat from it at lunch and would have the same for dinner. One day I wanted to peep into the pot to see what we were going to have for lunch, and to steal a bite if possible. Dad saw me and ‘slap’ – a smack across the face. ‘You are going to eat what you find served in front of you!’ The whole family usually gathered for lunch and dinner. We waited for dad to sit at the table and then we would sit at the table, too. Mum would always put the first plate in front of him and after that she served us. We didn’t have servants. While my granny was alive the meal for Saturday was always prepared on Friday. We were not allowed to cook on Saturday. But the table was laid in a rather formal manner with a white tablecloth. Before that, on Thursday or Friday, a chicken, a hen or a duck had been slaughtered. In the yard of the synagogue, behind a fence there was a slaughterhouse for hens and lambs. We used to buy the hens alive from Chetvurtuk Pazarya [Thursday market] and we transported them in baskets. The price of the slaughtering varied according to the type of the animal. Some of our dishes were kosher. Never has pork been cooked. All the cutlery and crockery was being cleaned with boiling water for Pesach. Milk and meat were never mixed but we didn’t have separate plates for the different types of food. My parents haven’t done bar mitzvah for me, I don’t know if my brother had had it done. The women had a bath on Friday but we, the men, only washed. I recall that dad had a bath every fifteen days or once a month and there were Jews who took a bath rarely still – twice a year, for Pesach and Rosh Hashanah.

My grandparents were very religious – grandpa attended the synagogue every Friday where he had a booked place after having paid a fee, he was keeping ‘taanit’ whereas my father and I are absolute atheists.

When grandpa died we started convening at Seder Pesach with my father’s brother – uncle Nisim and his family – his wife Bouka and their children – Ester, Rashka, Zelma. Uncle Nisim started reading the prayer and leafing through the Haggadah and granny continued after him. She knew some parts of it by rote. After her my father would go on reading but his turn was over very quickly because while turning the pages, he was turning three pages at a time. And we, the children, were staying still and listening. Well, we lost concentration at times. They gave us bags with a piece of ‘boyos’ inside. And we waited for the prayer to finish with the words ‘this year here, next year – in Jerusalem’ and here we were in.

At Purim we used to have much more fun. We organized groups – all of us were children of friends from the Jewish street and relatives. We used to sing a lot of songs. I know only one song but there were lots of them. We used to mask ourselves. Every year we prepared the masks ourselves but, of course, there were masks sold in the bookstores, in the groceries. They were polished, shining but were quite expensive. The wealthier could afford them. My usual disguise was as a black man with my face painted in black. Once I was a wolf, on other occasions – a buffoon or a clown. We used to have those special bags that we filled with sweets. We were visiting in our disguise all our relatives or the wealthiest Jews from whom we could expect more treats. They used to give us all sorts of sweets and some change. And we spent the money on swings or on the lotteries organized by the Jewish merchants in the street. There was always hustle and bustle here – the merchants were taking out all kind of goods and started shouting, making people get involved – ‘Here is the profit’ – they urged us to buy tickets and get an object or a wish. After having eaten the sweets given to us by our relatives, we took the money they had given us and went to the commercial street to gobble more food. We used to get on the merry-go-rounds, on the ferris wheel, we used to shoot at the shooting-galleries. Everything looked like a big fair.

Every holiday evening spent with my family ended with singing. I used to know a lot of songs, dad, too. We were known among the neighbors as the singing family because our signing could be heard far. In the summer I used to go to my grandparents in Sofia. There I used to meet with the famous director and writer Angel Vagenshtain 17 who is a cousin of mine. He was older than me and used to keep in touch mainly with my brother as they shared common interests, but we used to be very fond of each other. Angel (Dzheki), in his turn, visited us in the summer in Plovdiv. His arrival turned our day into a holiday. My father loved him very much. I recall that when he was sentenced to death for his antifascist activities later dad got so drunk out of grief, that, under the influence of the alcohol, he was shouting: ‘They will exterminate the golden youth of Bulgaria.’ Together with the neighbors from the yard we hardly managed to stop him from taking the matters in his hands.

The children were playing in the yard and in the streets – they played chilik, machka [children’s games], we used to set matchboxes full of acetylene on fire – you make a hole in the ground, put a little carbide and place a box on top. We used to seal it hermetically and one of us used to place his finger on the box whereas another one stood and shouted; ‘Take care!’, the finger was removed and the box exploded because of the pressure. It was such a pleasure, ‘kef’ 18 as we say in Bulgarian because we managed to make this imitation of a little bomb. We were also playing ‘magare’ [donkey] - one of us would lean against a wall and three or four of the others would stand in a line behind him, one after the other, holding each other by the small of the backs and start jumping. When one of us fell, we changed our places. After that – ‘bouki’ – a tin was placed on the ground in the middle of a circle restricted by a line. We used little tokens and the boy who managed to hit the ‘bouki’ was the winner. It was placed in a circle and the furthest you managed to push it, the more points you got. We were also playing ‘hilka’ – two teams with a ball. The game was played on a pitch. The ball had to be hit with a board. It is very similar to baseball. The girls didn’t lag behind in those games and played together with us.

I’ve never attended a Jewish kindergarten or a Jewish school because the tuition fee was too high for me. It was affordable only for those of the poor children whose parents had seasonal jobs like the tobacco pickers, for example, not the ones with permanent jobs like my father. In their case the education was free of charge. I finished ‘King Boris III’ Primary School 19 and the Fifth Junior High School ‘Lyuben Karavelov’20.  Both educational institutions were within the limits of the Jewish quarter and in the classes of thirty students there were four or five Jewish children. In our class there were four Jews. I, Barouh, Marko and a girl, whose name I can’t remember. I attended the Sunday school at the Jewish center where we had religion classes devoted to our religion. There were religion classes in the Bulgarian school as well but the Jews didn’t have to attend them. We could remain in class if we wanted to and sometimes I stayed. My favorite subject was Manual Labor. I am a skillful man, just like my father and brother. I can make anything – no matter where you put me – I manage to complete any task – I can paint, I can make installations, doors, window frames, ironmongery and so on. I have been a member of both Maccabi 21 and Hashomer Hatzair 22. My brother was a member of Maccabi at the beginning and then he joined Hashomer Hatzair. There was also an organization called Betar 23 – the most right-oriented, the most armed wing of the Zionist movement. They believed that Palestine had to be liberated through revolution, through weapons. The Maccabeans on the other hand were sports people. They used to have a large gym which was their own property. Hashomer Hatzair’s members were with leftist orientation. They were for social equality. The majority of its members left for Israel in 1947 [Mass Alyiah] 24. During the Holocaust most of its members started co-operating with the UYW 25. The main occupation of the members of Hashomer Hatzair was tilling the land. There was a big farm, ‘chiflik’, which was owned by the Bulgarian Baltov and, for that reason, known as the Baltov Chiflik. They were giving ‘ahshara’ – a public service which they weren’t paid for, and at the same time were training in agriculture. So there they were working and training in agriculture professionally at one and the same time. Their aim was to be able to till the land after leaving for Israel. There was some competition between the different organizations. Each one of them wanted to attract as many members as possible. At first I was a Maccabean, then I became a Hashomerist but I felt best at Maccabi. In the gym we used to have different exercise facilities – bars, a vaulting horse, a horizontal bar - we were practicing sports and apart from being Zionist, the focus was on the healthy way of living.

I hadn’t felt any anti-Semitist attitudes until 1939 – 1940, until the moment when the Fascist organizations Brannik 26, ‘Han Krum’ Legion were established in 1941. In the Jewish quarter their members – all of them young men - would come to break windows, to eventually beat somebody and they went away. I had such a case. We used to have a neighbor. His name was Kasurov and he used to live on the corner of ‘Tsar Samuil’ and ‘Yuri Venelin’. One day he saw how the members of Brannik were coming into the quarter ready to vandalize and ran towards them because they started bullying some of my friends. ‘Bastards, what wrong have these people done, leave them alone.’ We realized the Jewry was in jeopardy at the very moment of the begetting of fascism, with the appearance of the book ‘Mein Kampf’ by Adolf Hitler. A lot of the Jews were aware of the real dimensions of the situation, of the fact that a peril was approaching because we received information that the Jews from the region of the Aegean Sea were sent to the camps of death and we knew that was our destiny as well [Deportation of Jews from Aegean Thrace and Macedonia] 27. But nonetheless, we were used to being in good relations with the Bulgarians, to being tolerated by them and that gave us reasons to believe that those terrible things were not going to happen in Bulgaria. It was not by chance that a lot of the Jews joined the armed fight as a reaction against the jeopardy.

I get furious when some people say: ‘They were communists’. The truth was that the Jews found a way to fight for their own cause by joining UYW and BCP. Some of the members of the youth Jewish organizations joined their ranks. I was too young but my brother was a Maccabean and then he joined Hashomer Hatzair – they were different you know, and then he joined UYW and then became a member of BCP. Later, in 1943, he was a political prisoner.

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.

During the Holocaust I was working as an apprentice shoemaker and was repairing the shoes of the entire family and I’m still doing it. I have a kit of instruments at home. I worked like that for about two years but then one day I said to my father: ‘I don’t like this job. I have learned everything and now I want to work on the trains.’ But he replied: ‘No, you’ll go on working.’ But I said: ‘But I’m already familiar with this craft. I’ll make you a pair of shoes – if they’re not comfortable, I’ll go on working until I learn how to make comfortable shoes. If you like them, you’ll find me a job on the trains.’ And I made him a pair of shoes – for his extremely crooked feet. He put them on, took a walk and told me: ‘To my satisfaction and dissatisfaction at the same time, these shoes are extremely comfortable.’ He admitted – in that respect he was an extremely decent man.

The men between the age of 19 and 40 were mobilized in the labor camps 31. My father was getting on and I was too young for the labor camps. In 1942 my father was sent to the village of Gorno Voroshilovo because of his party membership. The village used to have the same name before 9th September but then it was quite a forlorn place. Now the highway is going through it.

There were also some men of the same age from present-day Greek territories, from towns like Drama, Salonika, Xanti whose relatives had been deported. They were mobilized in the labor camps of Kingdom Bulgaria which at that time used to have an outlet to the Aegean Sea. [50 000 Jews from Salonika were deported to Poland in 1943 but that has nothing to do with Bulgaria. The mobilization was of Jews-relatives who were from the old territories of Bulgaria – otherwise there are no facts about Jews from the newly-annexed lands who were mobilized to work.] When they were demobilized in winter they used to sleep in one of the rooms from the synagogue in Plovdiv. There were five such rooms in the yard. There were about 40 or 50 of those Greeks. There is an interesting story with them. The Branniks started bullying us again. They were attacking us ruthlessly. Somebody saw them coming and shouted: ‘Call the Greek boys’ (the Greek boys because they could only speak Greek). They quickly came out and there was such a fight. In the end there was a pile of the members of Brannik, like dogs, and they were severely beaten. But suddenly there was a shout ‘Police!’ and we disappeared into thin air. That was possible because the streets ‘Angel Kunchev’, ‘Vodoprovodna’, ‘Tsar Samuil’ and ‘Yuri Venelin’ formed a square. The houses and yards of those houses were connected by little doors and we could move from yard to yard. We entered a house in ‘Angel Kunchev’ and went out from a house in ‘Yuri Venelin’.

Afterwards the interned Jews from Sofia arrived. They were first sent to Chepelare. [A small town in the Rhodopi Mountains, nowadays a winter ski resort. There was probably a Jewish forced labor group which was working in the region of Devin and Chepelare. Otherwise there is no information about internment of Jews to Chepelare] and later they came to Plovdiv. A part of them were staying with friends and relatives. My aunt Sofi and my uncle came to our house. Well, what can I tell you? We the children were sleeping on the table – my brother on top of the table, I – on the lower board. On the table! It was possible to accommodate 12-13 people in those rooms. It was difficult to handle with the food but that was the reality not only for the Jews but for the Bulgarians as well. We used to have vouchers at the time and we ate 250 grams bread a day. We had to take care of ourselves, like everybody else. There was also a black market where the prices were extremely high. So flour, butter, oil could all be bought on the black market but that kind of providing supplies was the same for both Jews and Bulgarians. It was the same. For some of the Jews and for the Jews living in the synagogue there was a soup kitchen.

In 1943 my brother Samuil Behar was sent to jail after the failure of a Jewish youth UYW organization. He was sentenced to 10 years but was freed on 9th September. He was in the prison in Plovdiv. His wife, my sister-in-law, Amada, also spent some time in jail. They met while conducting different activities for UYW and got married immediately after 9th September in 1945. Later my sister told me that when she was younger our brother Samuil had always taken her to his secret meetings with Amada and his comrades from the group. She served as a cover. They had even told her that Amada’s name was actually Hana so that she wouldn’t betray her unintentionally. I believe that my parents had drawn their conclusions about the illegal activities of my brother but there were no comments and questions because they didn’t want to embarrass him and to be embarrassed in their turn. After all it was an illegal activity and too much talk was inadvisable. My sister-in-law had been not only in the prison in Plovdiv, but also in the prisons in Pazardzhik and Sliven. We used to visit my brother on Wednesday and Sunday and brought food and coal. My arms started hurting from carrying the buckets – one or two buckets of coal and wood on top. And in the end we found out that the wardens used the coal for heating and our relatives were freezing.

In January 1943 my father was freed from the village of Gorno Voroshilovo and was mobilized as a typesetter because they started publishing the newspapers ‘Utro’ 32, ‘Zarya’ [Fireworks - a daily informational newspaper. Printed in Sofia from 1914 till 1944] – and we were extremely happy that he got permission to move about freely whenever he wanted although there was a curfew for the entire population of Bulgaria. He even got permission to be outside after 10 p.m. He was going to work, they were printing the newspaper, they loaded it on the trucks and so on.

There was a decision to deport us on 10th March 1943. [Plan for deportation of Jews in Bulgaria] 33 They woke us at 3.15 in the morning and told us to take up to 10 kg luggage. And together with my six-year-old sister and ninety-year-old grandmother we went to the Jewish school. We were pushed into the Maccabi gym. There were about 200 of us and we could hardly breathe. There is an interesting story with my father. Dr. Araf was crying and talking through tears; ‘Do you know where we’re going?’ And dad replied: ‘I know very well but you have to pull yourself together – we have to set the example for the young people’. But he went on crying and my father slapped him across the face to make him stop. ‘We have been to war, we have looked death into the face. We have to be brave because of the women and the children.’ And at these words the man became behaving normally again.

We stayed there for about ten hours. I didn’t actually realize what was going to happen but my brother was fully aware because he was trying to get in touch with the partisans. At a certain moment they started separating men from women. They were reading our names from a list. They were letting us enter the schoolyard. And some time around noon, I can’t say at what time exactly, protest demonstrations started down ‘Tsar Osvoboditel’ Blvd, which at that time was called ‘Adolf Hitler’, and down ‘Aleko Konstantinov’, with slogans ‘Liberate the people who have fought for the sacred lands of Bulgaria.’ Tobacco workers and craftsmen from Plovdiv took part in the demonstrations. The people had sent tens of telegrams to the government saying ‘Stop the violence over the Jews!’, ‘We have lived together and will live together again!’ The patriarch also came out with the stole and the scepter and said: ‘The trains cannot pass! Only over my dead body!’ I think that the greatest influence was exerted by the Jews from Kyustendil and the Bulgarian intelligentsia – the unions of the lawyers, of the journalists, of the writers…, but there was some influence from abroad as well. Boris was a cousin of the British queen so she got in touch with him and told him: ‘Do not forget that there is Doomsday.’ [There is no data about such a conversation but this is a popular proverb in Bulgaria meaning that there is justice in the end.] Of course, the events on the Eastern Front played an extremely important role. The fall of Stalingrad, the Kursk Duga [Kursk Arc] and so on. They let us go. We realized that they wouldn’t deport us and then Zhan Levi [an eminent Jewish lawyer in Plovidv] delivered a speech of gratitude for His Majesty but I think that he wasn’t the only one to contribute for this decision.

A couple of days before 9th September 1944 my father came home and said ‘They’re liberating the political prisoners.’ And we all ran to the prison. Somebody there said: ‘Don’t go home, all of us will manifest together.’ We separated into two columns – one of the columns went over the bridge of Gherdzhika, the other one – over the old Karlovsky Bridge and the two columns met here in front of Dzhumayata and the speeches started. Then we went to the Police Inspectorate, which was functioning as a town-hall at the same time, and they started pushing the policemen and making them go outside. They didn’t surrender that easily; they even tried to shoot several times and injured one of our Jewish boys in the leg. And after that we went to the monument in ‘Hristo Botev’ Street. There was a symbol in front of it – the Latin letter V – for victory. Then somebody said: ‘This shameful sign cannot be left before the chief and the teacher of the communist movement in Bulgaria! Smash it!’ And we tore the flowers to pieces in seconds. On 9th September we first met and greeted the partisans from Sredna Gora Mountain and later the partisans from the Rhodopi Mountains – the first at one exit of the town, the others – at another. At that time the song ‘A Partisan is Preparing for Battle’ was extremely popular.

My brother was released from prison and the family was whole again. In 1947 for Israel left my dad’s relatives aunt Sofi and aunt Bouka. Another aunt of mine, Stella, emigrated to Paris in 1928. Aunt Rebeka and uncle Nisim remained in Bulgaria as well. All my mother’s relatives left the country in 1947; the only ones who remained were her sister Mati and she. I’ve never thought about leaving Bulgaria. I am married to a Bulgarian and my life is here in Plovdiv.

I was regularly writing letters to my relatives until they were alive. My mother was very active in this correspondence – she was regularly writing letters to our relatives in Israel irrespectively of the official policy of Bulgaria towards Israel.

After my mother’s death, my aunts died as well, but we talk on the phone with my cousins every now and then.

After 9th September life returned to normal again. Even before 9th September, in 1943-1944, I was working as a shoemaker. Afterwards, at the end of 1945, I started work at ‘Mikromer’ Locksmith’s. There we were making keys, locks, oxygen welding. My master, whose name was uncle Georgi, and my father had been together in prison in 1936. I spent two years there and then from the town committee of UYW sent me to ORT 34 in Sofia. At that time UYW hadn’t been transformed into Dimitrov Communist Youth Union [Bulgarian Komsomol] 35 yet. That took place later, in 1948. In ORT I attended six-month courses to train for jig locksmith. After completing them I worked for 4 or 5 months at ‘Osvobozhdenie’ Cooperation – a Jewish cooperative company in which the machines were from ‘Joint’ 36 I worked there for 6 months and came back to Plovdiv and worked at ‘Ustrem’ Metal-Working Cooperation, a subsidiary of ‘Joint’ too from 1946 till 1950. ‘Ustrem’ Cooperation was the first manufacturer of machine-tools. I worked there for a year and a half and then I was sent to Rabfak, where I studied for a year and a half. I was very good at Physics and Chemistry there. Our teachers were wonderful, all of them were so good – the best, the elite of the teachers in Plovdiv and they were eager to work there. For example, the eminent teacher of Bulgarian and Literature, Vera Gulubova, who I have mentioned at the beginning. I remember that I used to smoke at the time, she came to me and told me: ‘Behar, you smell like a tobacco warehouse, if nature had wanted the man to smoke, it would have put chimneys on our heads.’

After that I was advised to enroll in the Institute of Mining and Geology, into a field where specialists were needed. I enrolled and spent nine terms studying from 1952 till 1957. At that time I was living with the family of one of my father’s sisters. After graduating I got a job at Gorubso. I worked there for ten years until 1967 and then I decided to quit because I wanted to return to Plovdiv. I came back and started work at the Electrical Equipment Plant where I started as a dies technologist and reached the position of a head of the Instruments Department. And I grew a little further in the hierarchy by becoming a head of department in the town of Peroushtitsa [a small town 26 km from Plovdiv].

I have never had any problems with my Jewish origin – neither at school and at university, nor at my work places.

In 1955 at a birthday party I met my future wife. As a matter of fact, my brother was invited there and I went with him. We quickly made our acquaintances, we kept in touch and at the end of the year she came to celebrate together with me the New Year’s Eve in Sofia where I was a student. She was born in the village of Borets, Plovdiv region, but she went to live in Plovdiv in 1947. Her father was a militiaman here. She is a weaver by profession.

At the time of our first meeting I was preparing my diploma paper at the Institute of Mining and Technology. I graduated in 1956. We got officially engaged. My parents had nothing against the fact that she wasn’t Jewish. As far as her parents were concerned there was a certain opposition on the part of her mother because she was worried about what the people would say but her father was firm – he said it was her choice and it had to be respected. We got married before the officially chosen date. It happened absolutely by accident. At that time I was already working at Gorubso. We were invited to the wedding reception of a colleague of mine, which was organized in the village of Brestovitsa, Plovdiv region. His name was Lyubo. His best man was the Director of Gorubso and brother-in-law at the same time – the director’s wife was Lyubcho’s wife-to-be sister. The Director of Gorubso started joking with us in the end and told us: ‘Come on, why don’t you get married as well? Come on, it will be fun, I’ll give you the jeep and you’ll make a honeymoon to Plovdiv.’ So we went in the registry office with one bride, separated the bouquet and went out with two brides. That is how we made our civic marriage in Brestovitsa. Afterwards we went to buy some chocolates and the first thing we did when we returned to Plovdiv was to go to her parents and she said: ‘Mum, Dad, we got married.’ ‘How come, the date of the marriage is in autumn? She started collecting her things and her mother asked: ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Well, I’m going with him.’ That’s how we started living together in our house with my parents. We got married in 1956. Our children were born in 1957 – twin sisters. Their names are Liza and Dora.

I became a member of BCP in 1957. I’ll tell you a very interesting case. A decision was taken to make a TKZS – a Co-operative Farm [labor co-operative agriculture farms – the law for their establishment dates back to 1945. At first those were voluntary organizations but by 1956 they have turned into obligatory organizations. They were based on the principle of co-operative property and tilling of the land.] in the Balkan. Its chairperson started talking and was trying to win us for the idea. I had just graduated and was well-versed in Marxism. There was a meeting at which the Co-operative Farm issue was being discussed. I couldn’t contain myself and said: ‘Look, comrades, there must be some mistake here. According to Lenin’s theses about the rural economy this should take place on the basis of profound mechanization, automation and application of chemicals. Here we are using mules [a hybrid between donkey and horse] for work, mules for tilling the land. What kind of Co-operative Farm are we going to make?’ Break was announced and the chairperson came to me: ‘Hey, you, if you want to become a member of the party, you wouldn’t say such things!’ I replied: ‘That’s my opinion.’ – ‘What opinion of yours is that? This is according to Lenin’s theses.’ And I recall that I was looking for those theses afterwards. The Co-operative Farm existed for a year, then it was turned into forestry and once I bumped into the chairperson and asked him: ‘What happened, my man?’ – ‘Those were the general instructions.’ Even though I had made such a comment I was accepted for a member of the party.

My granny Rahel, dad’s mother, died in 1952. We buried her observing all the Jewish rituals in the Jewish cemetery. We kept on observing the Jewish rituals even after her death but not with the same solemnity as when she was alive. The large tablecloths at Pesach were missing. Now we buy matzah, make burmolikos, we put a tablecloth on the table again but there is no reading of prayers and so on. This tradition continued no matter I married a Bulgarian. My wife started making ‘alkashul’ for Purim. She learned how to cook a lot of typical Jewish dishes – agristаda and apio, andjinara and burmolikos. At Chanukkah we are still visiting uncle Nisim to light a Chanukkiyah – only once, and the children come then.

And our twins – our children grew up in this atmosphere but, of course, there is an important detail – my wife paints 40 or 50 eggs every Easter and she prepares Easter cookies. At Christmas we celebrate with her kin.

My two daughters were raised as Jews. For a short period of time they attended the Jewish kindergarten. They are twins. When they were children we dressed them identically. In 1979 my daughters got married on one and the same day. They feel very strong connection even nowadays despite living in different countries. Liza has a college education and is a sanitary inspector – to control the quality of the food – but she doesn’t work in this field. Now she lives in Israel and works at a hotel in Elad. She married twice and has two children from her two husbands. From her marriage with Svetozar Zhelyazkov is her son Branimir, and from her second marriage to Tsenko Kunchev is her daughter Vanya, who is a student.

Dora is married to George Spasov, a master of sports – mechanized water sports. She has a secondary education of technology. She lives in Plovdiv and works as a beautician here.

Liza, who lives in Israel at the moment, is more committed to the Jewish organization whereas Dora, who lives here, is not committed to that extent. She is a member of Shalom but comes rarely, and her children, too, but on the other hand Liza is very devoted. Her daughter Vanya, who lives in Plovdiv, is an activist and a madriha. Dora has two children, Nikolay and Iva. Iva is a third-year student. My two daughters are married to Bulgarian men. The Jewish origin of my daughters has never been an obstacle for the choice of their Bulgarian husbands, otherwise they wouldn’t have married them, right? Dora works as a beautician in Plovdiv. Irrespectively of the fact that they have different professions and destinies, they feel very strongly connected. I’ll tell you a very interesting fact. When Dora was pregnant, Liza could feel her labor pains from a distance.

We keep in touch with the Jewish community. Its activities after 9th September expanded very much, the ‘Sholom Aleichem’ Chitalishte was created, which didn’t exist before that. The Jewish singing union was restored and while I am in Plovdiv I keep in touch with the Jewish community all the time. After 1957 – 1958 it became a state property but the name remained unchanged. The Jewish holidays were still celebrated but they became somewhat more European. For example, from Purim we have kept mainly the carnival, Chanukkah was turned into a celebration of bravery. And people aren’t that much focused on religion any more but it seems to me that at the time when I was working at Gorubso, there weren’t so many people going to the Jewish Chitalishte, the flow of people going there diminished greatly. That was in the period between 1957 and 1962.

We lived in my parents’ house until a cousin of mine bought her own place and I went to live in her old apartment which was actually a Jewish real estate left by people who had emigrated to Israel. I didn’t buy it, but rented it. The Jews who had left for Israel had left a representative and I was paying the rent to him. Once a year we met because I was paying the taxes. I bought that place in 1989 and went on living there while my daughter who lives in Bulgaria – Dora – had bought the apartment in which I live now. The two grandchildren were born – her children Nikolay and Iva – and once she told me: ‘Papa – they call me Papa – Papa, there are four of us now. Mum and you are only two. Let’s swap our apartments.’ And we swapped.

I hail the establishment of the state of Israel. I believe that every Jew should have a place to call home. I think that the Israeli state system should be something like federation. It is not the only state in the world where people from various nationalities live together. There were years when the official policy of Bulgaria towards Israel wasn’t very friendly. I personally accepted critically some aggressive extremities on the part of the Israelis as well as the Arab attacks.

I accept myself as a citizen of Bulgaria and give examples with football. If Bulgaria plays Israel I’ll be for Bulgaria but if Israel plays any other country, I’ll be for Israel.

I was in Israel in 1999. I was impressed because it is an excellently constituted country, very different from Bulgaria at the moment. In general, democracy is a good thing but we shouldn’t have destroyed what we had already achieved.

In Bulgaria the democratic changes started in 1989 [10th November 1989] 37. I’ll give an example with the Electrical Equipment Plant in Plovdiv, which was a leader in the industry before 10th November. It had certified products in the international laboratory in Hague and we actually had received European machines. There were 400 employees working at several branches. At the moment there are 150 employees.

Or another example – in the rural economy. People have tried for years, for hundreds of years to consolidate the land plots. We had achieved this consolidation and afterwards it was returned to the owners in real boundaries. And now when you walk through the fields you can see two decares of wheat, a decare of sunflower, two decares of alfalfa and so on. The main mistake of the socialist movement is the complete lack of changes of people in authority. If there was an opportunity for such changes and T. Zhivkov 38 hadn’t been the leader for 34 years, if somebody else had come – there were a lot of students who were studying in Europe and in the world. Lyudmila Zhivkova 39 opened Bulgaria for the outside world. If a lot of people were rotating in the administration of the party only for two mandates and then were replaced by other people by younger and more competent people, now the situation would have been different.

I became much poorer after 10th November. I retired in 1980 and was getting the highest possible pension – 230 levs. Afterwards I was immediately hired again as a locksmith at the same plant that I had worked before. So I started completing my job as a worker again, I was standing at the vice again. I worked for ten more years. I was responsible for the maintenance of the instrumental equipment of the mass consumer goods shop. We were making door hinges, case hinges, shop shelves, we were making the Rubik’s cube, pegs, hairdryers. I was responsible for the entire instrumental maintenance. And that was the most creative period of my, how shall I put it, of my conscious manufacturing life. The boss whose subordinate I was would come and say: ‘Behar, do something because the people who are making this part are putting in too much effort and it’s too difficult.’ And I would go and observe the process, would look the people in the hands to see what they were doing. I would go there, take a seat, make drawings, would move to the machines – I am a technologist, I am a constructor – and start applying the new method and I would assemble the part, bring it to the workers and say: ‘OK, now, my girl, look now, see if this time you will assemble it more easily. Give it a try.’ In half an hour: ‘Wow, uncle Behar, that’s a good thing you have done, a very good thing indeed!’

I have another very interesting story to tell. There was an exhibition of all the shops in Bulgaria producing consumer goods and I went behind the sales stall. The guy standing behind the stall told me: ‘Behar, stay here for a while, I am a little fed up.’ And while he was away there came this guy and I said: ‘How can I help you?’ He was looking at me and said: ‘All you have shown here is very interesting but what I need is hinges. How many can you produce?’ ‘Tell me the quantities you need?’ ‘A really large quantity.’ And while this conversation was taking place I was estimating the time for which I could make new dies and asked him to be more specific about the amounts he would need. ‘Well, a million from each type. From each type.’ I was still thinking at that moment and told him: ‘No problem!’ But I had estimated that I could make one die for a week and that one die could cut 300 parts per minute, depending on the size. And that guy threw a business card on the counter – a director of ‘Raznoiznos’ Directorate. I immediately called the head engineer who said: ‘Have you gone mad?’ I replied: ‘Listen, we will make a mint from that.’ And we started right away – that guy would order 10,000 of that hinge, 40,000 – from another. I would take one of the boys working there and we would make three new dies. That dies provided for 12 people from that shop for eight years. Every year huge amounts of hinges were planned for manufacture.

I’ve never interrupted my connections with the Jewish community. I’ve been tightly related to it for 45 years, whenever I’ve been in Plovdiv. After 1989 the Jewish center expanded its activities and somehow changed in itself. Many holidays preserved their religious nature, as it was before 9th September. But I’m still a complete atheist. I attend the synagogue at memorial services or at the big holidays.

I haven’t received anything from the Joint but there were some 400 Swiss dollars and some German from the Red Cross. Before the denominations they amounted to 20,000 levs which means 500 levs nowadays. Every evening I play belote at Shalom. Even now I am in a hurry because I have to tell them I won’t play tonight so they have to find another partner.

Translated by Dimka Stoeva

Glossary

Mois Merkado Natan
Sofia
Bulgaria
Interviewer: Stephan Djambazov
Date of interview: January 2005

Mois Merkado Natan becomes 80 this year. He is a lively and schooled man. He expressed his interest in a book that he couldn’t find and we helped him:: ‘Jews, the World and Money’, ‘An Economic History of the Jewish People’ by Jacques Attali. This shows Mr. Natan’s profound interest in the Jewish history and fate. His flat, as he described it, is large compared to the usual Bulgarian home – four rooms and a kitchen. He lives there with his wife alone, but I failed to persuade him to pay him a visit, because of his wife’s illness (she is almost paralyzed) and also there is an overhaul being carried out in their block of flats. We met in a cozy café-gallery near his flat.

My ancestors came from Spain and in Bulgaria they first lived in Karlovo. [Expulsion of the Jews from Spain] [1] My paternal grandfather’s brothers settled in Plovdiv while my grandfather Mois headed to Varna and Dobrich. There he ran a shop and a trading company where he worked together with my father and his other sons. My paternal grandmother, Sultana Natan, had two sisters and a brother. My maternal grandfather Avram Geron and my grandmother Simha Geron lived in Razgrad and were in the trade with animals – sheep and cows – they used to buy them from the nearby villages and sell them to other villagers or sell them for processing. He had three or four brothers, too, but I don’t know of any sisters. Then they moved to Ruse from Razgrad.

My paternal relatives were traders. I don’t remember my paternal grandfather because when I was born he had already died. I remember my paternal grandmother Sultana. She was living in Varna with one of my uncles and she was letting nice flats during the summer. My grandmother used to rent two rooms and because her house was near the Seaside Garden, she always had tenants. They were predominantly Bulgarians who were on holiday, but there were also Poles. It was there, when I first went to the theater - there was a summer theater in Varna and my uncle, David Natan, was a theater critic. I used to go to the comedies of St. L. Kostov, mainly – one of the classic Bulgarian playwrights s who mocked the love of power and the self-seeking of the politicians of the time.

My maternal grandfather Avram Geron was also a tradesman of animals and very religious, too. As the eldest grandson I had to attend services at the synagogue on Friday evenings. That was in Ruse because my mother’s family had moved to live there in the 1910s because their business dwindled. All the Jews from that generation were very religious, but not orthodox. On Rosh Hashanah and the high holidays they used to close their shops and go to synagogue. My grandfather Avram used to go to synagogue every day. They used to buy only kosher meat. They observed that. At home, all holidays were observed when the whole family gathered. They lived well. I know that my grandfather Avram Geron was a very good man. He used to carry 10-lev bank notes in his pockets so that he could give them if he happened to meet a poor man. [This sum was equal to the money one needs for food for a day, it is also comparable to two and a half tickets for cinema.] He had a purse full with white bonbons for the children. My grandfather used to wear bowler hat and all others were dressed in the way normal citizens did – in Western style. They spoke broken Bulgarian, Turkish and Spaniol, which is Ladino [2], while my grandfather in Dobrich spoke also Romanian. [Dobrich is located in the region of Southern Dobrudzha that belonged to Romania from the Second Balkan War (1913) until World War II.] They had nice houses both in Ruse and Varna – they had running water, electricity and toilet inside the houses. My granny in Varna had a housemaid, and my grandpa and granny in Ruse hired a housemaid for the winters.

My grandmother Sultana had two sisters – the first of them, Roza, was married to the tradesman Pinkas who had a trading company jointly owned by my grandmother’s brother, Yosif; after that they went to Istanbul. I don’t know exactly when but the reason was he had relatives in Istanbul. Roza had two daughters, Becca and Lily, and a son Fredi – they moved to live in Turkey, and Lily went to Israel after that. The second sister was called Luna who had two sons. The sisters died long ago. My grandmother had five sons and a daughter. Three of them, Aron, Albert and David went to Israel where they died; my father stayed in Bulgaria, while the fifth son, Marko, moved to Ecuador together with his family. The name of the daughter was Belina and she also went to Israel, where she died. I remember one of my grandfather Avram Geron’s sisters, but I have forgotten her name. Her husband’s name was Prezenetti, while their children (four sons and a daughter) were owners of the ‘Fazan’ [Pheasant] textile company in Ruse. I know a story about my grandpa Avram. Once he went on business to Varna, but he missed the train back and when he was told that there was a train at the same time only the next day, he set off on foot for Razgrad (where he lived then) and came home one hour before the arrival of the train in question (the distance between the two cities is 137 kilometers).

My mother Rebeka Natan was a housewife. She was born in Razgrad in 1896 or in 1897. She had primary education and she was a dressmaker. During World War I she was the one to earn the living of the family because my uncle was mobilized. [Bulgaria in World War I] [3] She used to make clothes and earn money for the family. She went to live in Ruse before the war. They moved to Ruse because the family business declined. Mum had two sisters, Ester and Rashel, and a brother – Yosif. Rashel had a high school education and Ester – primary. Both of them were housewives and lived in Ruse. Ester has a son, Rashel – two sons and a daughter, as well as two step-children because she married a widower.

My father Merkado Mois Natan was born in 1893 in Varna and had four brothers and a sister. Merkado means ‘bought’ [in Ladino] - this is an old Jewish custom of selling the eldest son to relatives when he remains alone; they take care of him until he himself asks for clothes from his mother and father. [According to the Sephardi tradition if all brothers and sisters of a child die he is ‘sold’ to some relative, so they take care of him and this way he may survive. According to the custom, the child continues living with his parents but they do not buy anything for him.] So they called him Merkado, because he was bought by relatives in Varna. His elder brothers and sisters had died and he remained alone. Our relatives took care of him, they loved him. According to the tradition, he lived with his parents but they didn’t buy him anything until he asked for something from them. I don’t know exactly the name of this Jewish tradition – but it was most probably developed for the survival of the oldest son, the continuer of the family. I don’t know how many elder siblings he had, but after him came Aron, Albert, Marko and David. My grandfather could afford to take care of him and pay for his expenses, but that was the custom. My father used to speak Bulgarian very well because he studied in a Bulgarian middle school.

My father’s youngest brother David was 12 years older than me. His brothers (Aron, Albert and David) all died in Israel between 1983 and 1988. I don’t know where the other brother Marko died. Aron had a daughter who also died of natural death. Albert had a daughter who is alive and we keep in touch on the phone from time to time. Marko had two daughters. David was not married and didn’t have children. Belina was not married, too and she didn’t have children. Albert and Marko studied in a college in Romania. David had a high school education – he was a theater critic – this was his passion, while the others were tradesmen.

During the World War I my father hired a cab and illegally moved to Bulgaria where he served in the army. That was in the period when Dobrich was in Romanian hands. He was wounded in his hand – not seriously – but he served as a nurse. [The matter in focus is about the military service of the father as a young man – yet before he married.] After that, already during the World War II, he was too old to be taken to the forced labor camps [4]. So he didn’t serve in the army.

Together with my mother they had an arranged meeting where they liked each other. They had a marriage (religious and civic one) in 1923 in Varna. They dressed very fashionably - my father was a dandy. He had 12 suits in the wardrobe.

My father worked as a procurator in a Turkish tobacco company – he was in charge of the finances. The owners respected him and his salary was 12,000 Bulgarian levs – very good for that time. However, the Turkish company went bankrupt and he returned in Ruse where he became the accountant of my uncle’s company.

When my family moved back to Ruse, they were not so well-off, but we still had a normal standard of living. My father was the accountant at my uncle’s company – they used to buy tobacco and process it. They were partners in Ruse. We lived in a rented house and my mother ran the household work.

I don’t remember where we lived in Varna, but the house in Ruse was a decent small one and we lived on the ground floor. After that we moved from there to a bigger house with two rooms and a kitchen; this house shared the same yard with the old one. Then we moved to live in the center of the Jewish neighborhood where we had two rooms, a living room and a kitchen. We had a toilet inside the house and a bathroom, too – it was heated on firewood from outside as a Turkish bath. We had electricity, but we used firewood and coal for heating. We were four of us – my mother, my father, my brother and I. After that we lived in other similar houses. The reason for moving so much was that we were seeking for better living conditions for the growing family. Besides, one of the houses was in the Bulgarian neighborhood, while later we managed to find a better one in the Jewish quarter, where we moved to. We used to change houses every five years or so.

I was born in Varna in 1925. We moved to Ruse when I was two. I don’t remember Varna from this period, I remember it from the period when I started visiting my grandmother in Varna. Ruse had a very strong Jewish community - around 3,500 people. [Ruse had the third largest Jewish community in Bulgaria after Sofia and Plovdiv, numbering 3,134 people in 1926.] The town had its own Jewish school, which was true only for Sofia, Plovdiv and Pazardzhik these days. There was no Jewish middle school in any other Bulgarian towns. Ruse had then between 50,000 and 60,000 inhabitants. The Jewish community was very united – there was a Jewish municipality, led both by the synagogue and the school boards of trustees. There were several Zionist organizations – General Zionists [5], Poalei Zion [6] and Jabotinsky’s revisionists [7], as well as the youth’s organizations Hashomer Hatzair [8] and Maccabi [9]. Maccabi was the sports organization – we had a very good gym hall where we gathered every day and two times a week we made exercises under the supervision of a gymnast. My father was in the administration of the General Zionists, who were centrists. The other organization, Poalei Zion, was a bit more leftist, social democratic, while the revisionist fraction that was created by Jabotinsky [10] were rightists and a bit more radical as far as the liberation of Palestine was concerned. Each organization had a youth’s subdivision. The Revisionists’ one was Betar [11] – they used to have manifestations in the Jewish street dressed in brown shirts and black pants. The other ones were Hashomer Hatzair – they studied Ivrit rigorously and in their organization ’Ken’ [Hebrew for Nest] they used to speak only in Ivrit so they prepared themselves for the Alyah to Israel - to work there in the kibbutzim. Maccabi was also a Zionist organization – followers of the General Zionists, mainly devoted to sports.

In Ruse there were two synagogues: the Ashkenazi one and the Sephardi one. There was a chazzan, too. Haribi [rabbi] Naftali was the chazzan at the first one and haribi Tuvi was servicing the second one. There was a shochet, too – there was a chazzan and a mezamer. The chazzan was the chief one and mezamer was the one, who accompanied him, his assistant to the service. Bar mitzvah was made in both the synagogue and home. Mine was at home. A chazzan came with plenty of relatives and friends. He read and gave me the maturity certificate. This was the routine in Ruse, [which was possible because Bulgarian Jews were not extremely religious and certain rituals had been adapted to the situation in Bulgaria] and I can’t say anything more. Marriages were performed in the synagogue only according to the traditional ritual – the prayer was read and the respective certificate was issued [Ketubbah].

There was one Jewish school – a secondary school where we studied all the subjects taught in Bulgarian schools in Bulgarian language; in the primary school – up to the fourth grade Ivrit was taught. In the middle school we also studied Ivrit, Toldot [Hebrew for history], and Tannakh. There were Jewish children who were not sent to study in the Jewish school, because it was more difficult there – we studied in the mornings and in the afternoon. But when we reached the high school level we were completely prepared for it. I have a brother, Avram Merkado Natan. My brother is four years younger than me. He studied in the same schools as I did, but couldn’t graduate from high school, because the Law for Protection of the Nation was introduced and he was not allowed to go to school. He couldn’t graduate until 1947, after which he studied at the Technical University in Sofia.

The Jewish neighborhood was around David Street and the Jewish school. Almost all Jews lived there. There were also some Bulgarian families. In Ruse there were many Jewish tradesmen, successful ones. The trade with books was almost the whole in Jewish hands: the companies ‘Sam Patak’, ‘Moisey Melamed’, ‘Rozanis&Co’ and others. There were also many traders of haberdashery, clothes, and glass products. Beniesh had a large bookstore in the city center. Many doctors, and good ones, too, were from Jewish origin: Dr Menachem, Dr Versano, Dr Ovadia. One of the most famous dentists in the town was Dr Isakov, there were pharmacists, and druggists, too. Many lawyers were also Jewish, as well as some musicians. However, most of them were not professionals, they were amateurs. There was a ‘David’ chorus at the synagogue. In Ruse three musical comedies with a purely Jewish cast were performed – among them were ‘Carmusinella’ [no information available] and ‘The Love of Schubert’, based on musical compositions by Franz Schubert [12], as well as the ‘The Bells of Cornville’ [an opera-comique in 3 acts, 4 scenes; Music by Robert Planquette; adapted and arranged by Max Morris, first staged in 1877 in Théàtre des Folies-Dramatiques, Paris]. I can’t remember anything about the authors and the contents, because they were light ephemeral operettas – perhaps brought from abroad, Vienna maybe, which may be known only to the experts in operettas. There were attempts for Jewish theater performances with young people from Hashomer Hatzair – they played ‘It’s Hard to be a Jew’ (‘Shver Tzu Zein A Yid’) by Shalom Aleichem [13]. I can’t remember anything about that, too, except for the topic was the Jewish life. It was probably also a foreign product, because I remember a Negro appearing, but I can’t say anything more as far as the author and the content is concerned. They played in Bulgarian, too. There was a Jewish jazz band also, led by Albert Ventura who was a banker and a violinist. In summer they used to go and play in Varna – to have fun, because they were rich boys. A great musician was born in Ruse: Isak (Ziko) Gratsiani, who became the conductor of the Israeli military chorus later. I can’t add any further information. I don’t know any details about his life, because he left for Israel after 1944 and our paths separated. [There is no information available on him].

The Jews had a good standard of living. Almost everywhere they had running water and electricity. In several slums for the poor people they had everything outside their houses, but such houses were a very rare thing to see. A big Jewish organization, ‘Malbish Arumim’ [14] was in charge of providing food and clothes to the poor people. In autumns they used to buy them winter clothes and shoes, there was also a communal canteen. There was no anti-Semitism before the introduction of the Law for Protection of the Nation [15]. But there was no anti-Semitism after this law, too – I mean – declared and rude one. [Editor’s note: He probably means although the anti-Semitic laws were introduced it was still little felt in the every day reality.] There was one pro-fascist organization ‘Country Defense’ [16], as well as ‘Ratnik’ [17], but nobody offended me because of my Jewish origin while I was a schoolboy in the high school, even after we had to wear those yellow stars [18]. None of my classmates has ever insulted me, because we were good students. They respected us. There wasn’t any anti-Semitism among the people in Bulgaria. The anti-Semitism was on an institutional level – stemming from the laws and regulations. But even in the period when we had to wear those yellow stars – there wasn’t any negative attitude to us.

My mother always had me accompany her while she was to go shopping, so that I might carry the baskets. Tuesdays and Fridays were the market days. Ruse was a big industrial town. Outside the city there were many gardens so we used to buy fresh fruits and vegetables. My mother used to buy only kosher meet. There was only one seller that she would buy meat from. In the Jewish neighborhood there was a confectioner – the Turk Tahir Nuri, where we, the young people, used to go; our parents visited this place in the evenings, too. Pastries and cakes were offered there and in winter they made halva [19]. If you sit in there they would bring you a plate with pastries and you’ll have to choose. From this period I remember 19th May 1934 [The military coup d’etat after which King Boris III established a totalitarian regime, the Parliament was dismissed and all the parties were banned.]. I was 9 years old then. I remember the martial law, the mounted police. I remember also the entry of the German allies in Ruse through Romania– it was in March 1941. [On 1st March 1941, the Government of Bogdan Filov signed the protocol under which Bulgaria joined the Axis. On 6th March the dislocation of German troops on the Balkan Peninsula began and it started from Romania to Bulgaria via Ruse.]

My parents used to read also newspapers, mainly Jewish ones, and from Bulgarian newspapers they preferred ‘Utro’ [Morning] [20] and ‘Zora’ [Dawn] [21] [popular newspapers without any particular political focus]. Dad could speak Hebrew, because he read the prayers in Hebrew. In Ruse there were two clubs where the libraries were located, but I haven’t borrowed books from there because I used to buy them. I read ‘Captain Dreyfus’, the five volumes of Victor von Falk [‘Auf ewig getrennt? Oder Kapitän Dreyfus und seiner Gattin ergreifende Erlebnisse, Schicksale und fürchterliche Verbannung. Sensationsroman von Victor von Falk’ (On eternally separately? Or Captain Dreyfus and his wife moving experiences, fates and dreadful banishing. Thriller by Victor von Falk) (Berlin: A. Weichert 1898) - a novel in five volumes by Victor von Falk, considered to be a pseudonym of several authors] – my mother read them, too, as well as the novels by Victor Hugo: ‘The Miserables’, ‘The Hunchback of Notre-Dame’, all of them. Dad used to give me 20 levs a week and I saved it. In Ruse there was a famous bookshop ‘Simeon Simeonov’, where I could find the book I liked.

My father was in the administration of General Zionists. He was a member of the board of directors of the Jewish bank ‘Avoda’ Bank. [There is no further information on it]. There were several accountants in it, several tradesmen and several industrialists. My parents had Zionist political views – they were not in the politics because the Jews were out of the political institutions then. We had not only Jews for neighbors – there were Bulgarians, too. We got on well with them, and with their kids. However, my parents made friends more easily with Jews. My father attended the Jewish Bet Am [22]. After World War II he used to work with Bulgarians only.

My parents respected the Jewish traditions – they observed kosher, but not Sabbath – because we had to work. However, they did close the shops on Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot. We would go to synagogue on every holiday. We had a pupils’ synagogue on Sabbath – on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. [Organised attendance of Jewish pupils to services at the synagogue on Saturdays at Sabbath] There was a small and a big hall in the synagogue. The synagogue services for pupils were held simultaneously in the small hall – the prayers were read by the pupils themselves so that they might learn them. We had a famous teacher – we used to call him uncle Bucco – Bucco Delarubisa. He was a teacher in the middle school, his two sisters were teachers, too, as well as his wife. He once was the teacher of my mother, too. We learned many things from him. He was our Math teacher, but we learned a lot more from him – many sayings, for example, which famous people were Jews, he also taught us about the Jewish life and traditions. It was he who took us to synagogue on Friday evenings and we made our ‘pupils’ synagogue’ in the small hall of the synagogue. After I had my bar mitzvah I started taking part in the prayers – I used to read them. We observed the high Jewish holidays at home, too. We would lay the table for the respective holiday, kindle the candles and read a prayer. Just simple observing of the traditions, without putting much passion into it. We would always buy matzah for Pesach. Purim was marked in its own way – we were given money and sweets. At Chanukkah we used to kindle the chanukkiyah at home.

My parents seldom went on holiday. I remember that one year we came to Sofia’s Ovcha Kupel with my mother (there is a mineral water spa there) because of her illness. My mother and I used to visit my grandmother in Varna. My parents used to gather with their brothers and sisters as well as with my mother’s cousins in Ruse. In 1933 and 1934 all my father’s brothers gathered in Varna to visit my grandmother: Aron and Albert came from Dobrich [Romania at the time], Marko – from Milan (Italy).

We didn’t have a garden, but we had a big yard in one of the houses, shared between four other buildings and we played there. My mother was ill because she had two hard births (mine and my brother’s). She had problems with her physical condition and so we used to hire a housemaid from the neighboring villages Dimitrovden and Gergyovden for the winters. [The villages are named after Bulgarian Orthodox holidays. Dimitrovden is St Dimitar’s Day, while Gergyovden stands for St. George’s Day.] The housemaid had a bed in the kitchen.

We had both religious and mundane books, but I don’t remember their titles. My parents did read, and especially my father, because my mother didn’t have the time for it. Dad used to read contemporary novels. I remember that when I was 12, he brought home the ‘Brown Book’ [Editor’s note: Probably a reference to ‘Brown Plague’ in the sense of Nazism.] against Hitler and I understood from it that Hitlerism persecuted Jews and communists. It was an international issue, it read also about the Leipzig trial [Georgi Dimitrov] [23], for the Kristallnacht [‘The Night of Broken Glass’: the pogrom against German Jews. On the nights of 9th and 10th November 1938, gangs of Nazi youth roamed through Jewish neighborhoods breaking windows of Jewish businesses and homes, burning synagogues and looting. In all 101 synagogues were destroyed and almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed. 26,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, Jews were physically attacked and beaten and 91 died (Snyder, Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Paragon House, 1989:201)].

I haven’t had a nanny, but for one year I attended the ‘Gan Yeladim’ kindergarten at the Jewish school. It was one year before I started school. ‘Gan’ means garden in Ivrit, while ‘yeladim’ stands for ‘children’. After that I studied in the Jewish primary and secondary school. I was very good at mathematics. When uncle Bucco made us do sums, he would always ask me first what the answer was. This teacher whom we learned a lot of things from was a mathematician. From him we learned many sayings, many things, for example that the great violinist Bronislaw Huberman was a Jew. [Huberman, Bronislaw (1882-1947): a great violinist of the 20th century, born in Poland. He was highly acclaimed for his strongly individual interpretations.] We learned which famous people were of Jewish origin, he used to tell us about the Jewish lifestyle and traditions. He was a great man, a great pedagogue; for us he was not only our teacher in mathematics. His classes were exceptional. Later, every time I was in Ruse after the war I visited him until he passed away.

I haven’t had private lessons in music, nor in foreign languages; I studied French at the high school. My friends at school were Jews and Bulgarians, especially after I entered the Union of Young Workers (UYW) [24]. That happened after the war on the USSR was declared on 22th June 1941. I was in the sixth grade in the high school two years before graduation. However, the next year I was expelled from school. We were locked up within the Jewish neighborhood and we didn’t have any out-of-school contacts. We used to gather in Tahir’s confectionery before the curfew hour. At weekends we gathered in someone’s house – we used to organize jours [i.e. youth parties] then as we used to call them. We gathered boys and girls, danced a little, but most of the time we discussed things and had arguments – we were already members of the UYW. We didn’t drink alcohol, we listened to music only if there was a gramophone or a radio at the place where we gathered. We used our free time to study and read.

I did sports at ‘Maccabi’ – there were various competitions there. We used to play volleyball, table tennis, and two times a week we did gymnastics. I had a friend who used to come home and stayed with us for the night. From 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. we prepared our lessons. At 9 a.m. we were at ‘Maccabi’ where we played until 11:30. After that we used to have lunch before we go to school. The Jews in Ruse were not communists regarding their social status - we were rather intellectually attracted by the idea. As I already told you I read the ‘Brown Book’ and I knew the Hitlerism persecuted Jews and communists. In Ruse there were between 70 and 80 people, living in the Jewish street, who were organized in the UYW. I remember that we asked for special permission from the State Security Service to perform chamber concerts in the Jewish school. And when the day of the first one came we shuddered with fear because the head of the State Security Service and three or five agents came to listen to our music – but it was because in Ruse there was no other place to listen to music then. That was one of the most significant cultural events in the town during the war. Apart from gathering to someone’s house for a party the other thing to do was to go together with our parents to eat kebapcheta [traditional grilled meatballs] in the evenings – in our street there was a kebapche eatery, that was owned by Jews. The eatery was not kosher.

We couldn’t go on summer holidays after 1941 any more. Before that I hadn’t gone on holiday with my friends, because my father didn’t allow me to go on trips – he was very strict and meticulous in this respect, he always wanted to know where we were. Anti-Jewish laws were introduced in 1941 – the yellow star and the curfew hour. Now there are some disputes as to whether we lived in a ghetto or not – well we were in Ruse and 9 o’clock was the curfew. We could go out of there only for two hours a day – from the beginning it was not so strictly observed, but later the situation grew tenser. During the day we were allowed to go to the market, in a café and in a confectionery’s in the Jewish neighborhood, but we were not allowed to go to the other parts of the town. In 1942 a policeman liked the apartment where we were living and he drove us out from there. We used to live in the house of the Spanish ambassador Aftalion, who left and asked us to keep his home. He was a Jew, however, so the state confiscated the house and kicked us out. [No information for such person is available. In the same year, chief of the Spanish mission to Sofia was Julio Palencia i Alvaces (11.12.1940-27.10.1943). He is known for his active efforts for freeing dozens of Jews, as Spanish citizens, from compulsory work and civil mobilization in Bulgaria during the years when the anti-Jewish legislation was in force. He actively assisted the process of issuing Spanish passports and handled the emigration issues of Bulgarian Jews, who went to America through Spain. In order to save a Jewish family in Plovdiv, Palencia even adopted their child. As of 27th October 1943, Ramon Maria de Pudjadas was the plenipotentiary minister of Spain to Bulgaria. Aftalion was most probably a Spanish consul, but the name of the town he went to was not mentioned – most probably this was Kavala, where the Spanish consul was Jew against whom Germans undertook repressive measures.]

A friend of my father’s accommodated us at his place - he gave us a room and a store-room where we all lived. My father was jobless – we started selling all our furniture and possessions, because we didn’t have any savings by then. When they started renaming us – they didn’t change my name, but they did change the name of my father, because Merkado was not in the list of the Jewish names. [25] So he took his birth name – Eliezer. My mother remained Rebeka. My father’s name, changed to Eliezer, was written in all documents. That was the period when I studied at the high school, but in 1943 I was expelled from it because there were too many Jews there and some of them had to be expelled. I was expelled on the suspicion that I was a member of the UYW, and I was a Jew, too.

In March 1943 when a probable deportation of the Jews was discussed for the first time openly, seven friends on mine (two girls and five boys) decided to go illegal so that nobody could send us to concentration camps. We all were Jews, and one of us turned out to be the secretary of the town committee of UYW, so he got in touch with the underground revolutionaries. It was the period when Ana Ventura [26] was also illegal – the famous Ana Ventura – Jewish, daughter of one of the largest and richest industrialists in the town; she died later. On 19th March 1943 we decided to go illegal. Not only communists concealed us – there were also people who were anti-fascists and democrats. A humble villager offered us a shelter for a month, after which we moved to hide in a cave near Cherven village. We were not ready for such kind of life. We had almost no weapons, only a Turkish gun and two pistols. So we were just staying there and waiting. I went once or twice to the neighboring villages in order to make connection with the partisans - we expected to be relocated in the Balkan Mountains together with them. But the man who controlled the illegal activity in Ruse had us stay near the town for two months. His name was Nikola Popov, a former participant in the Spanish Civil War [1936-1939] and immigrant to the Soviet Union.

An accidental revelation happened when we were hiding in the caves: a child shepherd saw the youngest of us while he was at his post. This happened on 10th May and we scattered. The leader took with him a girl from our group, the other one managed to escape and I had to take the others out of that place because I knew the area. I led them to Svalenik village first – to one supporter of the partisans. We passed right through the center of the village – the police officers were in the tavern as we walked past them. And we did find the supporter of the partisans. He took us to a neighboring village – Katselovo. Meanwhile, our group leader left Tinka Dzhain [Born as Ester Sabitai Dzhain. She was an anti-fascist fighter of Jewish origin, a political commissioner of the Cerven’s guerilla detachment. She was killed after the detachment was discovered in 1943.] to the care of one of the supporters in Bozhichen village, but he gave her away to the police and they killed her there. We remained three or four days in Katselovo, but the man who was concealing us got scared and he said he would take us to another place, so he started guiding us, but disappeared in the middle of nothing. This happened at night. We hadn’t realized that the whole region was blocked and as we were moving forward we just came across the blockade. Guns went off several times and we hid ourselves in the nearest forest. During the night some of us wanted us to surrender, but a guy and I didn’t accept it, because we didn’t know whom we might come across and what they would do to us – they could kill us. We waited until the morning, came out of the forest and stepped in the hunting posse. So they caught us and arrested us. One of us – Salvador Papo, was stouter than the others and cocky, too – so he got the first thrashing because they thought he was the leader of the group. I was a skinny schoolboy - I weighed only 45. So we were taken to the police were we were detained for 45 days. We had a perfect ‘brainwash’ there – beating, beating as much as a human being could bear. Some of us couldn’t endure it any more and they confessed they were members of the Union of Young Workers, but I never confessed it. We said we decided to run away because we didn’t want to get deported.

In July we were brought to court and I was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment. I was accused of taking part in a Jewish communist group. I was taken to the Ruse’s prison, but during the bombardments we were moved to the jail in Pleven. I stood there until 8th September 1944. During that period my father, mother and brother were interned to the town of Somovit [Internment of Jews in Bulgaria] [27]. The Jews from Ruse, Vidin and Pleven were not interned to other Bulgarian towns but they were prepared for deportation. So, my family lived in Somovit and they were awaiting their deportation. In the dress making unit of the camp there was a friend of my father’s who approached him one day and told him: ‘Bad news, they’re going to move us from here’, because a German officer had told him so. But on the other day, uncle Sinto (that was the name of the dressmaker) went to work and was told that everything bad had blown over. When he came back to the camp and broke the news, the people in the camp started celebrating that they were not going anywhere. This happened in September or in October 1943. There were many Jews in Somovit – some of them from Plovdiv, some – from Sofia and especially those who got arrested during the demonstration on 24th May [28]. My parents and brother lived in Somovit for three months. After that they came back to Ruse and lived in the same room and store-room in the house of that friend of my father’s. My father then used to make frames for mirrors together with one of my uncles, so that they could earn their living.

I got out of the prison in Pleven on 8th September 1944. We broke the jail, the police started fire on us, but we, the prisoners, slashed the cordon. There was a victim or two. After that we ran to the vineyard where we spent the night. In the morning everything was calm and we went back to Ruse. After that I worked for a year in the police I was an intelligence officer at the State Security Service for a year. But after that I followed my father’s advice – to complete my high-school education and to go to university. So I graduated from the high school and enrolled in the Ruse’s Technical University. Later I applied for studying in the USSR. But then they played a trick on me – they hid my documentation. A member of the youth communist organization hid them, although he was in charge of submitting them. The reason was a simple envy – after which he confessed the fact to senior executives, but all the same - the deadline had passed. Аfter that they sent me to Czechoslovakia as compensation, where I studied mechanical engineering. I learnt Czech language. My brother, after they closed the Ruse’s Technical University, moved to Sofia, where he graduated from the Mechanical Electro-Technical Institute. My father worked in Ruse as a chairman of ‘Clothes and Shoes’ until he retired.

I studied in Prague from 1949 to 1952. There I lived in the Jewish hostel in 25 Belgicka Street. There were two Jewish hostels in Prague, indeed – one for boys and one for girls. They were maintained by Joint [29] and were built especially for families that suffered from the Holocaust. Even the staff in these hostels was of Jewish origin. There was a great concern for the students in these hostels – they fed and dressed us for almost nothing. I studied in the Czech Higher Technical School and I was impressed by the level of culture of the Czech people at that time. I was pleased with the education.

I came back and I was given a job in the Metal Cutting Machines Plant in Sofia. I wanted to work in Ruse, but I was told that there were too many engineers there and I got a refusal. They offered me to go to Haskovo, or to Vidin, but I told them that if I was to move to another town, that should be Sofia. So I got a job in Sofia. I was vice-technologist at the Metal Cutting Machines Plant in Sofia. I was not given an apartment, I was accommodated in a rented flat. Later we had a dispute with the director of the plant and in 1955 I resigned and found a job with the Institute for Rationalizations [30]. I was an engineer in chief there and in 1956 I became a lector in Resistance of the Materials - Mechanics at the Military Academy. I was a civilian - that was my wish. My parents and brother moved to Sofia in 1956. We changed our rented flat in Ruse for one of a military man in Sofia who was to move to Ruse.

My mother died in 1958. She was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Sofia, but she didn’t have a Jewish funeral because her husband arranged the funeral for a Saturday, when no Jewish funerals are carried out. He didn’t want to wait because of the heat. So we remained my father, my brother and I. I met my wife Yanka, a Bulgarian, in 1957 at the Institute for Rationalizations. She was a librarian after which she became a telephone operator there. We got married in 1959.

It happened to me to have problems because of my Jewish origin. In Czechoslovakia I studied aviation engineering – well, I graduated and when I came back a friend of mine introduced me to the Personnel Department at the Air Force, where I wanted to work. However, I was received there very coldly. Later, when I was working for the Metal Cutting Machines Plant, I learnt that all our Jews had been expelled from the Interior Ministry. At the Military Academy, I had a very intelligent man for director - colonel Kalanov – whose opinion was not influenced by my origin, because he had been a partisan together with Jews. So, he welcomed me very warmly at the Military Academy – and when I told him I wanted the position but as a civilian – he said: ‘O.K, we’ll have a civilian at the position.’ This was after Israel was constituted. And the attitude to us was connected with the security problems under the influence of the USSR. This is not a question of anti-Semitism – it was an institutional problem. After the Suez Crisis in 1956 they became more fastidious to Jews. Then the Hungarian events of 1956 [31] came in focus, it was said that the Jews had organized them, and institutions became more suspicious towards us. I was a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party, but there have always existed suspicions against me.

When I came back from Czechoslovakia and started work in the Metal Cutting Machines Plant, the doctors’ plot [32] in the Soviet Union started. While I was still in Czechoslovakia, in Bulgaria started the trial against Traicho Kostov [33]. I was in the Pleven’s jail together with him, our cells were on the same floor. We used to walk together and we would often go to him to listen to his lectures. I knew Traicho Kostov in person and that turned into just one more suspicion against me. After I came back from Czechoslovakia, the trial against Rudolf Slansky [34] began – he was the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Soon after it, in Romania was initiated the trial against Ana Pauker – one more strike against the Jewry. [see Ana Pauker-Vasile Luca-Teohari Georgescu group] [35] So – there was a certain negative reaction against the Jews on an international level. Almost all my friends moved to Israel after it was set up. I felt awkward about leaving, because I was sent to Czechoslovakia as a scholarship holder of the Bulgarian Government, so I decided to stay here. I also wanted to gain experience here.

My wife Yanka comes from Stara Zagora and her parents are from the town of Radnevo. She has uncompleted university education in a faculty of law. During the period the Jews were persecuted, her parents Dinka and Prodan Ovcharovi moved to Plovdiv to save the shop of a Jewish family. Prodan Ovcharov was a tradesman in Radnevo – a bit strange, Tolstoyist, vegetarian.

After I got married, we lived in a small rented flat that was destroyed later, and we were given an apartment, which we shared with other people. Then we moved to another place and finally I managed to buy a flat of 150 sq.m. (four rooms and a kitchen) from a friend in Maria Luisa Street in 1972. We still live there. My friend was fed up with this apartment, because there were tenants in it. We managed to move in 1975, but we continued with the law suits against the last tenant for three or four more years, because he didn’t want to move from there. Now only two of us live here – my wife and I - because my children have their own places now. One of my sons lives in Bulgaria, but has a separate flat, while the other is in Canada. My older son is Merkado – named after my father – he was born in 1960; the younger is Alfred and he was born in 1963 – both of them in Sofia. My son Merkado Mois Natan (this is the full name of my father, in the same way I carry the full name of my grandfather) is a lawyer and lives in Sofia. He has a family and a son, whose name is Mois Merkado Natan (that is also my name) and has just turned 17. His wife is a Bulgarian, and is also a lawyer. My younger son Alfred lives in Canada. He studied for two years at the Mechanical Electro-Technical Institute in Sofia and decided to move to Israel, and he set off for there without completing his university education in 1990. I didn’t agree that he should leave without finishing his education, but he did it. He was married to a Bulgarian in Sofia and he has a daughter from her, but he divorced and left for there. Four months later he came back, married his girlfriend and moved to live in Israel with her. After that they emigrated to Canada in 1993. He has two sons from his second marriage, the first one is 10 years old, the second one is 7. He attended a course for dental mechanics and now works as a dental mechanic. Both his children from the second marriage were born in Canada.

Until my father was alive he used to tell everything about the Jewish tradition to my sons. He used to tell them things, take them to the Bet Am or the synagogue. He told them about the Jewish history and the religious holidays as a way to observe traditions.

Then I had two jobs – and I had classes at the Mechanical Electro-Technical Institute, so I didn’t have much time. They are brought up as Jews and that’s how they feel themselves. They had Jews for friends even when it was not allowed for Jews to gather in Bet Am before the changes of [10th November] 1989 [36]. They used to gather at home – because we had a big flat and they had their own rooms. I used to go to synagogue only on high holidays before the changes. I am from those few people who know Hebrew and can read prayers. Now we mark all the holidays. I go to synagogue on Friday evenings, I am there on Saturday mornings, too. Besides, I worked for four years at the synagogue – I was vice-chairman of the Religious Council. My friends are Jews and Bulgarians. There are now no relatives left with whom we may keep in touch – neither in Sofia, nor in Israel.

As far as the wars from 1967 [Six Day War] [37] and 1973 [Yom Kippur War] [38] are concerned and the cancellation of the diplomatic relationships with Israel – I had expected these events, because we were deep into our relations with the Arabic world, which was dictated by the Soviet Union. I am a supporter of Israel and my attitude to the Arabic problems is negative. Firstly – because the Palestine question is not a Jewish question. The Palestine question is a problem of the Arabs. In 1948 when the War for Liberation was being led, Israel was attacked by all Arabic countries. The West Bank that was to become a Palestinian state, under the decision of the United Nations was occupied by Jordanians. Golan was occupied by Syria, while Sinai Peninsula was controlled by Egypt. That is to say that this is a purely Arabic question. It was not earlier than 1967 that Israel occupied the West Bank, expelling Jordan and winning the war. That is why the problem with those camps is artificially created - and it is quite clear for every Jew. Every time I explain these matters to somebody I say that the Palestinian question has nothing to do with Israel. It is an Arabic one because they didn’t allow another Arab country to be set up from the very beginning. However, after the wars started and the diplomatic relations with Israel were cancelled, I didn’t feel any change in the attitude of my friends and co-workers in Bulgaria. All the more – when I was teaching at the Military Academy we used to discuss these matters rather theoretically.

I have been to Israel once - in 1982. I gathered with my old friends there as if we hadn’t been separated at all. I visited all my classmates and friends whom I used to live in Bulgaria with many years ago. Then I had relatives there – they were alive; my aunts and uncles, too. I haven’t been there after that first visit, because as a poor relative of theirs I felt awkward about visiting them again. Now my aunts and uncles are dead. My wife wanted to go there very much, but it simply didn’t happen. My uncle David used to come to Sofia every two years or so. We communicated through letters, telephone calls. Now I have only one cousin there, other two of my cousins are living in Ecuador, but I don’t keep in touch with them. Unfortunately, I don’t know any further details about them.

The democratization of the country after 1989 had a negative effect on me. The way we live here now is the worst that ever happened to Bulgaria. We live in an insecure society. People are scared when they come back home from somewhere – people are afraid even when they are in their own homes. Because of that criminal deed, that Bulgaria has never experienced before. I’m speaking not only about the socialist period, but also of the times before it when we were wearing yellow stars and were in conspiracy activities. Even then we felt safer than we feel now. There was order in the country. Now – this democracy that we are now living in is no democracy at all, it is rather DAEMONcracy. And if I have to explain this situation to myself – it is perhaps because there hasn’t been such a phenomenon in the human history before. We know how capitalism stems out of the feudalism, how capitalism became socialism – but this phenomenon – from socialism to go back into capitalism we experience for the first time here. [Editor’s note: A reference to the perception of History along the lines of Marxist ideology. According to dialectical and historical materialism, official and exclusive in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe before 1989, the structure of society is in continuous development in the scene or World History, starting from the primitive prehistory, reaching the most developed and socially advanced Communism through the stages of Antique Slavery, Feudalism and Capitalism.] I call it DAEMONcracy because of the daemons – because people live in fear. Its is a stressful situation.

After 1989 my life didn’t change much with regard to the Jewry. I get on well with my wife on these questions – she has lived with Jews. But I feel that now the anti-Semitism is stronger than before. I can see the books on Slaveykov Square [the largest open book market in Sofia]: Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’, the books by Volen Siderov [Bulgarian journalist, radical nationalist, and Holocaust denier. Among his publications are ‘The truth about the six million Jews’ and ‘The Boomerang of Evil’.] and others. However, these are separate books - people do not share these views and feelings. I have always said that there wasn’t any anti-Semitism among people in Bulgaria. There were certain instances – sometimes they were provoked, sometimes they were paid, but as a whole they were marginal cases. However, the instances of anti-Semitism are instances of anti-Semitism. The publisher of ‘Mein Kampf’ in the Czech Republic was sentenced to four years of imprisonment. I think that every country deserves its Jews. After the changes from 1989 in Bulgaria a certain impetus to the Jewry was given, but the initial excitement of not being choked has passed and now the life takes its normal routine. The club ‘Golden Age’ was set up, and we meet with friends, acquaintances. [The Golden Age club was formed in 1999. In the Bet Am there are separate programmes for people of different age – this is the club of the elderly people] There is also a club were one can study Ivrit, Ladino – these are nice things. I receive aids - from ‘Joint’ I receive a small sum on heating – it is around 20 levs. [20 levs are equal to some 10 euros ]. The Swiss organization helps us, as well as this ‘Claims Conference’.

However, there is another thing - as if something in the mentality of the local Jews went wrong together with these changes. All of us here lived intensive lives, we had certain positions in the society, we were respected. Now we came to a situation to wait for somebody to help, because we live in need. This has its influence on our psychics. We are asking each other – did you receive this, did you get that? Earlier we could manage it with our own strength somehow. For example, when I bought the flat I started working more intensively, I developed projects, I had private students. Deeply in our hearts we cannot accept that we are living out of aids. On the other hand – the repressed by the socialism got between 20 and 50 levs in additional monthly pension, whereas before that the active fighter against the capitalism and fascism received such bonuses. And what should one say – have we, the Jews, not been repressed? We are the most repressed people: from 1941 to 1944 we had to wear yellow stars, there was a curfew hour, many houses were destroyed during the process of internment.

Translated by Alexander Manuiloff

Glossary

[1] Expulsion of the Jews from Spain: The Sephardi population of the Balkans originates from the Jews who were expelled from the Iberian peninsula, as a result of the ‘Reconquista’ in the late 15th century (Spain 1492, and Portugal 1495). The majority of the Sephardim subsequently settled in the territory of the Ottoman Empire, mainly in maritime cities (Salonika, Istanbul, Smyrna, etc.) and also in the ones situated on significant overland trading routes to Central Europe (Bitola, Skopje, and Sarajevo) and to the Danube (Adrianople, Philipopolis, Sofia, and Vidin).

[2] Ladino: otherwise known as Judeo-Spanish, is the spoken and written Hispanic language of Jews of Spanish origin. Ladino did not become a specifically Jewish language until after the expulsion from Spain in 1492 - it was merely the language of their province. It is also known as Judezmo, Dzhudezmo, or Spaniolit. When the Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal they were cut off from the further development of the language, but they continued to speak it in the communities and countries to which they emigrated. Ladino therefore reflects the grammar and vocabulary of 14th and 15th century Spanish. In Amsterdam, England and Italy, those Jews who continued to speak 'Ladino' were in constant contact with Spain and therefore they basically continued to speak the Castilian Spanish of the time. Ladino was nowhere near as diverse as the various forms of Yiddish, but there were still two different dialects, which corresponded to the different origins of the speakers: 'Oriental' Ladino was spoken in Turkey and Rhodes and reflected Castilian Spanish, whereas 'Western' Ladino was spoken in Greece, Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia and Romania, and preserved the characteristics of northern Spanish and Portuguese. The vocabulary of Ladino includes hundreds of archaic Spanish words, and also includes many words from different languages: mainly from Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, French, and to a lesser extent from Portuguese and Italian. In the Ladino spoken in Israel, several words have been borrowed from Yiddish. For most of its lifetime, Ladino was written in the Hebrew alphabet, in Rashi script, or in Solitro. It was only in the late 19th century that Ladino was ever written using the Latin alphabet. At various times Ladino has been spoken in North Africa, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, France, Israel, and, to a lesser extent, in the United States and Latin America.

[3] Bulgaria in World War I: Bulgaria entered the war in October 1915 on the side of the Central Powers. Its main aim was the revision of the Treaty of Bucharest: the acquisition of Macedonia. Bulgaria quickly overran most of Serbian Macedonia as well as parts of Serbia; in 1916 with German backing it entered Greece (Western Thrace and the hinterlands of Salonika). After Romania surrendered to the Central Powers Bulgaria also recovered Southern Dobrudzha, which had been lost to Romania after the First Balkan War. The Bulgarian advance to Greece was halted after British, French and Serbian troops landed in Salonika, while in the north Romania joined the Allies in 1916. Conditions at the front deteriorated rapidly and political support for the war eroded. The agrarians and socialist workers intensified their antiwar campaigns, and soldier committees were formed in the army. A battle at Dobro Pole brought total retreat, and in ten days the Allies entered Bulgaria. On 29th September 1918 Bulgaria signed an armistice and withdrew from the war. The Treaty of Neuilly (November 1919) imposed by the Allies on Bulgaria, deprived the country of its World War I gains as well as its outlet to the Aegean Sea (Eastern Thrace).

[4] Forced labor camps in Bulgaria: Established under the Council of Ministers’ Act in 1941. All Jewish men between the ages of 18–50, eligible for military service, were called up. In these labor groups Jewish men were forced to work 7-8 months a year on different road constructions under very hard living and working conditions.

[5] General Zionism: General Zionism was initially the term used for all members of the Zionist Organization who had not joined a specific faction or party. Over the years, the General Zionists, too, created ideological institutions and their own organization was established in 1922. The precepts of the General Zionists included Basle-style Zionism free of ideological embellishments and the primacy of Zionism over any class, party, or personal interest. This party, in its many metamorphoses, championed causes such as the encouragement of private initiative and protection of middle-class rights. In 1931, the General Zionists split into Factions A and B as a result of disagreements over issues of concern in Palestine: social affairs, economic matters, the attitude toward the General Federation of Jewish Labor, etc. In 1945, the factions reunited. Most of Israel’s liberal movements and parties were formed under the inspiration of the General Zionists and reflect mergers in and secessions from this movement.

[6] Poalei Zion: Leftist Zionist movement, founded in the late 19th century in Russia that combined Zionism with Socialism. The early Poalei Zion found its expression in the organization of trade unions, mutual aid societies, and Zionist groups of workers, clerks and salesmen. These groups emphasized the need for democracy within the Jewish community. The Austro-Hungarian branch of Poalei Zion differed markedly from the Russian one. Its ideologists maintained that the Zionist movement was an expression of the entire Jewish people and transcended class interests. It maintained that the position of the Jewish worker and commercial employee was different from that of the non-Jew, since the Jew had to face both exploitation and discrimination at the same time. It warned the Jewish workers against following the teachings of the Social Democrats in Austria-Hungary who denied this fact. It negated the socialist solution unless it were combined with a Jewish autonomous territory. Instead it stressed the need for the conscious direction of the migration of the Jewish masses to Palestine. The Poalei Zion groups in other countries followed in their ideology either the Russian or the Austrian models. Poalei Zion in Romania and Bulgaria adhered to the Austrian school. In 1907 a Word Union of Poalei Zion was founded. In 1920 the movement split over the attitude toward the Socialist and Communist Internationals, the Zionist Organization, and the place to be accorded to the movement’s activities in Erez Israel. Left Poalei Zion sought unconditional affiliation with the Third International (Comintern); by 1924 it had abandoned this attempt and reorganized itself on an independent basis. The other faction, the Right Poalei Zion, merged in 1925 with the Zionist Socialists.

[7] Revisionist Zionism: The movement founded in 1925 and led by Vladimir Jabotinsky advocated the revision of the principles of Political Zionism developed by Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism. The main goals of the Revisionists was to put pressure on Great Britain for a Jewish statehood on both banks of the Jordan River, a Jewish majority in Palestine, the reestablishment of the Jewish regiments, and military training for the youth. The Revisionist Zionists formed the core of what became the Herut (Freedom) Party after the Israeli independence. This party subsequently became the central component of the Likud Party, the largest right-wing Israeli party since the 1970s.

[8] Hashomer Hatzair in Bulgaria: ‘The Young Watchman’; A Zionist-socialist pioneering movement established in Bulgaria in 1932, Hashomer Hatzair trained youth for kibbutz life and set up kibbutzim in Palestine. During World War II, members were sent to Nazi-occupied areas and became leaders in Jewish resistance groups. After the war, Hashomer Hatzair was active in ‘illegal’ immigration to Palestine.

[9] Maccabi World Union: International Jewish sports organization whose origins go back to the end of the 19th century. A growing number of young Eastern European Jews involved in Zionism felt that one essential prerequisite of the establishment of a national home in Palestine was the improvement of the physical condition and training of ghetto youth. In order to achieve this, gymnastics clubs were founded in many Eastern and Central European countries, which later came to be called Maccabi. The movement soon spread to more countries in Europe and to Palestine. The World Maccabi Union was formed in 1921. In less than two decades its membership was estimated at 200,000 with branches located in most countries of Europe and in Palestine, Australia, South America, South Africa, etc.

[10] Jabotinsky, Vladimir (1880-1940): Founder and leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement; soldier, orator and a prolific author writing in Hebrew, Russian, and English. During World War I he established and served as an officer in the Jewish Legion, which fought in the British army for the liberation of the Land of Israel from Turkish rule. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Keren Hayesod, the financial arm of the World Zionist Organization, founded in London in 1920, and was later elected to the Zionist Executive. He resigned in 1923 in protest over Chaim Weizmann’s pro-British policy and founded the Revisionist Zionist movement and the Betar youth movement two years later. Jabotinsky also founded the ETZEL (National Military Organization) during the 1936-39 Arab rebellion in Palestine.

[11] Betar: (abbreviation of Berit Trumpeldor) A right-wing Zionist youth movement founded in 1923 in Riga, Latvia. Betar played an important role in Zionist education, in teaching the Hebrew language and culture, and methods of self-defense. It also inculcated the ideals of aliyah to Erez Israel by any means, legal and illegal, and the creation of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan. Its members supported the idea to create a Jewish legion in order to liberate Palestine. In Bulgaria the organization started publishing its newspaper in 1934.

[12] Schubert, Franz (1797-1828): a famous Austrian composer known as master of song whose works bear the spirit of Romanticism. He composed over 950 works (approximately 600 of them are songs).

[13] Aleichem, Shalom (1859-1916): born in Russia as Solomon Rabinovitz, he is a Yiddish literature's clasical writer. He is best known for his unique humorous style, ’laughter through tears’. His works include five novels, many plays, and some 300 short stories. Among them are: ‘Adventures of Mottel, The Cantor's Son’, ‘The Adventures of Menahem-Mendl’, ‘Tevye the Dairyman’, etc.
Source: http://www.bialik.netaxis.qc.ca/yiddish/aleichem.htm, http://www.sholom-aleichem.org, http://www.encyclopedia.com

[14] Malbish Arumim: Jewish women’s charity organisation. It was registered in 1912 in Ruse and in 1920 in Sofia. Organisations ‘Malbish Arumim’ are women’s charity ones, aimed at offering material support to poor Jewish girls and enhancing the popularization of Jewish culture in Bulgaria. Its activity was canceled with the introduction of the anti-Jewish Law for Protection of the Nation (1941) which liquidated all social, enlightenment, cultural and trade enterprises and organisations]

[15] Law for the Protection of the Nation: A comprehensive anti-Jewish legislation in Bulgaria was introduced after the outbreak of World War II. The ‘Law for the Protection of the Nation’ was officially promulgated in January 1941. According to this law, Jews did not have the right to own shops and factories. Jews had to wear the distinctive yellow star; Jewish houses had to display a special sign identifying it as being Jewish; Jews were dismissed from all posts in schools and universities. The internment of Jews in certain designated towns was legalized and all Jews were expelled from Sofia in 1943. Jews were only allowed to go out into the streets for one or two hours a day. They were prohibited from using the main streets, from entering certain business establishments, and from attending places of entertainment. Their radios, automobiles, bicycles and other valuables were confiscated. From 1941 on Jewish males were sent to forced labor battalions and ordered to do extremely hard work in mountains, forests and road construction. In the Bulgarian-occupied Yugoslav (Macedonia) and Greek (Aegean Thrace) territories the Bulgarian army and administration introduced extreme measures. The Jews from these areas were deported to concentration camps, while the plans for the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria proper were halted by a protest movement launched by the vice-chairman of the Bulgarian Parliament.

[16] Country Defence (Rodna zashtita): Proto-Fascist militant organization, founded in 1923 by retired army generals and led by Ivan Shkoynov. It declared fight against the political ‘left’ in general and the freemasons in particular. Members wore paramilitary uniforms and introduced the fascist salute. In 1930 the ultra right part split and gave birth to the Bulgarian Legions. In 1931, Country Defence merged with another extreme-right organization Kubrat (named after a proto-Bulgarian khan) and gave support to the party formation Democratic Union. After the 1934 coup d’etat the organization officially ceased to exist.

[17] Ratniks: The Ratniks, like the Branniks, were also members of a nationalist organization. They advocated a return to national values. The word ‘rat’ comes from the Old Bulgarian root meaning ‘battle’, i.e. ‘Ratniks’ ­ fighters, soldiers.

[18] Yellow star in Bulgaria: According to a governmental decree all Bulgarian Jews were forced to wear distinctive yellow stars after 24th September 1942. Contrary to the German-occupied countries the stars in Bulgaria were made of yellow plastic or textile and were also smaller. Volunteers in previous wars, the war-disabled, orphans and widows of victims of wars, and those awarded the military cross were given the privilege to wear the star in the form of a button. Jews who converted to Christianity and their families were totally exempt. The discriminatory measures and persecutions ended with the cancellation of the Law for the Protection of the Nation on 17th August 1944.

[19] Halva: A sweet confection of Turkish and Middle Eastern origin and largely enjoyed throughout the Balkans. It is made chiefly of ground sesame seeds and honey.
[20] Utro: Meaning Morning, it was a Bulgarian bourgeois daily, issued between 1911 and 1914. It was founded by St. Damyanov and the first editor-in-chief was St. Tanev. Utro published sensational both local and international news, supporting the policy of the Government, especially during the World War II, as well as Bulgaria’s pro-German orientation. Its circulation amounted to 160,000 copies.

[21] Zora: Meaning Dawn, it was a Bulgarian daily published between 1919 and 1944. It was owned by ‘Balgarski Pechat’ (Bulgarian Printing) publishing house and its editor-in-chief was Danail Krapchev. Zora was primarily affiliated to the rightist Bulgarian Democratic Party, but later it took a more neutral position and fought for national union. It defended the interests of the occupied Bulgarians from Thrace, Macedonia, Dobrudzha and the Western Outlying Districts. It published political, economic, and cultural information. After 9th September 1944, it stoped being published. Its editor-in-chief was convicted and executed.

[22] Bet Am: The Jewish center in Sofia today, housing all Jewish organizations.

[23] Dimitrov, Georgi (1882-1949): A Bulgarian revolutionary, who was the head of the Comintern from 1936 through its dissolution in 1943, secretary general of the Bulgarian Communist Party from 1945 to 1949, and prime minister of Bulgaria from 1946 to 1949. He rose to international fame as the principal defendant in the Leipzig Fire Trial in 1933. Dimitrov put up such a consummate defense that the judicial authorities had to release him.

[24] UYW: The Union of Young Workers (also called Revolutionary Youth Union). A communist youth organization, which was legally established in 1928 as a sub-organization of the Bulgarian Communist Youth Union (BCYU). After the coup d’etat in 1934, when parties in Bulgaria were banned, it went underground and became the strongest wing of the BCYU. Some 70% of the partisans in Bulgaria were members of it. In 1947 it was renamed Dimitrov’s Communist Youth Union, after Georgi Dimitrov, the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party at the time.

[25] Forced name change of Jews in Bulgaria: As a part of the anti-Semitic legislation ‘Law for Protection of the Nation’, introduced in December 1940 and followed by a further governmental decree in August 1942, Jews were not allowed to possess the Bulgarian ending of family names (-ov, -ev, -ich, etc.) and the Ashkenazim were forced to change their first names too.
In the fall of 1940, interior minister, Petar Gabrovski, submitted to Parliament a draft bill called Law for Protection of the Nation. The bill contained four chapters: 1.On the secret and international organizations; 2. On the persons of Jewish origin; 3. On anti-national and suspicious actions; 4. Special provisions; and the whole legislative text was divided into 50 articles. The second chapter focused on people from Jewish origin with article 15 defining the legal term ‘Jew’ while the following 14 articles imposed severe limitation on Bulgarian Jews’ civil and political rights. According to the requirements of this act, the Jews were forced to declare their origin with the due documents at the municipal authorities and police offices, removing the traditional Bulgarian endings –ov, -ev, -ich from their surnames. They were not authorized to be Bulgarian subjects, to vote, be elected to public bodies, enterprises or organizations, they were forbidden to occupy state, municipal or other positions in the public governing system or in private organizations. They were not allowed to be members of the organizations ruled by the interior ministry, to marry Bulgarians or own any open-land estate. Apart from that, their enrollment to education institutions as well as their right to practise freelance jobs, trade, industry and crafts were limited. All Jews were required to register their place of residence, which they were not allowed to change without prior permission, they were also asked to declare their properties. The restrictive measures of this chapter were connected with the personality, properties and professional activities of the Jews. On 24th December 1940, this bill was voted and passed by the 15th National Assembly. On 1st March 1941, the Government led by Bogdan Filov signed the protocol under which Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact and German troops entered the country.

[26] Ventura, Ana Avram (1925-1942): Bulgarian anti-fascist fighter of Jewish origin, born in the Danubian town of Ruse, a daughter of one of the richest industrialists there. She was a member of the communist youth organization of The Union of Young Workers and one of its leaders in Ruse and in 1942 also of the Bulgarian Workers’ Party. She was killed in an underground flat on 22nd February 1944.

[27] Internment of Jews in Bulgaria: Although Jews living in Bulgaria where not deported to concentration camps abroad or to death camps, many were interned to different locations within Bulgaria. In accordance with the Law for the Protection of the Nation, the comprehensive anti-Jewish legislation initiated after the outbreak of WWII, males were sent to forced labor battalions in different locations of the country, and had to engage in hard work. There were plans to deport Bulgarian Jews to Nazi Death Camps, but these plans were not realized. Preparations had been made at certain points along the Danube, such as at Somovit and Lom. In fact, in 1943 the port at Lom was used to deport Jews from Aegean Thrace and from Macedonia, but in the end, the Jews from Bulgaria proper were spared.

[28] 24th May 1943: Protest by a group of members of parliament led by the deputy chairman of the National Assembly, Dimitar Peshev, as well as a large section of Bulgarian society. They protested against the deportation of the Jews, which culminated in a great demonstration on 24th May 1943. Thousands of people led by members of parliament, the Eastern Orthodox Church and political parties stood up against the deportation of Bulgarian Jews. Although there was no official law preventing deportation, Bulgarian Jews were saved, unlike those from Bulgarian occupied Aegean Thrace and Macedonia.

[29] Joint (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee): The Joint was formed in 1914 with the fusion of three American Jewish aid committees, which were alarmed by the suffering of Jews during World War I. In late 1944, the Joint entered Europe’s liberated areas and organized a massive relief operation. It provided food for Jewish survivors all over Europe, it supplied clothing, books and school supplies for children. It supported the establishment of cultural meeting places, including libraries, theaters and gardens. It also provided religious supplies for the Jewish communities. The Joint also operated DP camps, in which it organized retraining programs to help people learn trades that would enable them to earn a living, while its cultural and religious activities helped re-establish Jewish life. The Joint was also closely involved in helping Jews to emigrate from European and Muslim countries. The Joint was expelled from East Central Europe for decades during the Cold War and it has only come back to many of these countries after the fall of communism. Today the Joint provides social welfare programs for elderly Holocaust survivors and encourages Jewish renewal and communal development.

[30] Institute for Rationalizations: It was set up by a law passed by the 15th National Assembly in 1941 upon proposal of the Bogdan Filov’s cabinet under the name of Institute for Economic Rationalizations at the Council of Ministers. This institute merged the existing by then Bulgarian National Scientific Organization and Bulgaria’s Standardization Institute. It was a state authority and a legal entity according to the legislation of the period. The aim of the Institute for Economic Rationalizations during these years was to co-operate for the economic strengthening of the state through applying the principles of rationalization. Its relations with the Bulgarian-German Chamber of Commerce and the Germany’s Institute for Standardization and Economic Rationalization are apparent. After the end of the WWII it was closed down in 1948 when it was transformed into Institute for Rationalizations. It had two main departments: Inventions and Proposals for Rationalizations and Standards.

[31] 1956: It designates the Revolution, which started on 23rd October 1956 against Soviet rule and the communists in Hungary. It was started by student and worker demonstrations in Budapest started in which Stalin’s gigantic statue was destroyed. Moderate communist leader Imre Nagy was appointed as prime minister and he promised reform and democratization. The Soviet Union withdrew its troops which had been stationing in Hungary since the end of World War II, but they returned after Nagy’s announcement that Hungary would pull out of the Warsaw Pact to pursue a policy of neutrality. The Soviet army put an end to the rising on 4th November and mass repression and arrests started. About 200,000 Hungarians fled from the country. Nagy, and a number of his supporters were executed. Until 1989, the fall of the communist regime, the Revolution of 1956 was officially considered a counter-revolution.

[32] Doctors’ Plot: The Doctors’ Plot was an alleged conspiracy of a group of Moscow doctors to murder leading government and party officials. In January 1953, the Soviet press reported that nine doctors, six of whom were Jewish, had been arrested and confessed their guilt. As Stalin died in March 1953, the trial never took place. The official paper of the Party, the Pravda, later announced that the charges against the doctors were false and their confessions obtained by torture. This case was one of the worst anti-Semitic incidents during Stalin’s reign. In his secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 Khrushchev stated that Stalin wanted to use the Plot to purge the top Soviet leadership.

[33] Kostov, Traicho (1897-1949): born in Sofia. After he graduated from the high school he enrolled in the National Service Academy. Later he started studying law at Sofia University. He took part in WWI. He made friends with officers who were narrow socialists under whose influence he adopted socialist ideas. In 1920 he became a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP). After the anti-fascist September uprising of 1923 he joined BCP’s apparatus. In 1924 he was caught and convicted to 8 years imprisonment. He was granted amnesty in 1929 and immediately after that illegally left for the USSR. He worked at BCP’s foreign office and was a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. He returned to Bulgaria in 1931 to direct the ideological activity of BCP and the Workers’ Party parliamentary group. For the period from 1932 and 1936 he emigrated to the USSR three times. He went underground in the summer of 1940. As a secretary of the BCP’s Central Committee he was one of the initiator’s and leaders of the armed resistance led by BCP during WWII. In 1942 he was arrested and convicted to imprisonment for life. He was released on 7th September 1944 from the Pleven’s jail. In 1945 he was elected general secretary of the BCP’s Central Committee. In 1949, following Stalin’s example for seeking enemies among the party members, he was accused of anti-party and anti-state activities and sentenced to death after a public process. He was posthumously rehabilitated.

[34] Slansky Trial: Communist show trial named after its most prominent victim, Rudolf Slansky. It was the most spectacular among show trials against communists with a wartime connection with the West, veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Jews, and Slovak ‘bourgeois nationalists’. In November 1952 Slansky and 13 other prominent communist personalities, 11 of whom were Jewish, including Slansky, were brought to trial. The trial was given great publicity; they were accused of being Trotskyst, Titoist, Zionist, bourgeois, nationalist traitors, and in the service of American imperialism. Slansky was executed, and many others were sentenced to death or to forced labor in prison camps.

[35] Ana Pauker-Vasile Luca-Teohari Georgescu group: After 1945 there were two major groupings in the Romanian communist leadership: the Muscovites led by Ana Pauker, and the former illegal communists led by Gheorghe Dej. Ana Pauker arrived in Romania the day after the entry of the Soviet army as the leader of the group of communists returning from Moscow; the Muscovites were the major political rivals of Gheorghe Dej. As a result of their rivalry, three out of the four members of the Political Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party were convicted on trumped-up charges in show trials in 1952. The anti-Semitic campaign launched by Stalin in 1952, which also spread over to Romania, created a good opportunity to launch such a trial – both Luca and Pauker were of Jewish origin. Georgescu was executed. Luca was also sentenced to death but the sentence was changed to lifetime forced labor. He died in prison in 1960. Pauker was released after Stalin’s death and lived in internal exile until her death.

[36] 10th November 1989: After 35 years of rule, Communist Party leader Todor Zhivkov was replaced by the hitherto Prime Minister Peter Mladenov who changed the Bulgarian Communist Party’s name to Socialist Party. On 17th November 1989 Mladenov became head of state, as successor of Zhivkov. Massive opposition demonstrations in Sofia with hundreds of thousands of participants calling for democratic reforms followed from 18th November to December 1989. On 7th December the ‘Union of Democratic Forces’ (SDS) was formed consisting of different political organizations and groups.

[37] Six-Day-War: The first strikes of the Six-Day-War happened on 5th June 1967 by the Israeli Air Force. The entire war only lasted 132 hours and 30 minutes. The fighting on the Egyptian side only lasted four days, while fighting on the Jordanian side lasted three. Despite the short length of the war, this was one of the most dramatic and devastating wars ever fought between Israel and all of the Arab nations. This war resulted in a depression that lasted for many years after it ended. The Six-Day-War increased tension between the Arab nations and the Western World because of the change in mentalities and political orientations of the Arab nations.

[38] Yom Kippur War: The Arab-Israeli War of 1973, also known as the Yom Kippur War or the Ramadan War, was a war between Israel on one side and Egypt and Syria on the other side. It was the fourth major military confrontation between Israel and the Arab states. The war lasted for three weeks: it started on 6th October 1973 and ended on 22nd October on the Syrian front and on 26th October on the Egyptian front.

Sofia

Bulgaria

Interviewer: Dimitar Bozhilov

Date of interview: June 2005 

Nissim Kohen views himself as a typical representative of the Jews from Iuchbunar   1. He spent his childhood and adolescent years there, surrounded by large families of relatives. He feels responsible to tell the events from his life precisely and in detail. He lives in a cozy, modern flat in a block, which was built on the site of the house he was born.

I am convinced that my ancestors came from Spain 2. I suppose that at first they settled on the territory of former Yugoslavia and later they came to Bulgaria. I do not have any concrete information on that, these are my conclusions. Unfortunately, there is no one to ask about that now.

I suppose my paternal grandparents Nissim and Amada Kohen were born in Sofia. It is interesting that they were first cousins. That was allowed by the Jewish tradition. They lived in the Jewish neighborhood in Sofia – Iuchbunar. Most of the Jews lived there. I also come from Iuchbunar.

My grandfather's house was on 12 Slivnitsa Street. Later the street was renamed to 7 Gyueshevo Street. Our house was made of adobe and at first it had only one room and an entrance hall. Later another room was added as well as another extension, which was the house of my uncle Rafael Kohen. My father's elder brother Eliya Kohen also lived in that yard. His house was the most solid one. My father Mihael Kohen took a half of one of my grandfather's rooms and enlarged it. He also built another room with a small entrance hall where he lived with his family. There were some inconveniences. The toilets were outside and we had no running water inside. There was a tap on the street, which we used. We had electricity. Later we had running water in the yard, but not in the house. The street, on which we lived, became all muddy when it rained. And so did most of the streets in the Jewish neighborhood.

My grandfather was a leather worker. He had a small workshop in the center. He made shoes of calf and horse hide called 'opintsi'. Those shoes were low and shallow. They were closed and were made of processed or unprocessed leather. They were pointed, the color of the leather and had shoelaces. Our grandfather's kin was called 'los konyos'. This is a combination of Bulgarian and Ladino 3. It means 'people who work with horses'. My grandfather and uncle Eliyah bought horse hide, tanned it and sold it. That's how their nickname appeared. My grandfather had a small beard and he wore a hat. He was fair-haired and a little stooped. He was a wise man and his word was respected in the family. We spoke to him in Ladino. My grandmother was always ill and rarely went out of the house. Sometimes she stood on the doorway in the yard or in front of the house. She was a wise woman with a very good memory. She knew a lot about many people, although she stayed mostly at home. My parents looked after my grandparents. My mother did all the housework.

My father had three brothers – Eliyah, Rafael and Azarya Kohen. The eldest one, Eliyah Kohen, was a cobbler. The next one, Rafael Kohen had a workshop for mending shoes in the center of the town. He took to drinking and lived very miserably. Before going home, he would stop in a pub and since he was in much debt, he had to get home using less traveled roads so that he would not meet any of the people whom he owed money.

Later he moved his workshop in our house. The third brother of my father Azarya worked as an adolescent for the Arie family 4 in Samokov 5. That was a rich family, whose house is now a museum. The Arie were in the leather and the banking business. My uncle was a leather worker. He worked for free, because my grandfather had taken money from them to build his house. There my uncle learned the craft and decided to start a leather business by himself. He also lived in the Jewish neighborhood on Shar Planina Street and Tri Ushi Street. I had a lot of cousins in Sofia. There were nine children in the families of my uncles who lived in our yard. Uncle Eliyah had four children – Mindusha, Moshe, Sofka and Hemda, and uncle Rafael – five – Buka, Simanto, Nissim, Elazar and Milka. Uncle Rafael married Buka-Miriam (nee Toledo) who was from Provadia 6. Uncle Azarya had a girl – Hemda, who lived and died in Sofia. His wife's name was Buka, nee Konfino and was born in Shumen 7. My father Mihael Kohen tried many things in life. He spent eight years in captivity during World War I 8. He was held captive by the French army near Salonika (Greece) as a soldier from the Bulgarian army. After that he worked as a tinsman. He took part in the construction of the roof of the first building of the Sofia University 9. He traded with second-hand products. Later, together with an uncle of my mother's Chelebi Haravon, and with the active help of my uncle Mois Haravon, he managed to set up a haberdashery on Lomska Street [present-day George Washington Street, near the central Sofia synagogue], but those were the years of the great crisis 10 in 1929-1932 and he was forced to close it down. Then he started work as a street vendor and walked around the neighborhood with a tray selling elastic cords, tights and haberdashery. Then he made a warehouse selling coal near our house. At that time people could not afford to buy a lot of coal and came to buy 5-10 kilos. In this way my father was able to support us and helped the people in the neighborhood. That continued until the passing of the anti-Jewish laws 11 when he was forbidden to work.

My mother's kin comes from Kyustendil. My mother's parents Yuda and Bohora Haravon lived there. I went there every summer when I was a student in the first grades of the Jewish school. My grandfather was a tinsman and my grandmother – a housewife. My mother's kin is very large. She had six brothers – Yosif, Rahamim, Shimon, Nissim, Chelebi and Mois Kohen. What is interesting about them is that my grandmother's parents left as early as the beginning of the 20th century, around 1906-1907 to the blessed land (Palestine at that time) to die there. They left their lands, their children and set off. My mother Sarina Kohen was 8-9 years old then. As far as I know my grandparents have graves in Jerusalem.

There were a lot of Jews in Kyustendil. They had their own synagogue and a community house. My grandparents lived in the Jewish neighborhood, which was around the synagogue. I remember that they lived in a small house, which had a ground floor and another floor. A relative of my grandfather's lived on the ground floor. His name was Manoah, and on the next floor lived my grandfather's family and my uncle Isak Haravon.

My maternal grandfather had two sisters Reyna Elazar and Sara Elazar, who had many children. They both adopted the family name Elazar after they married, but I do not remember if their husbands were relatives. Both sisters were very different. Sara was more talkative and funny and the other one was stricter and more aristocratic. My grandfather was the eldest. He was a silent, but a pleasant man.

My mother had four brothers – Buko-Aron, Chelebi, Mois and Isak Haravon and two sisters – Sofi Haravon and Victoria Eshkenazi. The eldest one, Buko-Aron Haravon was a shoe merchant. He lived in Sofia and died in 1951. His wife is from Sofia and her name is Matilda. They had two daughters – Liza and Bienvenida, who was killed in 1944 as a partisan. Chelebi Haravon was a tinsman and sold coal. He moved to Sofia, where he opened a warehouse for combustibles. His wife was born in Sofia and her name was Buka. He died from apendicitis in February 1938. They had three children – Leon Haravon, who was killed as a partisan, Sofi Mayer, who left illegally for Palestine in 1945 and Nissim Haravon, who died in Israel. He was a composer. Mois Haravon was also a merchant. He went to Sofia when he was young. In 1930 he married his wife Roza Katalan, who is from Sofia. They left for Israel during the big aliyah 12. They have two sons – Leon and Gavriel, who live in Israel. My mother's youngest brother Isak Haravon, was an electrical technician. He lived mostly in Kyustendil. He was a fan of Tolstoy 13 as regards moral and character. He did not drink and he was a vegetarian. His wife's name was Matilda, nee Benaroya, and she was born in Berkovitsa. They left for Israel. They have two children – Ida Levi, who was a housewife and Yeuda Haravon, who worked as an electrical engineer. Isak Haravon and his family lived in Ramat-Gan. One of my mother's sisters Sofi died very young while giving birth. About her I only know that she married a Jew from Botevgrad [a town in northwestern Bulgaria]. My mother's other sister Victoria Eshkenazi, married in Sofia. Her husband's name is Gershon Eshkenazi and he was born in Ruse. She was a housewife and her husband worked in the enamel factory [factory, producing dishes for Sofia]. They moved to Israel and she died there. She did not have any children.

My parents met in an interesting way. During World War I or probably at the end of the war, my uncle Azarya Koen was injured and was sent to the family of my mother in Kyustendil to be looked after. There he decided that my mother would be the perfect for wife for his brother, my father. After the war ended and my father returned from captivity, his brother Azarya told him that he had found a very nice girl from Kyustendil for him. My father retorted that he did not need a wife and Azarya should marry her if he liked her so much. But his brother was already married. There were other attempts to bring them together at that time. But in the end, they met by accident when my mother came from Kyustendil to visit her brother Buko Haravon. Later it turned out that she was the girl that uncle Azarya was talking about to my father. They liked each other and got married. Their wedding was in 1922 in Sofia. In my family my mother did all the housework and she helped my father who had a warehouse for coal near our house.

My mother had graduated primary school and started studying in a vocational school, which she did not finish due to lack of money. She kept her notebooks from the vocational school for many years. They contained sewing designs, which can be drawn only by a professional designer nowadays. My mother had a hard life. She had two more boys after me, but they died. My first brother Leon was born in 1927 but he died of diphtheria in 1933. In 1929 my second brother Albert was born. He died in 1934.

My mother got seriously sick of typhus. At that time Leon, my younger brother, and I were sent to my grandmother's house in Kyustendil and my father took care of my mother at home. When she was pregnant with my sister in 1937, my mother had a serious appendicitis crisis. A surgeon from the Jewish hospital in Sofia 14 came and ordered them to transport her to Sofia for an operation. My father made a stretcher out of blankets and with the help of the neighbors we transported her to the hospital, where she underwent an operation. Some months later my sister Sofi was born. In the beginning of 1938 a lot of people close to my mother died – firstly, her brother Chelebi and then her mother, who had come for the funeral of her son. Then in the summer of the same year her father died. The same year, 1938, I got very sick of acute typhus and was admitted to hospital. While I was in the hospital, there were the so called 'blockades'. Streets were blocked by soldiers and no one was allowed to go out. Those blockades were set up when governments were replaced and when there were serious changes in the power structures. They lasted for a couple of days. Blockades were also set up when illegal people were searched for. I do not remember the reason for the blockades when I was in hospital. Then my mother stood up to the soldiers and wanted to come and see me in the hospital but she was not allowed.

On Friday evening and Saturday morning my parents and especially my mother went to the synagogue. There was a midrash near us. [Editor’s note: There is no exact data on the number of midrash in Sofia. That midrash must be the Iuchbunar synagogue where rabbi Daniel Zion organized meetings.] My mother went to the meetings organized by the rabbi Daniel Zion 15 who had a very high reputation, encouraged charity and taught the Talmud.

My mother was clever and hard-working. She read books in Ladino. I think she got the books from acquaintances. At home we had Bulgarian literature, which we took from the community houses. There was a Jewish community house on Klementina Boulevard [present-day Stamboliiski Blvd] and on Lege Str. I also took books from the Bulgarian community house on the corner of Tsar Simeon Str. and Bregalnitsa Str. Its name was 'Hristo Botev'. Thanks to my mother I learned to read a little in Ladino in Rashi. She had a beautiful handwriting and expressed herself very well. Her Bulgarian was also very good. Uncle Mois Haravon also expressed himself very well. He wrote to us very good letters in Bulgarian from Israel.

Our neighbors in Sofia were mostly Jewish families. On our street 'Gyueshevo' there were Bulgarian families too. Most of the people were traveling salesmen and Bulgarian families. There were a number of grocery stores, some barber shops, cafes and pubs. Iuchbunar was like a hotel for many people. They came here only to spend the night and spent all the day working as salesmen, or workers in factories and tobacco warehouses. Almost none of the Jews in Iuchbunar worked as clerks on a state or municipal position. I do not remember knowing such Jews, except for a cousin of my father's who became a director in the Bulgarian Post. I started work as an electrical technician, but after an illness I experienced, I started work in a trade company. After the adoption of the anti-Jewish laws I went to work in the enamel factory producing dishes.

My father and his brothers were not members of any Zionist organizations but they had their political affiliations. My father voted for the left political formations – mostly for the socialists. I know that at some time the famous general Lazarov ran for a deputy. During the Balkan war and World War I the general was a commander of a regiment including many Jews. They worshiped him and he expected to receive wide support from the Jewish neighborhood. My father always spoke about him with pleasure and love. But the general did not manage to gather enough votes.

The Jewish rites were strictly observed. We did not mix milk and meat meals. At home we had separate cutlery for meat and for milk. We also had separate dishes for Pesach. Before the holiday we cleaned the house thoroughly and whitewashed the walls. The children received presents. Presents were also made on Purim and Rosh Hashanah. On Yom Ashekel there were marches and money was raised for the Jewish National Fund. On that day all Jewish organizations gathered on the streets around the Jewish school in Iuchbunar. I remember that there were arguments whose flags to be first during the march. It started from the Iuchbunar school, passed along Klementina Str and reached the center somewhere around Lege Str. All members of Jewish organizations were dressed in the respective uniforms. They sang songs in Ivrit and Maccabi had a brass orchestra and drums. A lot of Jews took part. One street was not enough for us all. After the march the children went to play sports games in the yard of the Jewish school and the adults went to a meeting in the Jewish People's Home. The Jewish National Fund was a structure of the World Zionist Organization of Chaim Weizmann, Max Nordau etc. In August 1937 I had my bar mitzvah. I made a promise with a speech towards my parents. While the other children had the speech made by a chazzan or a rabbi, my speech was written in Bulgarian by the Ivrit teacher in the Jewish school Mr. Benmair. The bar mitzvah was done at my uncle Azarya's place. A lot of guests with many presents came. My grandfather was still alive and was also present.

When my grandfather was still alive, on Pesach we gathered in his room together with my father's four brothers and their families. The table was long. On one of its sides there was a minder (a low and long bench) and on the other side there were chairs. 20 people could sit on that table. In the middle of the table we placed the three boyos [special unleavened bread without salt] and a plate with seven meals and the so-called ‘charoset’ [mixture of nuts, fruit, wine and other ingredients for the Pesach ritual, which represents the mortar used while in slavery in Egypt], which was made of apples, honey, walnuts and maybe dates. At first, we performed the ritual of washing the hands. The women presented a basin to my grandfather and to us all to wash our hands. Then we drank a glass of wine. My grandfather drank a little wine and read the prayer. We accompanied him. One of the boyos was broken in half and put in a towel, which the children carried on their backs to show that they were leaving to Israel. The food was festive. There was usually soup of matzah and boiled hen. The matzah was dipped in egg and placed in the soup to boil for a while. Another typical dish on that day was leaks balls.

In Sofia, especially for Pesach, one or two bakeries were hired and after they were meticulously cleaned, they were used to make matzah and boyos. Boyo was different from matzah. While matzah had a tiny crumb, boyo is round and looks like a thick bun. It does not rise, because it does not have yeast. There was a period, when only matzah was made in the bakeries and my mother tried to make boyos at home. Boyos were very hard and we called them 'brick'. What was left from the boyos after Pesach was used as rusk. It was delicious dipped in tea or eaten with cheese.

Hens were bought alive from the market and brought to the shochet to be slaughtered. There were two places where hens were taken. The first one was at the central synagogue and the other one – at the Iuchbunar synagogue. Later, after 9th September, when there was no longer a schochet, my parents asked a neighbor to slaughter the hen. Another typical dish for Pesach was burmolikos 16, which were made of matzah and eggs. They were sweet or salty. At home the sweet ones were dipped in sugar syrup or covered with powdered sugar. It was usual for Pesach to put lettuce on the table. We ate matzah or boyo for eight days.

On Purim the Jewish school organized a fancy dress ball. The Jewish school had a very good choir led and conducted by Mr. Aladgem. The famous opera singer Mati Pinkas started from this choir. I remember a school celebration of Tu bi-Shevat. The whole school gathered in the gym together with the children's parents. There were a lot of songs, the tables were covered with fruit, there were many people.

The so-called 'buying off' was typical for Jewish families. If a large family had only one boy and a lot of girls or vice versa, the boy could be bought by one of the relatives. That is 'el mercado' in Ladino, meaning 'bought'. That was done to save the life of the only one. The relatives who had bought the child, received presents on Purim. A nice tray with a small present was prepared – some sweets or masapan and it was presented to the one who had 'bought' you. And that person bought shoes and clothes for the child. I was bought by a relative – Hemda Kohen, who is daughter of uncle Azarya Kohen, and my mother had 'bought' a neighbor on our street.

There was a tradition among Jews, similar to fooling fate. When there was someone seriously sick, the chazzan went to him and if his name had been Avram, he received a new name, for example Nissim. The reason for the new name was that if the man was sentenced to death as Avram in the 'list', he would be saved with his new name. And sometimes it worked. An aunt of mine, wife of my uncle Buko Haravon, Matilda Haravon, had her name changed. Nevertheless, she did not recover, and died soon after that.

Jewish traditions were strictly observed in our family. On Sabbath my father did not go to work. My mother did not light a fire and prepared the meals on Thursday or Friday. According to the Jewish tradition you are not allowed to work and should not allow your cattle or your slave to work on Sabbath. Sabbath is for all. In the winter when it was very cold my mother cleaned the stove and filled it with coal. Then she asked a neighbor who was not a Jew or a passer-by to come and light the fire.

On Pesach we played with walnuts. The girls arranged two or three heaps of walnuts and aimed at them from a distance. They won the heap that they managed to hit. The boys also played a game with walnuts. We made a small hole in the ground next to a wall and we threw walnuts in the hole. The walnuts which landed in the hole were won by the boy throwing them. There was one more game with walnuts. Every boy received two-three walnuts. They formed a line and tried to hit other walnuts placed on the ground with theirs. If they managed to hit a walnut, they won it.

At home we never ate on [Yom] Kippur. While I was a child, that rule was more strictly observed. When I grew up and started learning things, it was not so strict. We had a saying that 'the Jewish child becomes worse when growing up'. On [Yom] Kippur we went to the Borisova Garden where we rowed boats. Mati Pinkas sang a very nice song 'Oh, Jerusalem nights' in the evenings there. During the day on [Yom] Kippur the children took a quince, sprinkled it with clove and smelled it all the time not to feel hungry.

On Purim children put on fancy dress clothes and went from house to house. They sang songs, told poems and received money. We used what we could to make masks. Some children turned the inside of their coats out, others wore their pajamas. There was a song sung in Ladino 'Last night I ate cheese pastry and my tooth fell. Give me money, to fix my tooth.' That was a joke song.

We celebrated Chanukkah. We did not have candlesticks. Then we used float lights. In a glass bowl filled with oil, we placed paper with a small hole in the middle. We pushed a wick made of cotton through the hole. One of the cotton ends was in the oil and the other end was lit. We made ten such bowls. Every day we lit one of them. We made the candles for Sabbath in the same way.

There were around 10 praying homes in Sofia. There were societies, which took care of the funerals. [In the 1930s there were a lot of Jewish charity societies such as 'Kupat Tsedaka and Bikur Holim', 'Moasim Tovili', 'Malbish Arumim'. There were also religious and funeral ones – 'Chevra Kaddisha', 'Oavim and Orhot Haim'.] They were at a synagogue which was on Bregalnitsa Str. There were the so-called midrashi next to our house. They were small praying homes for around 30-40 people. My father visited such a praying home on Odrin Str.

There were two Jewish schools in Sofia. One of them was in Iuchbunar on Bregalnitsa Str. and Pozitano Str and the other was in the center of the town. There was a synagogue next to the Jewish school in Iuchbunar. For a time while we were students, we went to the synagogue in the neighborhood on Saturdays to pray. The adults went from 9 to 10 am and we went after them. We were in junior high school then and prayed separately from the adults.

I studied in the Iuchbunar school. I also went to nursery school. We started studying Ivrit in the nursery school. We learned songs and fairy tales in Ivrit. In the first grade we had a teacher who taught us reading, writing and maths in Ivrit. We also studied Bulgarian. Until the fourth primary grade we studied all subjects, such as reading, writing, botanics, mathematics etc. in Ivrit. We studied in the mornings and the afternoons. The classes were mixed. Our classes were from 8 to 12 and from 14 to 17. We also had physical education. After the fourth primary grade, in the junior high school grades, all subjects, except the Jewish ones, were in Bulgarian. The Jewish subjects were learning the Torah, Jewish history and Jewish literature. We had both Bulgarian and Jewish teachers. We also had teachers from abroad. Those who taught Ivrit were mostly from Poland and Russia. Our teachers were very good, but they were not well paid. I remember that they were on strike once for not receiving their salaries. The salaries were provided by the Jewish municipality.

From first to fourth grade our Ivrit teacher was Ashrieli and our maths teacher – David Pilosof. Then, in the higher grades I remember Mr. Dembovich, teaching Ivrit, Torah and Jewish history, Benmair – in literature and grammar, Mr. Temkin – in Torah and Jewish history. Mr. Temkin also taught in the central Jewish school.

Jewish schools were the so-called 'private schools' and that is why after the third junior high school grade [present-day seventh grade] we had to sit for an exam in front of a commission formed by the Education Ministry. For a couple of months we had to revise and learn well everything we had learned in Ivrit from first to fourth primary grade so that we would be able to talk about it in Bulgarian in front of the commission. We were very well prepared in Bulgarian language and in maths. In our class 19 of the 30 students received excellent marks. I remember that even the newspapers wrote about our success. It was thanks to our teachers and to the fact that there was a natural selection among the students through the years. What was typical about Jewish schools was that in the first grade we were three or four classes and until the last junior high school grade only one remained. There were many reasons for that. Firstly, it was hard to study in the Jewish school because of the language. Secondly, education was all the day. All the other schools studied until one o'clock in the afternoon but we studied in the mornings and in the afternoons. Thirdly, many of the people in the Jewish neighborhood were poor and wanted their children to start working from an early age in order to help the family. So, some of them were sent to Bulgarian schools, and others were sent to work.

The Jewish school was between Osogovo Str, Bregalnitsa Str and Pozitano Str. There was a synagogue complex on a part of Pozitano Str. There were two yards. The Jewish school had two buildings – a new one and an old one. The nursery school, first and second primary grade were in the new one and the other classes were in the old one. The new building was opened in my time – approximately around 1930. I was among the first students who entered it. What was typical for the times was that the children living in the center of Sofia near Hristo Botev Blvd studied in the central Jewish school. The other children studied in the Iuchbunar school. The classes consisted of 35 to 37 children. But gradually that changed and children from Iuchbunar went to study in the central school, because the number of children there was declining. Some of my classmates had to move to the central school in the last grades. There were three classes in the nursery school, and there were 35 – 40 children in each one. There were at least three classes in the first grade. The number of students in the classes declined throughout the years and in the last junior high school grade there was only one class of 35 students.

A lot of the subjects in junior high school [three grades after the four primary grades] were in Bulgarian. Zoology, anthropology, physics, chemistry and maths were in Bulgarian and Jewish literature, Jewish history and the Torah were in Ivrit. We graduated junior high school in third grade, which is equivalent to present-day seventh grade. We had various teachers. Most of them were very talented. Our music teacher Aladgem later became famous as the conductor of the Army orchestra. He did his military service in the King's Symphony Orchestra and in the school he was replaced by the artist Yosif Yosifov, who also became famous later on. We had very good teachers. We had a maths teacher Nikola Shopov. Unfortunately, he did not teach me, but everyone spoke about him with veneration and they said that after he died, his brain would be given to research because he was extremely clever.

We had a lot of fun at school. Once a rabbi from Serbia came and wanted to organize a choir at the synagogue. But he did not know Ivrit. We were already members of Zionist organizations and we tried to talk in Ivrit. That man got into very funny situations with his bad Ivrit. Instead of asking us 'Are you in the choir?', he would ask 'Are you in a hole'. In Ivrit 'choir' means 'a hole'.

I learned Ivrit at school. We studied the Torah, Jewish literature and history. We were obliged, but also willing to talk in Ivrit. My parents knew only a few words in Ivrit. My mother knew more than my father because she had studied four grades in the Jewish school. She could read in Ladino in Rashi. She read books in Ladino.

I graduated high school in 1938. In 1937 the son of King Boris III 17 was born – Simeon II 18 and then all our marks at school were raised one point. No one was expelled for bad marks. There were also students who received the mark of 7 [6 is the highest mark in Bulgarian schools.]

The Jewish school was the focus point of all Zionist organizations. Those were Hashomer Hatzair 19, Betar 20 and Maccabi 21. Other organizations such as Akiva and Akara gathered in the Jewish People's Home. I was a member of Hashomer Hatzair. All organizations educated their members during meetings, marches, gymnastic exercises. In Hashomer Hatzair they focused on scouts education, cultural activities and preparation for leaving to Israel as pioneers in the new country. In Maccabi they focused on exercise and Betar – on military discipline. There were neverending disputes between the members of these organizations.

Before Hashomer Hatzair I was a member of Maccabi, when I was a student in third or fourth primary grade. Soon after that our whole group transferred to Hashomer Hatzair. We were there until 1941 when Jewish organizations were disbanded and then I became a member of the UYW 22. Hashomer Hatzair was a left scout’s organization. It was an educational organization characterized by a love of nature and freedom. Once or twice every week there were meetings of the boys' groups, the girls' groups and the mixed groups. There was a group uniting the members at a certain level of development. That level was defined by age – children, students and adults. During the meetings we discussed books and exchanged information on many topics. We discussed a famous book at the times 'Discussions with a philosophy teacher' by Trachtenberg. That is a German author, whose book was on Marxism. The discussions were in Bulgarian. We played Kuntsovi games – in quickness of wit and guessing. [Interviewer’s note: He says that they called the games 'kuntsovi'. He cannot explain the name. Would that be 'kunst' games? I suppose it might come from German – kunst meaning art in German. Also, there are some tests and theories in psychology – it might be one of them.] For example, we had to guess the object by its smell or its sound – for example, whose watch was ticking. We also played games in nature – searching for tracks and uncovering hidden objects. In the summer mountain camps were organized, the so-called 'mashabot', I went to Tsigov Chark area in the Rhodope Mountains. The Hashomer Hatzair members had a uniform. It was with a different tie depending on the level of development. The green tie was for the children, the blue one – for the adolescents and the black one for the adults. Each group had its flag. The organization in Maccabi was similar. But they put more focus on exercise. Their uniforms consisted of white blouses and black trousers. Betar and Hashomer Hatzair had different views on what kind of state Israel should be. We advocated for a mixed binational state, cultivation of the land, development of agriculture, while they advocated winning the land with a weapon in hand. They sang a song about the Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River.

Hashomer Hatzair considered itself a more leftist, younger-oriented and more vigorous organization than the others. The meetings took place in the building of the Jewish school after classes. There we also played people's ball and volleyball. It was a leftist organization and that is why it was close in ideas to the UYW. That is why, sometimes the Jewish municipality did not allow Hashomer Hatzair to stay in the yard of the school. Then we met in some park – usually the town's park. Later, around 1938 the organization opened its own club on Klementina Str (present-day Stamboliiski Blvd) at the streets Osogovo and Stara Planina. Now that location is changed and the old buildings do not exist any more.

Political issues were seriously discussed in Hashomer Hatszair. There was the so-called 'Court of War'. That was in the beginning of 1939. Each of us took the position of a certain party in a conflict, which was controversial at the time and we discussed the issues of war and peace. I represented China, others represented Germany or Russia, England, France. Everything was like a game. We invited all members of the organization and we sat on a table in front of them as judges, prosecutors and defenders. The idea was to defend peace and condemn war.

In Hashomer Hatzair we raised money for the Jewish National Fund 23. There were different ways to raise money. One of the ways was on Purim, another – in the synagogue during a wedding. A third one was on Yom Ashekel. On Purim a group of people went from house to house of Jewish families with blue and white money boxes to ask for donations, with which the Jewish National Fund bought land. Most of the people in Iuchbunar were not rich. We did not know where to go and knocked on three or four doors. It was harder with the blocks of flats outside Iuchbunar. But we looked at the family names on the doors and knocked only on those with Jewish names. In this way, we raised a little money. There were also funny moments. We made jokes with the expression 'The missis said she was not at home' – that is, there were cases when a maid opened the door, went to announce who was at the door and what we wanted and then returned to say that the missis was not at home.

Another way of raising money was at weddings. We usually placed a box labelled 'Keren Kayemet le Israel' (Jewish National Fund) at the entrance of the synagogue. So, everyone passing by, could throw something in the box. And the third way was on Yom Ashekel. That is the day, which was close to our holiday Lag ba-Omer. On that day Zionist organizations organized marches. Young and old gathered at the Jewish school, formed lines and started marching towards the center. I do not remember any special reaction of the society to our marches. On that day the children carrying money boxes raised money for the purchase of land.

In Hashomer Hatzair we prepared ourselves to become pioneers and leave for Palestine. With the announcement of World War II, the chances of leaving decreased. That is why, we, the members of Hashomer Hatzair, in our desire to fight fascism became close with UYW and many of us joined UYW. That merge happened in June – July 1941 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The UYW were organized by the community houses in the neighborhoods. Our meetings also took place there. The structure was the following: there was a neighborhood leadership, below it a section leadership and below it UYW groups working in a specific sector. I was working in the crafts school in Sofia. The goal was to establish UYW groups there through meetings and propaganda. The meetings were done at houses, during an excursion or in a park. My parents knew about my activities, because some illegal UYW friends spent the night at home. My parents were sympathetic to us.

It was typical for Jews in Iuchbunar to say that their education ended after junior high school. In Ladino that was the expression 'skapado di shkola'. We had to look for work and we went from shop to shop and workshop to workshop to ask if they needed apprentices or workers. I started work as an electrical engineer for some Bulgarians. I installed chandeliers. I also went to electrical technical courses organized by the organization for professional development of Jews 'Ort' 24. That was from September 1938 until January – February 1939. Then I got sick of typhus and could not continue. Later, in 1942, I started work in a trade company. The anti-Jewish laws were adopted then and its owner, who was a Jew, had to close it down. Then I started work in the enamel factory. Its owner was Valentin Velyaots. The owner's wife was a Jew and he also had progressive [i.e. leftist] ideas. I did not have any problems with him for being a Jew. He also had an employee of Russian origin, who was the main decorator and did not like Jews. I also worked as a plumber – I helped a friend for 15 – 20 days, but we did not receive any money. Later I started working for a man named Nikolov, who produced metal boxes for cosmetic creams and tins. We worked very well together, but unfortunately, while working with the metal press I cut a part of my finger. That was the end of my work in that company. It also coincided with the worsening of the situation of Jews in 1943 when the internment started 25.

We were forced to wear badges [yellow stars] 26 soon after the adoption of the Law for Protection of the Nation. Then the troubles for the Jews started. Labor camps 27 and many limitations were set up. They placed boards on the companies, shops and houses of Jews as well as boards 'made by Jews'. We, for example, had a board 'Jewish house'. I could work but only during the day, because we were not allowed to go out after 6 pm. As for the general attitude of the Bulgarians towards the Jews I could say that there were nice and malicious people. Yet, most of the people sympathized with us. In our neighborhood a couple of demonstrations against the anti-Jewish laws took place. I took part in one of them and in the famous demonstration on 24th May 1943 28. I can say that the Bulgarians in our neighborhood defended us.

There are some things in history, about which it is difficult to say if they are true or not. Let's take for example the demonstration on 24th May 1943 – who organized it and who made it. It seems that there is more than one truth. I put aside the attempts to cover up the truth, to deny or extol the moment. In the end everyone has their own point of view and a moment they remember or have forgotten. What I saw was the following. When the message that the internment will start appeared, discontent rose among the Jews as well as calls for protest. On 24th May 1943 leaders of the Jewish community such as rabbi Daniel Zion and colonel Tadjer and some other representatives of the consistory tried to meet with the king and negotiate the cancellation of the internment. I think that while waiting for them to return and see what had happened, people started to gather in the synagogue in Iuchbunar. My friends, who were UYW members, played football in a nearby playground. I stayed with them for a while and when I was leaving I noticed that many people were gathering around the synagogue. I went back and told my friends that there were many people in front of the synagogue. We also went there. Someone shouted 'let's go forward' and we all started our demonstration along Osogovo Str and then Klementina Str carrying the Bulgarian flag in front of us. In my opinion that demonstration happened accidentally, but meanwhile there are people whom I trust and who say that the previous evening, on 23rd May, they were visited by communists who agitated them to take part in the protest.

I think the demonstration continued until Sredna Gora Str and Strandja Str. There were police cars there, who dispersed the people. A friend of mine and I took Strandja Str in the direction of the Central Station, we went round the neighborhood and went home without any problems. Throughout the day and the next day people were arrested. The rabbi Daniel Zion was sent to the prisoners' camp in Somovit.

Shortly before the internment some of my Bulgarian colleagues from the metal can factory came to see me. That was a while after I cut my finger. Later, a little after 9th September 1944 29 one of my colleagues from the same workplace came to see me. He said that a neighbor of his had taken our family chest, which we had left at home during the internment. We wrote a request to the police and managed to get it back. It is still with us and now it is in my daughter's flat. So, my colleagues and my acquaintances, who were Bulgarians were kind towards us.

Before the internment, but after we already knew that we had to leave our houses, the Jews from Iuchbunar tried to sell their belongings and something like a market was formed in the neighborhood. Everything was sold almost for free. Two women came to us and wanted to buy our wardrobe. They were very sympathetic and gave us their address so that when we came back, we could go and take our wardrobe back. But later we did not go to look for it.

My whole family – my parents, my sister and I, were interned to Dupnitsa. We had a manual sewing machine and my mother insisted to take it with us. My mother had made separate bags for everyone because we did not know what might happen – whether we would be together or not. Every family received an individual notice about the internment.

We travelled to Dupnitsa by train. A cordon of police, spread out up to the center of the town, met us at the station. My mother had a cousin there – Mati Shekerdjiiska. She lived in the center and had two rooms. Her family had four members. We stayed at her place from the first night. We were very thankful for her hospitality. There were limits imposed on our movement around the town and the places, where we could shop. There was a special Jewish bakery, which was the only place we were allowed to buy bread. Its bread was much worse than the one in the other places. Some people sympathized with us, others harassed us. There was a group of young men who chased us and beat us. I do not know if they were Branniks 30, they were more of vagabonds to me.

It was quite crowded in our house and we had to move to another flat near the Jewish neighborhood. As for work, we did all kind of work we could find. For example, we took part in the renovation of the high school, and in the construction of the water conduit in the town. I also worked in a brigade at the station. There were many warehouses in the station and a group of 7-8 people loaded and unloaded the wagons. They invited us to join them and took care of us. They had a lot of work they could not get done alone and what they couldn't, they passed to us, the Jews. They also protected us from people who harassed us. When there were sacks with grain or corn, we filled up our pockets as much as we could. We took off our coats, filled them up with corn and tied them like bags. In that way we managed to provide food for our families and the people living around us. Once there was some trouble at the station. Some cartons used for the production of cigarette boxes arrived. We started unloading the wagon but someone had stolen a few cartons. They were an exact number and the owner found out. A Jewish boy and I were blamed for that. The policemen took us to the police station and beat us. We were held there until late at night. We denied everything and they had to let us go. The moment we stepped out, another policeman arrested us for violating the curfew. After a couple of hours we were once again released.

We had to find another flat in Dupnitsa because other relatives of Mati Shekerdjiiska came and it got very crowded there. We shared our new flat with other interned families. My father did not work because he was sick. The eight years he served in the army during the Balkan War and World War I had affected his health.

In Dupnitsa I received a summons for the Jewish labor groups and in June 1944 I was sent to Lovech. We built the road Sofia – Lovech. From there we observed the American bombers, also called 'fortresses', which were flying to Romania and we hoped that they would bring us freedom. Once the camp was attacked by partisans with the goal to frighten the commandment and release some people. We filled a cart for them with walnuts and food. That took place in August 1944 when Prime Minister [Ivan] Bagryanov was replaced and we were allowed to take our Jewish badges off. Around 7-8th  September the same year we were already anticipating the coming of the Soviet army and the labor camps were disbanded. There were six labor groups around Lovech. We left the camps. No one could stop us any more. We traveled to Pleven. In the evening I took the train to Sofia together with the political prisoners from the Pleven prison, who had broken free. So, on 9th September 1944 I was in Sofia. There were soldiers everywhere. I traveled to Dupnitsa and arrived at noon. The people there were waiting for the Red Army and the men of Zhelyu Demirevski 31. When I left my baggage at my parents', I enrolled as a volunteer in 3rd Guard Regiment led by the legendary partisan commander Zhelyu Demirevski. There were a lot of other Jewish volunteers too. I think we were around 50 people. Overall, around 60-70 Jews from Dupnitsa took part in the Fatherland war [Bulgarian Army in World War II] 32. Some of them were mobilized and others were volunteers.

We fought in the area between 1st and 2nd Bulgarian Army. That was the region of the volunteers' division commanded by Slavcho Transki. Our task was to liberate the town of Boyanovats and intercept the Germans between Skopje and Belgrade. Many people died in the fightings, including the regiment commander Zhelyu Demirevski. I returned in the end of December 1944. Some of the soldiers - volunteers or the so-called 'guards' from 3rd Guards Regiment were discharged because they had already done their military service. Those who were younger were also discharged. And the others, like me, who had not done their military service yet, had to do it in the country.

My military service was in Sofia. We were accommodated in the school 'Vassil Drumev' and 134th School, which were close to our house. In the end of May 1945 we were moved to Botevgrad. Then an order was received that those who had already spent some time serving should be discharged. In August 1945 I completed my military service. I started working in a warehouse doing repairs, but I got sick and quit for some time. Then until 1949 I worked in the glass factory Stind in Orlandovtsi district as a sorter and worker. Later I started work in the co-operative 'Mashinostroene' [Machine Construction] and I was in charge of the supplies for the workers – I rented flats for them and arranged the food supplies. Then I started work as head of the personnel department in the machine construction company 'Orel' and worked there until 1950.

In 1950 the Bulgarian government decided to establish the so-called 'Workers' Candidate Student School'. It was similar to the Russian 'Rabfak' [Worker’s Academy] 33. It was for workers who wanted to prepare to study at university. The goal was to educate a group of specialists who would be loyal to the authorities. I entered the school in 1950. For an year and a half I took all the high school subjects. I studied maths, history, literature and natural sciences, but I did not study music and painting. Then I entered the Chemical Technological and Mineralogical Institute.

While I was studying at 'Rabfak', I met my wife Sofi. She was working as a printer and was also studying at 'Rabfak'. When we graduated, we became even closer friends. She entered the Higher Technological Institute and studied machine textile engineering. The studying was very hard for us because we were not prepared very well, but we focused our effort and managed to graduate. At that time, in 1952 we got married and went to live in the house of my parents. My degree is in selicate industry, although I was also working with the famous then inorganic technology. My fondness of glass directed me to selicate materials. When I graduated the institute, I started work in the Stind factory, where I had worked for a while before. By 1947 Stind had been a small factory in Orlandovtsi. There were other similar factories in Sofia – in Nadejda district, in Gorna Banya etc. After the nationalization in December 1947 all small factories were united under the name 'Stind'. I started work as an engineer in the factory in Gorna Banya. Later I also worked in the factory in Nadejda. Then I decided to apply for the post of a teacher in the technical high school on glass and fine ceramics. I taught analytical chemistry there for a year. In the end of 1959 I started work in 'Design Organization'. It changed its name and structures a lot through the years. It was also named 'Promproekt', 'Zavodproekt' etc. Nevertheless, from the beginning until my retirement in 1984 I worked on the design of glass factories.

I have two daughters – Rina Kohen and Jana Geron. Rina graduated the secondary polytechnical school in Sofia. She works in accounting. My other daughter Jana has a degree in statistics from the Economy Institute and works in the Statistics Institute. She is married to Mishel Geron and has two sons – Emil and Mihael.

Many changes took place in Jewish life from 1945 to 1950. People returned from the internments and faced many difficulties in finding places to live. Jews died in the war or as partisans. People had to start their lives anew. The Zionist organizations  abolished by the Law for Protection of the Nation appeared once again. Those were Maccabi and Ehalutz, which continued the traditions of Hashomer Hatzair. Some Jews wanted to immigrate. Ben Gurion came to Bulgaria. He negotiated with the Bulgarian government the immigration of Jews. Before that, in 1941 on the eve of the signing of the pact with Germany many young people left for Israel. So, now their parents wanted to go to their children. Many people left from 1948 to 1950 [the Mass Aliyah]. At one point I also wanted to live and applied. But I was much influenced by the ideas of a new life in Bulgaria and I believed that origin would not be of matter any more. We believed in the socialist ideas. I thought that in the future there would be no problems to travel wherever you liked. My parents were also old and sick I could not leave them. Probably many people left and stayed, it is hard to find the right number. There was Zionist propaganda but I do not know if that was what convinced the people to leave. Certainly, Zionists were the people who helped people to leave. They provided steam boats and took care of the people when they arrived in Israel.

All families on my father's side and most of those on my mother's side left for Israel. I do not have many close relatives here. We wrote to each other regularly when they left. But to my regret, I did not write much. My mother kept the contact with our relatives in Israel. I went to Israel for the first time in 1981. Then I got in touch with more people and wrote them more often. During the wars in Israel [Six-Day-War] 34 [Yom Kippur War] 35, I do not remember how we kept in touch with our relatives. The diplomatic ties between the two countries were broken at that time 36. We worried about our relatives. We did not receive much news about the situation there. During the war in the Persian Gulf when Iraq bombed Israel, we phoned regularly our relatives there.

In 1962-63 as employees of design organizations we were able to get a flat. We lived there until 1985 when blocks of flats were built on the site of the house where we were born and we received a flat in one of them. When my daughter Jana married, my wife and I went to live there.

My sister Sofi is much younger than me. She was born in 1937. She was interned to Dupnitsa with us. She studied in the Jewish school which after 1945 became a Bulgarian one. She graduated the Pedagogical Institute and was a teacher in a primary school in Sofia. She was a respected teacher in chemistry and maths. In the 1990s she left for Israel but she came back. She lived on the upper floor of our block until she died. She married Rahamim Komfort, who was born in Dupnitsa. He was a machine mechanic. They have two children – Mihaela, who left for Israel and Nissim who lives in Sofia.

After 9th September 1944 we did not stop celebrating the Jewish holidays. We have a tradition to gather with our children. We have always lit candles on Chanukkah. My mother went to the synagogue when she could. Even when she was not able to go there by herself, we drove her and then we took her back. I did not have any problems to accompany my mother to the synagogue. It could have had negative consequences, but I personally did not have any problems. During totalitarianism the religious followers were persecuted. Yet, I have not heard of any Jews arrested for visiting the synagogue. My mother died in 1991. She went regularly to the synagogue until 1990.

I did not have any problems for being a Jew at my workplace. There were some minor incidents on work issues, but nothing out of the ordinary. In the 1950 some Jews on high positions were fired, but I was never on such a position.

The entering of the Soviet forces in Hungary in 1956 37 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 38 was supported by Bulgaria. People thought that socialism was threatened. Those were the times then. Now Bulgaria supports the USA in the war in Iraq. But I was strongly opposed to the Revival Process 39. I do not think such measures should be taken towards gypsies, or Turks, or anyone in Bulgaria.

We had a neighbor near our old house, who was among the people I trusted the most. During the internment he strongly defended the Jews. I was curious what his opinion was on the Revival Process. To my regret, he was against the Turks. I see things from the human side. Everyone has their right to speak their mother tongue and believe in their own religion, if they do not disturb the others. But interstate relations between Turkey and Bulgaria were also involved here and the problem was more complex. I do not know if I am right, but my opinion on that issue was very firm.

In 1981 a colleague of mine invited me on a visit to Leningrad [present-day Saint Petersburg]. He was a Russian Jew in a design organization and we made a project together on the glass factory in Razgrad. His name was Ilya Faintich. In Razgrad glass production with Soviet machines was introduced and the project was mostly a Soviet one. We met a couple of times and I wanted to visit the Soviet Union. So he invited me. In Leningrad I had an embarrassing situation. An officer in the police station interrogated me about who I was and what I was doing there in order to fill in an address card. All that was because of my Jewish origin. That cast a gloom on my stay in the city. What's more, there were anti-Jewish posters on the walls in the police station. I think that the negative attitude towards the Jews after 1944 was not an ideology, but introduced by people who wanted to preserve their positions in the power structures and were malicious in nature. That is, it is all up to the individual person. Now Ilya Faintich and I exchange postcards for our birthdays. Sometimes we phone each other. We speak in Russian. Ilya Faintich and his wife Irina Solomonova now live in Germany.

My wife and I were not rich, but we were both engineers and we managed to lead a comfortable life and go on holidays. We received vouchers for tourist holidays homes allocated to the design organizations, in which we worked. Every summer we brought our children to the seaside resort of Kiten.

Now I visit the Jewish home [Bet Am] 40 regularly. I lead a group of 18 people speaking Ivrit. We meet once every two weeks. We read in Ivrit and visit each other. I also visit the meetings of the 'Golden Age' club every Saturday ['Golden Age' club is established in 1999, where 30-40 Jews gather every Saturday. They have guests who are famous personalities, musicians, artists, economists, politicians. That is one of the most active and interesting clubs in the Jewish Home in Sofia.]

As for the trips to Israel – sometimes they allowed us, sometimes not. I do not know on what they based their decision. Once some friends of mine from Sofia – the Ninyo family came to me after a trip to Israel. They brought me an invitation from a friend – Marcel Lidgi and I applied to the police station for a permission to leave. Then I was sent on a business trip for a week and when I got back, I received my permission. Then I applied for visas and I had to decide if I wanted to travel by plane or by ship. I also applied for a Greek visa in case I decided to travel by ship, but I did not use it, because I used a charter flight. I spent five weeks in Israel. Marcel Lidgi is one of my friends from Sofia. He is the husband of a classmate of mine from the Jewish school – Mati Amar. We were together in Hashomer Hatzair and in the UYW. Now we still keep in touch. They left for Israel in 1950. They live in Tivon, near Haifa. They also visited us in Sofia. I still keep in touch with my UYW friends. They were mostly Jews. About 90% of my friends now are Jews. I also had Bulgarian friends. Now I mostly meet with the people from the Bet Am.

It is difficult for me to evaluate the changes in Bulgaria after 1989 41. There were definitely many imperfections during communism. But I am convinced that the situation got worse after 1989. I do not know if we would live better after we enter Europe. On the one hand, it is nice to lift the borders between countries, but on the other hand, we could lose our Bulgarian culture and identity in this world globalization. Yet, the world is heading towards that.

Translated by Ivelina Karcheva

Glossary

Berta Ezra Pando (nee Dzhaldeti)
Plovdiv
Bulgaria
Interviewer: Svetlana Avdala
Date of inteview: May 1996

‘I have been living in Plovdiv for such a long a time but I will always feel like a citizen of the town of Yambol!’ says Berta at our first meeting. She used to always arrive on time. Her body seemed slightly bent; it was as if she was diffident all the time. She was always with her husband who was already ill at the time. She didn’t show any signs of impatience or irritation towards him, not even at a single occasion. She had accepted things as they were. When you are with Berta you can feel the cozy atmosphere of the little town. It is a pleasure to be with her because she is an ordinary, modest, helpful person, without unnecessary whims. The conversations were going well. It was easy for me to lead it and to foresee what was going to come next. The facts were presented in a traditional, normal way. Nothing special. And all of a sudden a little end of the curtain was lifted and God made a manifestation of himself…I keep on wondering whether I became religious because of these interviews and my meetings with all these people. Because things seem so logical, even predestined, especially from the point of a view of a life that is almost over.

My name is Berta Ezra nee Dzhaldeti, Pando by marriage. I was born on 10th September 1935. I have a sister – Rika Dzhaldeti (1943 – 1994). I am married to Haim Mois Pando (1923). I have a daughter whose name is Stela and who is married to Isak Benaroy. I also have two grandchildren – Mois and Alberta.

We are Ladino Jews [1]. My paternal grandfather, whose name was Israel Dzhaldeti (? – 1933), was born in Yambol, he was a dairyman and he married twice. His first wife’s name was Rebeka, his second wife’s – Berta. We are from Berta’s offspring. My grandpa was born in Yambol [in Southeast Bulgaria, 261 km from Sofia] and was living there. He got married in Yambol. Grandpa had five children from his first wife Rebeka – Albert (who died during World War I), Estrea, Yeashua, Ester, Fortunae and he had five children from his second wife Berta – Rebeka, David, Soultana, my father – Ezra, Matilda. I don’t have any memories of granny Berta because I was three months old when she died of asthma in 1935 in Yambol.

My maternal grandfather’s name was Yako. I don’t know when and where he was born. I don’t have memories of him because he died in 1914 during the war, a long time before my parents got married. My maternal grandmother’s name was Rika Azis. She was born in Odrin. She had two marriages – her first husband’s name was Yako Levi – a Turkish Jew, who was my mother’s father. Granny’s second husband was David Azis. Each of her marriages lasted for three years because both her husbands died. I remember her well and I think that she used to be a very pretty old lady. That was what I was thinking as a child because I loved her very much. I was her first grandchild and she was looking after me till I started junior high school. I used to sleep and live at her place during the week and went to mum and dad at the weekend because my parents used to work a lot and were extremely busy. Granny Rika wasn’t very old, she was fifty-something. Her hair was absolutely white; she used to make a little bun at the back of her head. She only had two or three teeth in her mouth. She was of medium height, slender and very lively and active.

Granny talked to me in Ladino and I replied in Bulgarian. That was the way we were speaking with her. In fact we were very close. I felt her like my closest confidante and shared what had happened to me with her. She didn’t have much time to tell me fairy tales and to sing songs to me but our communication was rather intense. I remember she was telling me not to lie and never to touch anything that didn’t belong to me.

My granny was leading a life of poverty. Her house was tiny. They had started building it together with grandpa but when he died the house remained unfinished – one of the rooms was grouted with mud and on the floor of the corridor hall there were boards. There was one more room and a tiny hall where uncle Albert used to live. The kitchen was outside, in the little yard. There was a hearth and chimney, as well as a hob – the so-called ‘mangal’ on coal, on which we used to cook. There used to be only fruit-trees in the garden – plum-trees, quinces, an apple-tree. There was also a vine-arbor. There wasn’t a fence around the garden but a real hedge. We didn’t have any domestic animals but I recall that we had a lamb one year. There was neither fountain in the garden, nor running water. I used to walk for two blocks to fetch water and we weren’t the only ones to do so – all the people from the neighborhood used to fetch water from that fountain. The toilet used to be out in the yard. A lavatory with a hole on the floor in a little cabin. I fell in the hole once as a child. We didn’t have electricity, we were using gas lamps. In winter we were using stoves on wood – the so-called ‘gypsy love’.

My aunt Souzana used to live at granny’s place as well – she was my mom’s stepsister who wasn’t married at the time. Uncle Albert, his wife Olga and their son David were living there too. My uncle used to drink a lot and he was unbearable when drunk - he used to become extremely aggressive. And at such occasions aunt Olga and my other aunt – Souzana – would close all the windows, lock the doors and hide into the house. He would come back home, leave no stone unturned, bump into things, until going to bed and falling asleep. Whenever aunt Olga saw him coming home drunk, she used to flee the house - not through the door but through the window so that he wouldn’t see what was going on – and then run to the neighbors. And on coming into the house he started throwing things, smashing, breaking and then he would go to bed. After his falling asleep, auntie Olga used to come back home and clean everything and in the morning there wasn’t a better person in the world than uncle Albert. There were cases like that – uncle would go out, make a trick of some sort and win some money, then he would put on a new overcoat, a suit, a bowler hat and would go out with friends in the evening. Later he would return with no overcoat, no hat, no nothing. There was such a case – they got drunk, he and his friends, there was some street-organ and he liked it so he bought it in the end. He had the money at that moment so he bought it just like that and then came home drunk with a gift for Olga – a street-organ. It used to stay there in the room, that street-organ, until they left for Israel.

My aunt Souzana used to provide for us – my mother’s stepsister, who was still living with granny. She used to work as a milliner at a workshop which belonged to a Bulgarian guy. We used to have a great relationship with my aunt. Later on she got married, in 1942 – 1943 and left for the town of Stara Zagora [a city in Central Bulgaria, 192 km from Sofia]. My aunt used to be very fastidious. I recall that every Friday the furniture was taken out, in the garden as in those years we used to have fleas and bed-bugs and it was normal because the floor was made of mud. So we would take everything out and we used to beat some things and pour boiling water on other things. For Pesach the entire cutlery was boiled and the houses were whitewashed. That was what granny was doing and that was what mum was doing.

On Friday only the women went to the public bath. It was Roman, new and very nice, with mineral water. It was made of marble. There was a pool, showers, bidets and even a sauna for to get very warm. The people would stay there in the steam so that all the dirt would go easily off their skin. We would go there with aunt Souzana – she would take me there and every time we took apples and cookies. We would stay there for hours. Afterwards we would climb the internal staircase in our towels and go to the second floor. The bath was downstairs and the beds – upstairs. There we would take a short rest.

There was one main street in Yambol – with a lot of shops. It was paved as well as the other big streets. The others were cobblestone secondary streets. The Police Department was in the Shopping Street as well. One of the distinctive features of Yambol are the so-called ‘Hali’ [the central covered market]. They date back to Roman times. They were really picturesque and ancient. They still exist but have been turned into a shopping center. They are situated right in the center of the town square. There are domes on them and arcs instead of doors. There were doors from the four main directions – east, west, north and south – so that people could enter from any direction. We usually used the eastern door. The butchers were on the right – one next to the other – all the meat merchants. Right opposite were the greengroceries and the fishmongers after the door. I remember very well. I used to go shopping with mum once a week but I also went with dad to buy minced meat for the meat fingers – ‘kebapcheta’ as he was a ‘kebapcheta’ maker.

Granny Rika’s house, where I used to live till starting primary school, was in the ‘Dolnata’ [Bulgarian for lower] Neighborhood, near the Toundzha River and the Shopping Street. There used to live mainly Jewish families, rarely was there a Bulgarian one. That’s why that district was known as the Jewish Neighborhood and it was something like a ghetto. I can state that all our neighbors were Jews. All my father’s brothers and sisters used to live in this lower neighborhood. There was also an upper neighborhood where my parents were living. The Turkish people lived in a separated neighborhood. We didn’t communicate with them a lot. Their neighborhood was near the hill ‘Baira’ (there was this hill which was called ‘Baira'), to the other end of the town. And the gypsy neighborhood was near the Turkish one whereas the Jewish Neighborhood was in the lower part of the town, near the Toundzha River. There were some Armenian families as well that were scattered throughout the town but didn’t have their own neighborhood. In the ‘Gorna’ [Upper] Neighborhood, where my parents were living, used to be the houses of the well-to-do families. In that neighborhood there were some Bulgarian families.

The people living in the Lower Neighborhood were very close indeed, in wonderful relationships. If you were in need of anything – advice, help, you could turn to your neighbor. There weren’t fences around the houses. When we needed something – tell your neighbor this, tell him that, do you have this, do you have that…They were borrowing and lending things, they were gathering in the evenings on a little square which was in the center of the neighborhood. Each person would carry their own chair and a conversation would start right away, they were chatting all the time. They were preparing together jam, tomato sauce called ‘liutenitsa’, ‘fideus’. My granny was a great expert on ‘fideus’. It was something like noodle which wasn’t cut into big pieces as usual. We were just waiting for the sheets of pastry to get a little dry, then we used to fold them and cut them afterwards. The pieces look like spaghetti. When the women of a household decide to prepare ‘fideus’, they would call other women from the neighborhood and cook in one of the houses, next time they would cook in another woman’s house. The same thing when ‘liutenitsa’ was prepared – all the people would gather and work together. A lot of jam was prepared because there were lots of plums and again all the neighbors took part.

We the children used to play a lot. I was together with my cousins. Aunt Ester, who used to live in the lower neighborhood, had five daughters – Rebeka, Gratsia, Sofi, Berta, Meriam. The second and the third sons of uncle Yeshua – Shimon and Israel were almost my age. We used to play all sorts of games. We liked to play ‘chilik’, hide-and-seek, play tag, ‘long donkey’, ‘short donkey’, we were hopping over each other. There were some vegetable gardens that were called ‘bakhchi’. We were taking walks in the ‘bakhchi’, climbing trees, picking plums, picking mulberries…The Toundzha was nearby so we used to go there to wade into it…Our parents didn’t control us at all, nobody was taking care of us… There were neither cars nor any other dangers. If a cart went by, we would jump at the back until the people chased us away. I lived with granny until I turned thirteen and started the junior high school.

Granny was religious and used to take me to the synagogue. It is a very beautiful building in my childhood memories. Downstairs there was a hall with a dome decorated with tainted glass. There were a lot of seats in it. That light coming from above hued in different colors seemed magnificently beautiful to me… The men would sit downstairs and the women upstairs on the balcony. There was also an entrance-hall from which the women headed for the balcony and the men remained downstairs. The women were wearing their newest clothes and were always with kerchiefs on their heads. Granny didn’t have a lot of dresses – only one formal and she used to wear it every Friday. Men would put on ‘kippah’. I was feeling very important but just the first fifteen minutes after which I used to get bored and started fidgeting on which granny would tell me to go to the yard. There was a large yard that surrounded the synagogue. There was a separate place for slaying animals. There was another separate building where the ‘shammash’ used to live – that was the person who was taking care of the building of the synagogue.

Granny was always fasting at Kippur. She was trying to make me follow suit but whenever I started crying because of being hungry she would give me something to eat. Taanit would end with a mass in the synagogue. On returning home we would first have a little slice of bread with a pinch of salt and then we would sit at the table where a lot of delicious dishes were served – I don’t exactly remember if there were leeks balls but I recall that the dishes were extremely tasty.

I don’t have any recollection of granny Berta Dzhaldeti (? – 1935); I only know that she was a rather domineering lady. As mum comes from a very poor family she wasn't accepted by granny Berta because mum didn’t have a dowry whereas my dad’s family was quite well-off – all of them were craftsmen. And on top of that, according to mum’s words, dad was a very popular man. Despite all the negative factors, the love between mum and dad was extremely strong. His parents, that means my grandmother because my grandfather was already dead (he died in 1932), didn’t give her consent. I have heard that at the time there was a man called grandfather Avram – something like a chieftain and all the people were seeking his advice and took his words into consideration. My dad went to him when he met my mother and afterwards set his mind on marrying her. That chieftain gave his consent and with the permission of the parents they got engaged. They were engaged for two years and for those two years mum was obliged to gather her dowry. And uncle Yeshua and dad worked hard during those two years and saved the money without informing their parents. The saved money they put into my mother’s bank account. And when there was enough money for the dowry, the parents, or my granny to be precise – my father’s mother – Berta gave their consent for the marriage. Dad and mum got married in 1934 in the synagogue in Yambol observing all the rituals.

Mum has told me that after getting married they started living with granny Berta in the big family house in the Lower Neighborhood. They were given a room that was facing the staircase. Mum used to tell me that granny had a big case in her room. The key from the case was kept in her skirts. Every time they came back home the old lady would lift her skirt and take the key out, then she would unlock the case, put inside the things they had brought, lock it again and hide the key. Mum was also saying that while she was pregnant, dad would bring her something – apples or grapes and on passing the room they were occupying with mum, would drop something through the window. There was something under the window – a sofa, or some other piece of furniture – so that his mother wouldn’t see that he was giving something to his wife. The rest he would give to the old woman and she put it in the case. They were eating only what she had decided to give them from the case. There were no protests – that was it – matriarchy. The whole family used to live in the big family house until my grandmother’s death. I remember that house. There were two rooms on the ground floor and a big kitchen. There the family was doing the washing, the cooking, the washing up. There was also a big corridor hall, a big bedroom and a little room. In the backyard there was something like a toilet and a summer kitchen. At my time there was living only uncle Yeshua with his sons and after 9th September for some time uncle David and auntie Bouka. Grandfather Israel died in 1932 and grandmother – in 1935. After her death mum and dad went to live somewhere else. At first they lived with an Armenian family and then rented rooms on the ground floor in the Upper Neighborhood. The owners were Jews. I only remember their first names, not their surname. I recall grandpa Moshe who had a son Yako, a daughter Rashel and a daughter-in-law Sofi.

Only kosher was cooked at granny Rika’s house. Pork was never brought into the house, she didn’t mix meat with dairy products, she was cooking in separate pots and when visiting mum she was always carrying her own meal because my mum’s dishes weren’t kosher. I even remember that dad was bringing home pork. We would often eat bacon with garlic in the evening.

On holidays and at the weekend I would go to my parents. Before the Holocaust we were convening with dad’s family in the Big family house. One of the women would make leek balls, another – something else, everything was very delicious. There would invariably be some meat on the table – usually lamb. Everybody would cook and then the dishes were brought to the table around which we gathered. We, the numerous children, would have great time under the table.

I remember that at Purim ‘mavlacheta’ were being made – in the form of the letters and we would take the bagel with the letter that was the first letter of our names. At Frutas [2] we were given bags full of different fruit. I felt at home both with granny and with my parents but I think I felt better with my parents. They were living in the Upper Neighborhood which wasn’t far from the Lower one.

My father Ezra Israel Dzhaldeti (1904 – 1968) was a very energetic, very practical and resourceful person. He was quite wild when he was young. In 1923–24, during the September uprising [Events of 1923] [3], he used to be keen on anarchism. And during those riotous years he and two or three other men were sentenced to death as anarchists. But he succeeded in escaping to Turkey by using a fake passport. He lived in Turkey for a year and a half. Afterwards there was an act of grace. And later on, when things in Bulgaria settled down a little, he returned to Yambol. There, in Turkey, he worked as a shoemaker, an assistant-shoemaker, a journeyman and he managed to make a pair of tourist shoes with a hole for a gun in the sole and that was how he returned from Turkey – with a gun in the sole of his shoe. But when he returned to Yambol his brother Yeshua and his father, my grandpa Israel, were so sacred that they almost made him jump and hide into the lavatory.

After getting married he settled down and started making ‘kebapcheta’ meat fingers so he settled down because he was short of time. And that was how, in a natural way, he gave up his political activities. He wasn’t a member of any Jewish organizations. He became a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party [BCP] [4] only after 9th September 1944 [5].

His father was a dairyman. He was a dairyman, his uncle was a dairyman – I’m telling you about my family. My two uncles Yeshua and David were tinsmiths, all of them were craftsmen. Grandpa Israel had built a dairy shop apart from the house and dad inherited it. They also had a Big family house in the Dolna Neighborhood. Dad has a lot of brothers and sisters. All of them were craftsmen and all of them gave up their shares of the shop in my father’s favor because he was the last one to live with his parents.

At first my father started selling milk and after that put some tables in the shop itself. Later on he put some tables on the sidewalk and it turned out to be something between an inn and a shop. There were seven or eight tables inside the shop and four or five outside. Every evening a lot of people gathered here, mostly Jews but not only. It was so noisy! My dad was known as uncle Ezrata. He was very sociable and used to attract a lot of customers. He used to have heaps of friends – Jews and Bulgarians. In front of his shop there was an enormous sign that read: ‘Dairy and Kebapcheta Shop Ezra Dzhaldeti Kosher’. Kosher was written both in Hebrew and in Bulgarian. And as a matter of fact he obeyed all the rules of kosher. The ‘kebapcheta’ were made from lamb and veal or from mutton and veal. He used to sell milk only in the morning and ‘kebapcheta’ – only in the evening.

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.

My mother Fortunae Yako Revy Dzhaldeti (1912-1981) was a humble and sensible woman. She was of medium height, with black hair, very agile and very laborious. She seemed very pretty to me and to my father, I guess, as he wanted to marry her so badly… She used to tell me off from time to time, she even slapped me because I wasn’t a very good child. I was pretty wild to be honest. My knees were always bruised. I used to fall all the time, or hit myself… I was playing together with the boys. As the Jewish School was in the lower parts of the town, and it was snowing, and there was a lot of snow at that time, mind you, I would put the bag on the ground, sit on it and slide down the hill. It was like a real slide. Mum would always warn me not to tear my clothes on that slide. One year the bag simply couldn’t take it any more. We used to also go on top of the Toundzha River because it was nearby and would invariably freeze in winter so we used to go there to slide. Mum was always telling me off, especially when she had got fidgets. She was very angry because she worked too much. Dad didn’t use to tell me off at all.

My mother was an excellent cook and from her I learned how to prepare very nice pastel. You sift half a kilo of flour with a packet of baking powder, a little salt and one egg. After that I make a little well in the middle of the flour heap. In it I pour half a cup of vegetable oil, even a bit more and half a cup of yogurt with half a spoonful of baking soda stirred in it. I knead soft dough. I separate it into two parts – one of them slightly bigger than the other, I knead it into a ball and with the bigger rolling pin or a bottle, if you don’t have a rolling pin, I roll out the dough to fit the baking dish. I use medium size baking dish. The bigger ball of dough I flat out and put on top – in that way I’m sure the filling will not drip out. I put the filling, roll out the other sheet of dough and put it on top. When I put the first sheet of dough in the baking dish I make some holes in it with a fork – so that the dough wouldn’t rise and the air wouldn’t go out.

The filling – a well baked aubergine, chopped into tiny bits or hammered with a knife or a wooden spoon and 250 grams minced meat. A pinch of salt, black pepper and I fry all this. I don’t even put oil in the pan because there is enough fat in the meat. I also put one egg in the filling, after the meat has been fried, after I have taken the pan away from the hob and the filling has gone a little cold. So I put the filling, place the other sheet on top, press the endings with fingers so that the filling would stay in, make holes in the upper sheet with a fork and bake. I heat the oven to 200 degrees and when the dough is not sticky any more I know the dish is ready. That’s it. You can make a filling from spinach, cheese and eggs.

Our family always ate together – at breakfast, lunch and dinner. We waited for dad to sit at the table and then we sat down. My father used to buy the products and mum did the cooking. Usually at the table we discussed everyday topics, the things we were going to do or what has happened during the day. Dad didn’t like it when we were talking too much while eating so we usually had our meals in silence.

My parents’ house was in the Upper Neighborhood. They had rented some rooms in a basement. Before that they had lived with granny Berta who was a very authoritative woman. They had two rooms in that basement. One of them faced north and was very damp and practically nobody lived in it nonetheless it was furnished. We were living in the room that faced south. There was a small kitchen which was probably meant to be a washing room. We used to cook in an ‘odzhak’ [a hearth] and on ‘mangal’ [a brazier]. The toilet was in the house. There was running water in the house. There was no garden at all. The furniture – a bedroom suite, a nice wardrobe with a mirror on the middle door, a little bed for me, a stove, a table. The owners of the house used to live above the basement. They were Jews as well. We were on friendly terms with them. Inside, from the dark room, as we called it, there started a wooden staircase that we used to climb to their part of the house. During the Holocaust when there were restrictions on when to leave the house and on everything in general, we used to celebrate Pesach and other holidays with our landlords… regardless of the fact that there were restrictions. The windows were covered in black paper because of the air raids – so that no light would be let out. We would go upstairs and live in that way… I used to spend the holidays with my parents, not with my grandmother.

So, with our neighbors, who used to be our friends, we prepared superb meals, we used to make matzah, boyos. But not like the matzah we have these days, it was more like home made round loaves. And for eight days we used to eat only boyos without salt. They were hard and not very tasty. We couldn’t wait for it to finish so that we could have some real bread. And indeed we didn’t buy bread for eight days.

The period of the Holocaust coincided with my years at the nursery and primary schools. Almost all Jewish children attended one and the same nursery. It was mixed and there were children of Turkish, Jewish, Armenian origin. When the Holocaust started we, the Jewish children, somehow got isolated. Most probably that was done by the other children under the influence of their parents. I recall a child called me ‘chifutka’ [6]. I remember that may be because of that incident the teacher made a parents’ meeting and said that the Jewish children are no longer allowed to attend the nursery. We were expelled because of being Jews. There were about ten of us. And our parents were really worried. Then, one summer, they decided to take us to a Catholic nursery but we were turned out of there too. I also recall that Tsar Boris III [7] died at that time. And the other thing I can’t forget is that all day long the nuns would teach us how to pray.

In 1942 I enrolled in the Jewish school and I studied there until the fourth form. It was situated just between the Lower and Upper Neighborhood, next to the synagogue. It was in a large, beautiful building. There was a separate room for every class. In each class there were between 20 and 25 children. In that same 1942 it was turned into a police department and the school was moved to two rooms in the synagogue. The rumor had it that a lot of people were tortured in that police department. Some people had seen the police officers covered in blood. It was an absolutely horrible situation. In the new premises there were two classes in each room and usually two or three kids had to sit at one and the same desk. The first and the second form studied together in our room. And it was the staff room as well. There were three teachers. I can’t recall the name of the first one, Miss Rashel and Mr Leon. The teacher, whose name I can’t remember, was teaching Hebrew, but I couldn’t learn anything in that language. Miss Rashel was teaching Algebra, Art…, Mr Leon – Bulgarian. I didn’t have favorite subjects. I remember some of my friends’ names – Ancheto, Amada, Stela, Izako. I didn’t use to be a brilliant student, I was somewhere in the middle. I didn’t participate in any clubs. After 9th September [1944] the building of the Jewish school was restored to its original functions, but it was turned into a Bulgarian school this time. After the Jewish school, in 1945, I enrolled in a Bulgarian junior high school – Junior High School I. There I also made some friends – Ema, Roumyana, Mimi Sheytanova, Diana…

In 1942 the adults had to wear badges [Yellow star in Bulgaria] [8] but I hadn’t turned twelve and didn’t wear one. That was an advantage for the children because due to the restrictions imposed by the curfew only we could do the shopping. In the first years the curfew started at 9 p.m. and I recall that my parents used to meet with other Jewish families at dusk in the city garden, around which flows the Toundzha River. They were there together with the kids. I remember that when the curfew was introduced and we started going home earlier, while the sun was still shining, I would always ask mum ‘Why are we going home so early?’. She always said: ‘Because that is what we have to do.’

They didn’t comment but there was a period when they were very worried especially when more restrictions to our going out were introduced – we were allowed to be out only for two hours a day; we weren’t allowed to use the main streets, only the secondary. Afterwards the people interned from Sofia and Plovdiv arrived [Internment of Jews in Bulgaria] [9]. Our house was rented and very little so nobody was accommodated at our place. There was also a soup kitchen.

During the Holocaust my father’s job became totally rudimentary [Law for the Protection of the Nation] [10]. He was forbidden to practise it – both the dairy products and the meat fingers – and he gave away all the tools and vessels (grills, big pots, basins) to a neighbor – uncle Angel, who used to be a friend of my father’s. Angel wanted to take all these objects, hide them and pretend that he had bought them. He gave everything back to my dad after 9th September [1944]. The shop was closed but not seized. I can’t say if dad was made to pay taxes for it. Dad was mobilized into the forced labor camps [11]. I can’t say exactly where he was but he used to go there early in spring and returned in late autumn.

Mum had to support the family. She was from a poor family and before getting married, she had worked together with her mother, brother and sister in a workshop in Elkhovo where they used to make traditional Bulgarian costumes. Mum used to weave the tinsel stripes which were used to trim the costumes. She used to make them on a loom at home. So at that time she was forced to start this activity again. My cousins were making bead necklaces. I can’t say where they were being sold – neither the tinsel, nor the necklaces. We were giving them to some merchants and they were selling them in the nearby villages. Surviving was difficult.

I remember that one of my father’s suppliers of milk visited us once and he took me to a village near Yambol. I guess my father had made an arrangement with him. We went to the village by cart. It must have been at threshing time because I recall I and the children from the village were sliding with the threshing-board all day long. And in the evening they put 4 or 5 kilos of flour in a bag and returned me with that same cart to the outskirts of Yambol – at that time trade on the black market was severely punished. So they gave me a bag of flour and let me go. And, as I had to go through a neighborhood called ‘Karbona’ on my way home, I recall the bag was very heavy and it was extremely difficult for me to walk and to reach home.

My father fell ill in 1943. He got some horrifying neuralgia of the three-headed neuron and he was operated in 1943 in Sofia by professor Filipov. Traveling was forbidden for us at that time but that was some rare malady and they sort of experimented on dad, he was a test animal. Thank God, the operation was successful in spite of being difficult and complicated. It lasted for eight and a half hours and it was the first of the kind in Bulgaria, the eighth in the whole world. Dad had read that in some magazine. And exactly at that time my sister came into this world. My sister was born in 1943 in the basement. The delivery was guided by a midwife called Rayna. She had helped at my birth as well.

I remember that moment very well because there is a difference of eight and a half years between us. I wasn’t such a young child anymore and I remember how mum’s labor started. Then, they made me move to the dark room to sleep in. At some pint in the early morning papa came to me and woke me up; ‘Come on, Betty, get up, you have a sister.’ I jumped out of bed, they were bathing her, my little sister… It was so difficult. My mother had a lot of milk. I remember that the owners of the house, who were living above us, had a daughter as well. Her husband was from Sofia and they used to live there but they were interned to Yambol – they started living with her father and brother. That daughter, whose name I simply can’t remember, gave birth at the same time like mum. Her milk was too thick and that was making the baby constipated. So, she was taking down the baby every day so that mum could breastfeed it because mum had milk in excess. So mum was breastfeeding both of them. It seemed to me that more children were born at that time no matter the situation was extremely unfavorable. There was no problem with the nappies because mum was using what was left from my childhood. Nothing was thrown out in the past.

There is a difference of eight years between me and my sister Rika Ezra Dzhaldeti (1943 – 1994) and we were in close contact until 1949 when I had to go to Sofia to study. She was very young but I remember she was crying all the time – ‘I want with Betty, I want with Betty.’ So mum would always make me take Rika on my walks in Yambol. And when we turned around the corner and mum couldn’t see us, I would always slap her and send her back. I was a pretty grown-up girl at the time and she always wanted to come with me. Then I went to study in Sofia and then got married. When we had already moved to Plovdiv she came there to study at the college of medicine, to become a laboratory technician. Later on, she returned to Yambol and there she was working as a laboratory technician at the hospital. She didn’t succeed in getting married after all. I was communicating with her more actively in the last few years. She even died while living here with us, in Plovdiv. She got ill and lived here with us for four months, we were taking care of her. She died on her way from Plovdiv to Yambol, where she had to be hospitalized for blood transfusion. She was buried in Yambol.

I recall that during the Holocaust the communists and the members of UYW [12] were interned to a camp in Kailuka [13]. They were isolated there. It was something like a concentration camp. As a matter of fact all the families with partisans in them were interned there. Some of them managed to break away from the camp like Mati Roubenova. She was something like an organizer of the Jewish young people for the partisan movement. One of my cousins, Israel, Naftali’s brother, became a partisan. They were hiding in the mountains around Yambol.

Another cousin of mine, Albert Dzhaldeti, who was known like Dzhaldo by everyone, was a communist and spent three years in jail. There were my relatives in Kailuka, too – my uncle Davidcho, his wife, my younger cousin Naftali. And just before 9th September [1944] there was a fire in the camp which took the lives of lots of people. Three people from Yambol died there. Among them was grandpa Avram – the elder. He was the oldest person in the camp. Uncle Davidcho was just a little scorched. Tanti Bouka, his wife, was seriously burnt. My younger cousin had some wounds too – on his arm and head. When they returned they were in wounds. There were no medicines. I remember we used only flavin and changed the bandages. I recall that once, when I started removing Naftali’s bandage from the head where he had a very deep wound, there started falling white worms from the flesh. That cousin of mine survived but after all he had gone through he got valvular disease as a consequence to the rheumatism he had caught in the camp and the burning. The wounds healed but the valvular disease remained. He took to his bed and died at 21. His brother, Israel, came back from the Balkan Mountain alive and kicking, he went to the front as a volunteer and was killed on 25th December 1944. As a matter of fact almost everybody from the family survived apart from those two guys. I remember that on 9th September 1944, when the partisans returned, we were waiting for them in front of the Jewish school. They were on lorries, which stopped there, in front of the school. Tanti Bouka was still in bandages and we were waiting, and waiting, and waiting for uncle Elko (Israel) - the partisan, we used to call him uncle Elko. She lost hope and went back to our family house, she was sitting there, not knowing what to do. And at one time, the last lorries came and – there was uncle Elko. I ran to tanti Bouka to tell her… She was sitting on the stairs just like the sculpture ‘The Mother’ which is in front of Dimcho Debelyanov’s [14] House-Museum – sitting on the stairs just like that, leaning her head on her hand… it is as if I can still see her… And I shouted from far away: ‘Tanti Bouka, uncle Elko is back!’ She didn’t know if he was dead or alive, if he was going to return or not, because Nati Roubenova died, uncle Avramcho – a neighbor, died too.

After 9th September [1944] my father’s private business was done with. Until retirement, he worked as a manager of a confectionery, which wasn’t his, and mum helped him. Dad decided to turn our shop into a place for living for us because he had heard that our neighbor's shop was being nationalized so he thought the same would happen with ours. So he built a wall in the middle of the shop and we got two small rooms and a little hall – there was a separate bedroom and the other room served as a kitchen, living room, everything…

Aunt Souzana had married in Stara Zagora. She decided to leave with her family – with her husband and her son David, who was a year old – for Israel in 1948–1949 [Mass Aliyah] [15]. In a year’s time her brother David went there together with his wife Olga and their child. There they had two more children. Afterwards her mother went there too – my granny in 1950 or 51. She sold the house and paid for the journey with that money. My mother wanted us to leave for Israel very much because almost all her relatives emigrated but papa laid down a condition: ‘If you want to go, go, but I and the children will stay here.’ So we stayed. At that time everything was ready, even the documents but dad remained on his position. I don’t know why. Even now I feverishly believe that I have to stay here and I didn’t agree to leave for Israel then or later.

Uncle Yeshua’s son, Albert, stayed in the Big family house and lived there. After 9th September [1944] my cousin, who had been in jail, started work at the Ministry of Interior and became an investigator.

In 1949 I went to Sofia to study there. They had just opened a boarding house and a vocational school sponsored by Joint [16]. They called it ORT [17]. It was situated near Rouski Monument whereas the boarding house was on 20 ‘Pozitano’ Street, next to the Jewish school. In the first year there was only me and three other girls. In the second – there were eight girls form all over Bulgaria, in the third – fifteen. In the first year there were 52 boys and 4 girls. The person in charge of the boarding house was Rouzha Isakova. At that time she was 61 – a learned, intelligent woman. There we, the kids from the remote part of the country, learned manners and general culture. All that I know I have learned from her – how to eat with fork and knife; at home, to be honest, nobody was using knives at the table, we were a simple, ordinary family. There we learned how to keep our hygiene; what we had known before that was that we had to go to the public bath once a week; she was teaching us that we have to take a bath at least twice a week. Every evening or every morning we had to wash our intimate parts, in the evening we would go to bed only in our pyjamas, not wearing any other clothes. She explained that how the body had to breathe, to take a rest from everything. She was sleeping there, in the girls’ bedroom. We were all looking at her going to bed, then we would lie down, she turned off the lights; she made her bed look like a sack, only one corner was tuned invitingly… A woman of refined manners... She used to wear a corset… She would undress, remove the corset, put on the nightgown and go to bed. That is what I took from her and even now I cannot get used to sleeping with underwear. In the morning we were waken up with an alarm, so we would get up, wash, prepare ourselves and go downstairs for breakfast. By the way, food was scarce in those times but we didn’t feel it so much because everything was from Joint. In the morning we always had milk with cocoa, a spoonful of margarine and some jam – that was serious breakfast for those years. There were coupons for bread and we used to give our coupons to the steward but we weren’t given an exact amount of bread. They simply sliced the bread and put it on the tables – some people eat more bread, some less – but we always had bread on the table.

After breakfast we would stand in line and go to school. Our boarding house was on 106 ‘Pozitano’ Street and the school was near the Rouski Monument. Our teachers were Bulgarians and Jews. We used to study general and technical subjects. We had some practical lessons of cold working, locksmith skills, turnery in workshops that were fully equipped. There was a separate room for electrical engineering but we also visited other factories, like furrieries and foundry work factories. There we also had some practical lessons. The cold working and the electrical engineering were conducted in the school. At noon we would return, the whole group, for lunch. Lunch always consisted of soup and main course, there was no shortage. And from the canteen – to the study-room to prepare our lessons. Downstairs we used to have this big, sports hall, which was turned into a study-room, with tables. We studied individually. Rouzha Isakova was the manager of the boarding house and Marko Isakov was something like a mentor of the students. Uncle Yakov was in charge of the supplies, tanti Rashel was a cook, and later came tanti Sara. My classmates were Stela Davidova and Sara Mandil from Kyustendil [in South-West Bulgaria, 68 km from Sofia], Zhozefina Isakova from Plovdiv. The boys from Yambol were Albert Sintov – the husband of our famous [opera] singer Anna Tomova-Sintova, who is a first cousin of mine, Isak Benaroy and Hari Basan, from Yambol as well. We used to throw parties in the evenings. It was such fun, there was a guy who played the accordion. He was playing, we were dancing – tango, waltz, rumba…We were joking, presenting little drama plays… It was wonderful…

After 9th September [1944] the traditional Jewish holidays weren’t relevant anymore and we didn’t celebrate them but every Saturday we would go to the Bet Am [18]. We were allowed to leave the boarding house from 6p.m. until 9p.m. So we used the time to go to the parties there. We were like brothers and sisters with our boys. For the whole time I spent there only one couple formed and it was in the fourth year. Benaroy from Yambol and a girl called Binka from Samokov. They got married afterwards. If any of us had a courtier all of us were informed and involved. Each of us would share their opinion – if it was a good match or not.

We spent three years in the boarding house. Then it was closed down. In Plovdiv another vocational school was founded and the people from Plovdiv went there. The others, in whose towns there wasn’t a vocational school, formed a boarding house on 79 ‘Zhdanov’ Street [today Pirotska Street]. We didn’t have food, nobody was doing the cooking for us but each of us was granted a small scholarship. There we graduated.

We were going to a lot of cultural events with Miss Rouzha Isakova – to the theater, opera, ballet. I recall that at that time the jazz singer Lea Ivanova had come to Bulgaria for the first time. I had put on my dress from the graduation party and a pair of elegant shoes and it was snowing so heavily – there was a layer of 30 or 40 cm of snow. By the time we reached the hall my feet had turned into blocks of ice.

I graduated and returned to Yambol. I started work at the airport for jetliners in Bezmer. There is no civil airport there now but there was in the past. It was an airport for repair works on airplanes with engines with internal combustion. Bezmer is an airport for jetliners. I started work at the workshop at the airport. I managed to stay two months there. I fitted engines because my specialty at school was ‘Engines with Internal Combustion’. There were only two girls in the workshop. The other girl, she had started working there before me, used to wash the parts of the engines, when there were planes to repair. I was in the starting group. It consisted of six people. After assembling the engines we were checking if everything was fine, on the ground. Afterwards a captain, who was a pilot, tried it in air. He used to fly with the plane for half an hour and if there was anything wrong we would finish it, then he would fly for an hour or two and from there the plane was sent to its destination in one of the military establishments.

While I was still in the boarding house I had a boyfriend, a Bulgarian – a young officer from Yambol. We were seeing each other for a year but the rumors had reached my parents. My cousin Albert Dzhaldeti was working with a cousin of his in the Ministry of Interior. And that Bulgarian told him: ‘Listen, Dzhaldo, your cousin is going out with my cousin, but you should know that his mother and sisters, his relatives, are absolutely unhappy that he is in love with a Jew. If something serious happens and they get married, your cousin will see no good.’ So Albert told my parents, they told me and we split up.

After that a relative who was married in Plovdiv had come to Yambol. She saw me in the bathroom and liked the way I look very much. She told tanti Roza: ‘I like this girl, she has to live in Plovdiv.’ And after that he [her future husband Haim] visited tanti Roza, I was invited and that’s how we met. And our boy swallowed the bait at once. It was quite a courtship. We were walking in the garden and he, in order to impress me, used to throw his raincoat on the trees. We were dating for about a month. We didn’t get engaged before the wedding, only a sort of agreement, and we got married in 1954 in Yambol. We signed the register but the synagogue was already closed. Afterwards we came to Plovdiv. He used to live with his father in rented rooms. His mother had died a few months before the wedding. They had sold all their belongings. We were living on 7 ‘Nikolaev’ Street. There were three rooms and a kitchenette. In one of the rooms there lived another woman – a widow. We used the other two rooms – my father-in-law in one room, we – in the other one. My father-in-law died three years after we got married. We didn’t bury him according to the Jewish traditions but we chose the Jewish cemetery.

When I came to Plovdiv in 1955 the Shalom [19] was functioning until 1960. We were meeting there often and had great time. Bitoush Behar’s father – Dzhoudi – was the funniest person in the Bet Am. We were dancing a lot – gallop, polka. And usually Dzhoudi was leading the dance and showed us the steps and the figures we had to do. He was such a great guy! When we knew that Dzhoudi was going to be there we realized the party would be great…

I started work in ‘Peter Chengelov’ Shoe Factory in 1958 and I worked there till my retirement. I became a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party [BCP] in 1961.

We didn’t have children for nine years. My relatives started wondering about the reason. I recall that had planted a lemon tree. We didn’t have enough room for it and gave it to tanti Soultana – my dad’s sister, Albert Sintov’s mother [Anna Tomova-Sintova’s husband] because she was very fond of flowers. It became a big tree but it didn’t give any fruit – it was grafted, watered, but no and no. And tanti Soultana said once to her neighbors who were talking before our door: ‘Can you see it, that lemon tree, it won’t give fruit, like its saibiika [owner – a word of Turkish origin]’ Mum had heard that and was extremely angry. And can you believe the paradox – I got pregnant and the tree gave a lemon that same year!

And there was another interesting thing with my conception. I had a friend from Yambol – Milka Godzes. She was a Jew too. Her father had started going blind gradually since the age of ten or twelve. Her father and my father were friends. My dad helped him by reading the lessons aloud to him so that he could finish the third year at school. When Milka was born, he saw and afterwards lost his sight completely. Milka married a Jew, too. We were friends with her because she was only a year and three months younger. Later, when we grew up we both got married. Her husband was a military officer in Burgas [a city on the Black Sea Coast in Southeast Bulgaria] and they moved to live there. Later, when they came to Plovdiv, they would visit us. After some years, having been in all towns in Bulgaria, he was transferred to Yambol and they settled down there. We would return to Yambol for the holidays and used to meet them in the Jewish club to celebrate – for Pesach, Rosh Hashanah. Milka gave birth to a son in 1961. He was given a brit. By chance I turned out to be in Yambol at that time and was present at the circumcision. There is such a belief among the Jews that if a childless woman takes the part from the brit and carries it with her all the time, she will have a baby. They gave me the part of his weewee. I folded it in a piece of cotton and was always carrying it in my handbag. I got pregnant in less than a year. My pregnancy was very hard. I stayed in bed for nine months. I was hospitalized three times and was put on systems because I couldn’t eat anything. Then I returned to Yambol and decided to give birth there. We were bringing up Stela as a Jew but at the same time didn’t want to make her feel isolated from the other children so I painted eggs and made cookies at Easter.

Stela finished high school and started work in the trade system. She finished a course for sales consultants. At first she was a shop assistant for 6 or 7 months and then she became a cashier at big store. She worked there for more than a year… What happened afterwards? Her wedding was also interesting and indicative of how sometimes things follow a certain destiny. As I have told you with Milka nee Godzes, Benaroy by marriage, we had been friends since childhood. My Stela was friends (when visiting her grandparents in Yambol) with her son – Isko – the boy part of whose flesh I had taken after the brit. When they were young children they were fighting and quarreling all the time. He used to pull her plaits. Later, when they grew up, they didn’t keep in touch because we lived in Plovdiv most of the time. We returned to Yambol from time to time. Afterwards, Itsko [diminutive from Isak] went to Varna [a city on the Black Sea Coast in Northeast Bulgaria] to study economics, he came back to Yambol to study for some exams and they met again, but as grown up people. Stela was finishing school and had gone to visit her aunt. They started flirting, wooing. They were writing letters and in a year, a year and a half they decided to get married in 1983. The wedding took place in the hall in the registry office. Stela was a real bride, all in white, unlike me. At my time it wasn’t fashionable for the brides to look like that. After that the reception was in the Jewish club. It was a magnificent wedding. We prepared everything with Milka, a lot of people came. About fifteen people had come from Plovdiv. It was very nice, we had lots of fun. They live in Yambol now. Even now when we get together with the young people and the in-laws Milka starts joking – ‘Stela is our girl from the very beginning. Don’t forget that she was conceived because of Itsko’s weewee’ and I reply: ‘Itsko is our boy – it was we who took his weewee…’ Stela worked for about ten years for the heating company in Yambol. Now she assists her husband. He makes furniture on commission. She stays in the office and takes the orders. My first grandson Mois was born in 1984. Now he is a student in Plovdiv and lives with us. Their daughter Alberta – Betti – was born in 1989. She is a student and lives in Yambol.

In 1991 my daughter Stela, her husband, his brother and his sister-in-law left for Israel to make an aliyah. They took my grandson – Moischo [diminutive from Mois] - along. At that time he was six. Our granddaughter, who was two years old, stayed with us. We moved to Yambol to look after her and started living with my sister. My grandson, Moischo, couldn’t get used to Israel. He had to start school but couldn’t learn the language for two or three months so they got him on the plane and returned him here. He started school here in Yambol. My daughter and son-in-law spent 11 months in Israel but nostalgia returned them to Bulgaria – they even had to pay a refund of 10, 000 dollars. The money they had earned was used to pay the loans back. Now they live in Yambol.

I have leftist beliefs. The changes of 1989 [10th November 1989] [20] brought a lot of difficulties for me. My life was changed entirely. We became very poor. In 1991 I was taking the biggest working pension of 185 levs [around 90 euro], during the [Ivan] Kostov government [1997-2001] it became 61 levs [around 30 euro].

I have been coming regularly to the Jewish home for 5 or 6 years. I am a member of club ‘Health’ and the Club of the Disabled. The activities of the Jewish organization have been revived. More and more young people start coming here, the activities expand and there are a lot more people. Itsko also regularly attends the Sunday school and goes to the Jewish home. I receive aid from Joint because our pensions are so little.

Glossary:

[1] Ladino: also known as Judeo-Spanish, it is the spoken and written Hispanic language of Jews of Spanish and Portugese origin. Ladino did not become a specifically Jewish language until after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 (and Portugal in 1495) - it was merely the language of their province. It is also known as Judezmo, Dzhudezmo, or Spaniolit. When the Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal they were cut off from the further development of the language, but they continued to speak it in the communities and countries to which they emigrated. Ladino therefore reflects the grammar and vocabulary of 15th century Spanish. In Amsterdam, England and Italy, those Jews who continued to speak ‘Ladino’ were in constant contact with Spain and therefore they basically continued to speak the Castilian Spanish of the time. Ladino was nowhere near as diverse as the various forms of Yiddish, but there were still two different dialects, which corresponded to the different origins of the speakers: ‘Oriental’ Ladino was spoken in Turkey and Rhodes and reflected Castilian Spanish, whereas ‘Western’ Ladino was spoken in Greece, Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia and Romania, and preserved the characteristics of northern Spanish and Portuguese. The vocabulary of Ladino includes hundreds of archaic Spanish words, and also includes many words from different languages: mainly from Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, French, and to a lesser extent from Italian. In the Ladino spoken in Israel, several words have been borrowed from Yiddish. For most of its lifetime, Ladino was written in the Hebrew alphabet, in Rashi script, or in Solitro. It was only in the late 19th century that Ladino was ever written using the Latin alphabet. At various times Ladino has been spoken in North Africa, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, France, Israel, and, to a lesser extent, in the United States and Latin America.

[2] Fruitas: The popular name of the Tu bi-Shevat festival among the Bulgarian Jews.

[3] Events of 1923: By a coup d’état on 9th June 1923 the government of Alexander Stamboliiski, leader of the Bulgarian Agrarian Union, was overthrown and power was assumed by the right-leaning Alexander Tsankov. This provoked riots that were quickly suppressed. The events of 1923 culminated in an uprising initiated by the communists in September 1923, which was also suppressed.
[4] Bulgarian Communist Party [up to 1990]: the ruling party of the People's Republic of Bulgaria from 1946 until 1990 when it ceased to be a Communist state. The Bulgarian Communist Party had dominated the Fatherland Front coalition that took power in 1944, late in World War II, after it led a coup against Bulgaria's fascist government in conjunction with the Red Army's crossing the border. The party's origins lay in the Social Democratic and Labour Party of Bulgaria, which was founded in 1903 after a split in the Social-Democratic Party. The party's founding leader was Dimitar Blagoev and its subsequent leaders included Georgi Dimitrov.

[5] 9th September 1944: The day of the communist takeover in Bulgaria. In September 1944 the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria. On 9th September 1944 the Fatherland Front, a broad left-wing coalition, deposed the government. Although the communists were in the minority in the Fatherland Front, they were the driving force in forming the coalition, and their position was strengthened by the presence of the Red Army in Bulgaria.

[6] Chifuti: Derogatory nickname for Jews in Bulgarian.
[7] King Boris III: The Third Bulgarian Kingdom was a constitutional monarchy with democratic constitution. Although pro-German, Bulgaria did not take part in World War II with its armed forces. King Boris III (who reigned from 1918-1943) joined the Axis to prevent an imminent German invasion in Bulgaria, but he refused to send Bulgarian troops to German aid on the Eastern front. He died suddenly after a meeting with Hitler and there have been speculations that he was actually poisoned by the Nazi dictator who wanted a more obedient Bulgaria. Many Bulgarian Jews saved from the Holocaust (over 50,000 people) regard King Boris III as their savior.
[8] Yellow star in Bulgaria: According to a governmental decree all Bulgarian Jews were forced to wear distinctive yellow stars after 24th September 1942. Contrary to the German-occupied countries the stars in Bulgaria were made of yellow plastic or textile and were also smaller. Volunteers in previous wars, the war-disabled, orphans and widows of victims of wars, and those awarded the military cross were given the privilege to wear the star in the form of a button. Jews who converted to Christianity and their families were totally exempt. The discriminatory measures and persecutions ended with the cancellation of the Law for the Protection of the Nation on 17th August 1944.

[9] Internment of Jews in Bulgaria: Although Jews living in Bulgaria where not deported to concentration camps abroad or to death camps, many were interned to different locations within Bulgaria. In accordance with the Law for the Protection of the Nation, the comprehensive anti-Jewish legislation initiated after the outbreak of WWII, males were sent to forced labor battalions in different locations of the country, and had to engage in hard work. There were plans to deport Bulgarian Jews to Nazi Death Camps, but these plans were not realized. Preparations had been made at certain points along the Danube, such as at Somovit and Lom. In fact, in 1943 the port at Lom was used to deport Jews from Aegean Thrace and from Macedonia, but in the end, the Jews from Bulgaria proper were spared.

[10] Law for the Protection of the Nation: A comprehensive anti-Jewish legislation in Bulgaria was introduced after the outbreak of World War II. The ‘Law for the Protection of the Nation’ was officially promulgated in January 1941. According to this law, Jews did not have the right to own shops and factories. Jews had to wear the distinctive yellow star; Jewish houses had to display a special sign identifying it as being Jewish; Jews were dismissed from all posts in schools and universities. The internment of Jews in certain designated towns was legalized and all Jews were expelled from Sofia in 1943. Jews were only allowed to go out into the streets for one or two hours a day. They were prohibited from using the main streets, from entering certain business establishments, and from attending places of entertainment. Their radios, automobiles, bicycles and other valuables were confiscated. From 1941 on Jewish males were sent to forced labor battalions and ordered to do extremely hard work in mountains, forests and road construction. In the Bulgarian-occupied Yugoslav (Macedonia) and Greek (Aegean Thrace) territories the Bulgarian army and administration introduced extreme measures. The Jews from these areas were deported to concentration camps, while the plans for the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria proper were halted by a protest movement launched by the vice-chairman of the Bulgarian Parliament.

[11] Forced labor camps in Bulgaria: Established under the Council of Ministers’ Act in 1941. All Jewish men between the ages of 18–50, eligible for military service, were called up. In these labor groups Jewish men were forced to work 7-8 months a year on different road constructions under very hard living and working conditions.

[12] UYW: The Union of Young Workers (also called Revolutionary Youth Union). A communist youth organization, which was legally established in 1928 as a sub-organization of the Bulgarian Communist Youth Union (BCYU). After the coup d’etat in 1934, when parties in Bulgaria were banned, it went underground and became the strongest wing of the BCYU. Some 70% of the partisans in Bulgaria were members of it. In 1947 it was renamed Dimitrov’s Communist Youth Union, after Georgi Dimitrov, the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party at the time.

[13] Kailuka camp: Following protests against the deportation of Bulgarian Jews in Kiustendil (8th March 1943) and Sofia (24th May 1943), Jewish activists, who had taken part in the demonstrations, and their families, several hundred people, were sent to the Somovit camp. The camp had been established on the banks of the Danube, and they were deported there in preparation for their further deportation to the Nazi death camps. About 110 of them, mostly politically active people with predominantly Zionist and left-wing convictions and their relatives, were later redirected to the Kailuka camp. The camp burned down on 10th July 1944 and 10 people died in the fire. It never became clear whether it was an accident or a deliberate sabotage.

[14] Debelyanov, Dimcho (1887-1916): One of the greatest Bulgarian poets, born in Koprivshtitsa and lived in Plovdiv, Ihtiman and Sofia. Memories of Koprivshtitsa sunny days, his native house and early childhood happy days used to haunt him, driving him back to his idyllic past in his poetry. He worked as reporter in newspapers and magazines, translator, editor and journalist, as well as a stenographer in the National Assembly. Debelyanov joined the army as a volunteer in World War I. He was killed in a combat near Demir Hisar (region in Macedonia) at the age of 29. Unknown at his death, his posthumous fame was considerable. His poetry is in many respects symbolist, and is distinguished by its technical innovation, its precise rendering of nebulous emotional states, and its remarkable musicality. (http://www.plovdivcityguide.com; http://www.scuttlebuttsmallchow.com)

[15] Mass Aliyah: Between September 1944 and October 1948, 7,000 Bulgarian Jews left for Palestine. The exodus was due to deep-rooted Zionist sentiments, relative alienation from Bulgarian intellectual and political life, and depressed economic conditions. Bulgarian policies toward national minorities were also a factor that motivated emigration. In the late 1940s Bulgaria was anxious to rid itself of national minority groups, such as Armenians and Turks, and thus make its population more homogeneous. More people were allowed to depart in the winter of 1948 and the spring of 1949. The mass exodus continued between 1949 and 1951: 44,267 Jews immigrated to Israel until only a few thousand Jews remained in the country.
[16] Joint (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee): The Joint was formed in 1914 with the fusion of three American Jewish aid committees, which were alarmed by the suffering of Jews during World War I. In late 1944, the Joint entered Europe’s liberated areas and organized a massive relief operation. It provided food for Jewish survivors all over Europe, it supplied clothing, books and school supplies for children. It supported the establishment of cultural meeting places, including libraries, theaters and gardens. It also provided religious supplies for the Jewish communities. The Joint also operated DP camps, in which it organized retraining programs to help people learn trades that would enable them to earn a living, while its cultural and religious activities helped re-establish Jewish life. The Joint was also closely involved in helping Jews to emigrate from European and Muslim countries. The Joint was expelled from East Central Europe for decades during the Cold War and it has only come back to many of these countries after the fall of communism. Today the Joint provides social welfare programs for elderly Holocaust survivors and encourages Jewish renewal and communal development.

[17] Organisation for the Distribution of Artisan and Agricultural Skills among the Jews in Russia ORT: On 22nd March 1880, by order of the Minister of Interior Affairs of Russia, the Organisation for the Distribution of Artisan and Agricultural Skills among the Jews in Russia ¬ ORT ¬ was established. A small group of prominent Russian Jews petitioned Tzar Alexander II for permission to start a fund to help lift Russia’s five million Jews out of crushing poverty. ORT, Obschestvo Remeslenovo i zemledelcheskovo Trouda (the Society for Trades and Agricultural Labour) was founded. ORT today provides skills-training and self-help projects for some of the world’s most impoverished communities, using funds raised by its supporters, and added to by development agencies and national governments, to put people on the path to economic independence.

[18] Bet Am: The Jewish center in Sofia today, housing all Jewish organizations.

[19] Shalom Organization: Organization of the Jews in Bulgaria. It is an umbrella organization uniting 8,000 Jews in Bulgaria and has 19 regional branches. Shalom supports all forms of Jewish activities in the country and organizes various programs.

[20] 10th November 1989: After 35 years of rule, Communist Party leader Todor Zhivkov was replaced by the hitherto Prime Minister Peter Mladenov who changed the Bulgarian Communist Party’s name to Socialist Party. On 17th November 1989 Mladenov became head of state, as successor of Zhivkov. Massive opposition demonstrations in Sofia with hundreds of thousands of participants calling for democratic reforms followed from 18th November to December 1989. On 7th December the ‘Union of Democratic Forces’ (SDS) was formed consisting of different political organizations and groups.

Matilda Levi

Sofia

Bulgaria

Interview: Violeta Kyurdyan

Date of interview: March 2002

When I entered her home for the very first time, I found myself in a wаrm and cozy apartment in the most beautiful part of the center of Sofia. Matilda gave me a friendly smile as she invited me to take a seat. I didn’t see any pictures on the wall, nor did I notice any precious objects around. No bright colors, nothing to grip the attention.  Everything in the room was clean, modest, and simple. Matilda was sharing that apartment with one of her sons at that time. Presently, after having badly broken her leg, she lives in the so-called Parents’ Home for elderly Jews. When I went to visit her there, I had the same impression of coziness that I had had at her home, as if she had brought the sprit of her home with her. She was joking and smiling again, but she couldn’t walk well enough yet and she was suffering of not being able to go down to the garden, but had to walk around with her support along the corridor instead. Though, she’s still the same charming and shining person I had met, despite the pain and the inconvenience, which the accident has brought to her life.

My maiden name is Behar. When I was small, we spoke Ladino 1 at home. I used to speak that language but now I’ve forgotten it a little, of course. My grandchildren don’t speak [Ladino]. Bulgarian culture surrounds us.

I come from Karnobat. My [paternal] grandfather Moisei Behar ran his own business. He had a little shop down at the square. He used to sell textile, haberdashery, fancy goods, etc. A lot of people used to come from the villages. There was a connection with the villages. Women weren’t allowed to go there; it was regarded indecent in those times. Sometimes I went there. When I was a child my grandfather wasn’t interested in the children at all and he even mixed up their names. My grandfather could read in Bulgarian. He read newspapers, but he couldn’t write. My paternal grandmother, Vida Hason, came from Bourgas; my grandfather brought her from there. She came from a notable family. My grandmother was a real housewife though she could write. I wondered why, when she started writing something, she wrote from right to left. She didn’t explain. I suppose it must have been a text in [old] Turkish; I don’t know even now what it was. She spoke fluent Turkish.

My grandmother had seven children and they all went to different places. All of my aunts and uncles received their education in Bourgas, and one of my aunts in a French boarding school in Rousse. Later, all of them except my father went to Israel. He remained here because his ideology didn’t allow him to leave. I don’t know what was better: to depart or not.

My other grandmother, my mother’s mother, Bohora Behar, came from Yambol and her father was a rabbi there. They called my other grandfather, Mordehai Behar, Bukorachi-the-drummer. He was bald headed and had a little beard. We had a big portrait of him and he looked just like Lenin, at least that’s what Lenin looked like in the photos I’ve seen of him. We hung this portrait [on the wall]. Later we had to hide it because he looked so much like Lenin. When he was going to work in the mornings, he passed by our house. He had a big cane with which he could reach the first floor window and he knocked to tell me good morning and then he went on to work.

My father, Yosif Behar, was born in Karnobat in 1888. He studied in Karnobat till the third grade [the seventh grade of elementary school at present]. Everything was just fine but where could he continue studying? In Plovdiv, of course. So, he was taken to Plovdiv. There’s a big and very famous secondary school there. Samodumov and Barutchiyski [eminent Bulgarian intellectuals] taught my father there: these are men who later became professors. He received a very solid education. He studied math really fundamentally, descriptive geometry, rhetoric and Old Bulgarian. He could recite Chernorizetz Hrabar and Cicero’s speeches by heart. [Hrabar was a Bulgarian writer from the end of the 9th century, the so-called Golden Age of the Bulgarian culture.] He was very keen on math but he could also draw very well and could write in calligraphy: they studied calligraphy at school. When we had to make chemistry tables in secondary school, he made them for me and they were always hung on the classroom wall. He sang lots of [Bulgarian] folk songs. He didn’t study Hebrew at all. But he knew some prayers by heart and also their translations.

After he graduated, he did some accounting courses. When he first went to Plovdiv he was 13. He wanted to go back home. He left school and walked from Plovdiv to Karnobat on foot, because he didn’t have any money. But after that he returned to Plovdiv and continued studying. My father often said, ‘We, our family, eat boza 2 and halva in Plovdiv.’ That was the cheapest food and the rest was expensive. He said, ‘We didn’t know what toothpaste was then. We baked bread until it became black, then we pounded it and brushed our teeth with this paste.’ And he died without a tooth pulled out.

After he finished his accounting courses, he came back to Karnobat. He was accepted as an erudite man. My father had been in a non-commissioned officers’ school. He didn’t take part in the war [WWI] although he was some sort of a commander. After he graduated from school, he was told that he had a valvular disease and wasn’t fit for active service. So, he was never sent to the front. He spent all his life with this disease. He had a wonderful handwriting, like a calligrapher. He became a clerk at the Dimitrov brothers’. They were businessmen. He had to go around the villages and market their goods. Then he bought a horse and rode around the villages; I don’t know if he had a cart. He was really in the circle of the Karnobat intellectuals because he had graduated from secondary school.

Life in Karnobat was rather patriarchal. We Jews were around 100 families or maybe fewer. All of us had to be religious. There was no way out, because your neighbor would immediately say, ‘Look, he isn’t religious!’ and so on. Even on Friday evenings my grandmother wasn’t supposed to switch the electricity on, or even touch the switches. Some Turkish woman used to come to turn the lights on. I remember that we used gas lamps. I was ten when electrification finished. I was living with my father, mother and my uncle, my father’s brother, in a one-storey house. Both my grandmothers lived in their old-Bulgarian houses, with a front square bay, just like the Koprivshtitza houses. [This is a small and picturesque Bulgarian town, famous for its houses built in the Bulgarian national revival tradition.]

We didn’t live in luxury. We had a hall and two or three rooms. When all of us, the grandchildren, gathered we used to all sleep downstairs. There were cupboards where, according to the Bulgarian tradition, we used to put the mattresses. And when it was time to go to bed we climbed up, it was a little bit high, and we rocked on the mattresses, which were really soft. It was very funny. Then we put the mattresses on the ground and slept there.

There was great poverty in Karnobat. We lived in the Jewish quarter. When holidays were close my mother used to prepare something that I carried to the poor: roasted chicken or something like that. Money was collected, too. It was something like a synagogue fee. Poor people were always given something. They were given some work. Sometimes Turks came to broom the yard or they went to the school fountain to bring some water. Otherwise, I used to bring the drinking water. Sometimes my father got up at 4am to go for water because there was no running water. The tap was leaking and there were great queues. My paternal grandmother had a well and a pump but the water wasn’t good for drinking. The pump was for irrigating. There were flowers in the front yard and in the back yard; there were tomatoes, peppers and parsley. They were irrigated because there was a lot of dry heat in the summer. I helped in irrigating and cleaning the garden.

Karnobat had its madmen. But the madmen were really harmless and there was Mad Sarah; she was a Gypsy. She wandered down the quarter, spreading gossip, but she was not ill tempered. Everybody loved her and she gave instructions everywhere. For example, I had a cousin whose mother had died during her birth. I don’t know how Mad Sarah had learned that Iveta would soon come but she pulled me aside and said, ‘Now listen, Mati, Iveta will soon come to your house. Tell Grandmother Vida to look after her carefully because it’s a sin; she’s an orphan. Look after her very carefully, right?’ Well, that was it – she was mad in a very special way. There was another madwoman but she was kind of grim. Sometimes she came to work in the yard and we had to give her food. But she was always grim.

After my father got married he moved to work with his father-in-law who traded with different foods. Many people came from the villages and bought goods: groceries, victuals. It was a small shop, not very beautiful, with a little office next to it. When my aunt graduated from the school in Bourgas, she became a clerk in this shop. My father worked there as a clerk, too. There was a store full of different packages and there was high grass in the yard; it was very pleasant to walk on. A big turtle used to live in it and my father told me that the turtle would live 300 years. I liked sitting on it very much and from time to time it showed its head off the carapace.

My father worked there; it seems he was doing well in business. He went to the villages; he had much communication with the villages. He had friends there, they used to come and visit us. Karnobat is situated in a wine-producing area. They used to bring him wine and grapes; they came with baskets from the villages. Sometimes he took me along. There were some rich villages: Sungurlare for example, which is a town nowadays. There were lovely houses there. People were living well. However, once he took me to the village of Seymen and I was shocked by the little huts there. They were made just of clay and the roofs of thatch. I was shocked by the poverty there.

My mother, Rashel Behar, was my father’s first cousin. She graduated from a French boarding school in Yambol. She has shown me what they had embroidered at school and it was incredible. It looked as if it wasn’t made by a human hand. She embroidered magnificently. She spoke French. She was a housewife.

I was born in 1919. When I was a baby she didn’t have any milk after some time, so the priest’s wife suckled me. I had a brother, Mois Behar, born in 1921, who died of dysentery when he was two. These were times when dysentery couldn’t be cured. So I grew up alone and the eggs and milk were all around me. We had milk for breakfast and my father, since there were hens in our yard, would come and say, ‘I’ve got it from the hen’s butt, eat your egg.’ But I began drinking milk only when I got pregnant because I had to. Otherwise I didn’t even taste milk. My father ran after me in the yard, but I didn’t want to drink. However, I ate yogurt. If it wasn’t ready or it hadn’t ripened in the evening, and it was sheep’s milk, it ripened perfectly, if it wasn’t ready, I was sent to buy some. And they cut some for me; it could be cut with a knife, in a large baking dish. The dairyman cut some and the milk was so thick that it didn’t seep water. So I brought home some milk from the main square and it was our dinner. Butter was harder to find. We had salami [sausages] when we made some for ourselves but it was hard work. We used to make different kinds of jam: we did that in the yard, in a large copper baking dish slaking the mixture with a big stick. I helped a little: cleaning the plums, looking after the hens in the yard and so on.

[In the morning] the greengrocers and the cheese-sellers passed by. They were Albanian; we used to call them arnauts [inhabitants of Albania and neighboring mountainous regions]. So, my mother would take something like a plank, or a stick, long and flat, on which you sign what you have taken, we called it a ‘rabosh’. It was like a credit card. We signed a notch on the ‘rabosh’ and we were able to take cheese. Neither the man nor we would ever lie to each other. One couldn’t lie just like that. It would have been so absurd.

My mother had a housemaid, a Turkish girl, from time to time. Our house wasn’t large so the housemaid came and went. We spent most of the time in the yard. It was really nice there; I played with the hens. It was interesting: there was a big plum tree. We put swings on it and so my cousins and Jewish friends and I rocked on it. In fact, it was a really close community. When it was winter and the snow was thick my father made a little path. Sometimes, probably because we were so poor and we were always in the yard, our legs suffered, they just froze, and became red. Then my grandmother said, ‘Now I’m going to heal you.’ And she let us go barefoot in the snow. We walked barefoot in the snow, our legs reddened and then we sat right next to the stove. That’s how our feet were healed.

There was a Turkish girl at my grandmother’s who spoke Hebrew, Bulgarian, and Turkish. All she had to do was to play with us; we were three or four cousins and she was a little older and we respected her. This girl, Hayriye, was a very alert Turkish girl, an orphan. Her grandmother was a friend of my grandmother’s. When she [the girl’s grandmother] came, we all stood up. That’s because she had authority. She predicted my fortune by throwing hot lead. When she came, my grandmother said, ‘Be quiet, don’t move and don’t shout.’ So she came, she sat on the couch and she was given some coffee. She said, ‘Come here so that I tell your fortune by lead.’ She had a veil that she put on my head and started mumbling something and I got very scared. At some point I heard something hissing. The lead was put in boiling water and started sputtering. Then she took the veil off my head, she took the lead out of the water and began telling my fortune. She gave instructions to my grandmother who answered her in Turkish, so I didn’t understand. At some point she said, ‘Don’t be afraid’ and I understood she was curing me of fear. Then she left and we started playing our games with relief. Her granddaughter, Hayriye, was the leader.

Then Hayriye grew up. When she became 16, my grandmother Vida sewed a veil for her. Although I already understood that Ataturk 3 had come to power and veils could be taken off, no Turkish woman from our town took her veil off and Hayriye had to be given a veil. She was opposed to that, ‘I don’t want a veil, I want to be like Mati [short for Matilda], like the other children…’ ‘You can’t’, my grandmother said, ‘put it on, when you’re going to the fountain, and after that take it off.’ So, she went to the fountain with a veil on and when she returned she removed it and stayed without it at home. But it was a great burden for her. Then she liked going to the fountain and flirting. I sometimes noticed her flirting with some Turks.

I spent all of my childhood at my father’s mother’s. She took care of me all day long and combed my hair. When I woke up my hair was always messy, curly somewhat. My mother didn’t have enough patience to comb my hair. She used to start combing me but it hurt me a lot. I sometimes even ran in my nightgown to my grandmother’s who lived on the same street. And my grandmother asked me, ‘Your mother pulled your hair again, didn’t she? Come here.’ And she put me on a little chair with a mirror and said, ‘Take a look at yourself and tell me how you want me to style your hair.’ She started to form a curl here, a circle there, I was really glad because she didn’t pull my hair.

I wasn’t sociable as a child. I was a child with my own concepts and didn’t like others imposing their will on me. I always ran to my grandmothers. My grandmothers’ houses and our house were very close but I didn’t communicate a lot with my mother’s parents; they were much more reticent people. My [maternal] grandmother was a fantastic cook. She made really tasty dishes: the meat-and-vegetable hash and the sweets she made were fantastic. For example, she took almonds, pounded them, mixed them with eggs and other things and the result was great almond cakes. She had a room where she stored lots of nuts and almonds and sacks of apples for the whole winter. She was a good woman and had a very white face. She was rather bumptious with her complicated meals. Despite that I went to Grandmother Vida’s, who cooked simply: baked beans and pickled vegetables. I ate them and I liked them very much. At Grandmother Vida’s, there was a big basement where the pickled vegetables were stored. My grandmother made fine pickled vegetables. She took those round fleshy peppers and filled them with parsley, carrots, cabbage and so on. There was sauerkraut, too. I really liked the pickled vegetables and the beans she baked. Grandmother Vida cooked it in an earthenware pot. She used to put it under the stove, it was a very primitive stove, and it stayed there until noon in the heat and formed a crust.

First, I had to go to an infant school. [The last year in the kindergarten, where children are prepared for school.] This was before the Jewish school. I even have a photo from the infant school. We had a very nice teacher; she just recruited the children. She recruited me too. In order to go to my grandmother’s I had to pass by the school. Once I was walking towards my grandmother’s and the teacher stopped me and said, ‘Come on, Mati, come study in our school!’ ‘No, I can’t. I’m going to see my grandmother.’ And so I passed by the school, I didn’t want to go there. But eventually the teacher recruited me. And I liked it so much that I even became ‘the boss’ of the infant school. There were around twenty children. We weren’t taught reading and writing. We were led to the nearby hill to play games. There were two hills near Karnobat: Dedo Dimcho’s hill and Kakkazan hill that means ‘Hill of the 40 cauldrons.’ There was a myth that a big bey [Turkish title] had buried his gold there. Then they tried, but with no success, to plant a forest on it. It’s a lilac garden now. We made great efforts in the past: we had brigades that went there, digging and planting trees. We didn’t plant lilac but something else then.

I went to the Jewish school. There were only two rooms in the Jewish school: the first and second grade studied in the same room. The result was that when I was studying in the first grade I listened to the second grade lessons as well. So officially we finished the first grade but in fact we ‘finished’ the second as well.

My first teacher in the Jewish school was very good: a Bulgarian, but I believe she was of Greek origin. In Karnobat there were Greeks, but they didn’t recognize themselves as Greeks, but as Bulgarians. She was a little plump; she was very nice and was married. When somebody couldn’t answer some question, I answered and then she sent me out of the classroom. It happened often and one day I felt cold and went back home.

I loved all the subjects but I was especially biased towards literature. I didn’t carry my textbooks back home; I knew everything by heart, so I left them at school. I just didn’t know what it was like to study at home. When at the end of the year they gave the certificates to us they even said I had the best results: ‘Here you are, Mati, it’s six [the highest grade]. But if there was a mark ten, I would give it to you.’ In the third and fourth grades, we began studying history and biology. We learned Hebrew. It was hard, the language was difficult. I coped with that too, but without any pleasure because it was difficult and it had nothing in common with Ladino. Ladino is a European language as it has some things in common with Spanish. I knew the [Hebrew] alphabet a little from Ladino; I could read but not easily. There was no one who could help me.

There were very good and nice teachers in the Jewish school. They came from Kazanlak: one taught us in Hebrew and the other in Bulgarian. At the end of the course, we had to have an exam. A commission from the Bulgarian school came to see what our preparation was and whether we were able to move to the junior high school. Some of us didn’t succeed; there were some really dumb pupils. There was a girl called Roza. The teachers asked me to help her but she didn’t even learn the alphabet. We finished the fourth grade with this exam and moved to the Bulgarian junior high school. So I studied Hebrew until the fourth grade, and it wasn’t very systematic. We had a teacher from Yambol; I always laughed at him and told at home what funny pompous words he had said in class. He always sent me out of the room, only for hinting.

My father [usually] came back from work late and it was a very pleasant moment for me. He was very loving, he immediately took me on his lap and began telling me what had happened at the ‘charshia’ [a word of Turkish origin, which means ‘marketplace’] how a stammering man there had carried around chickpeas and hadn’t been able to say ‘chick-peas.’ ‘When he finally manages to say ‘chick-peas’ the time for closing the shops comes.’ He was telling me about Uncle Milan from Sungurlare, how he had come and what they had been talking about. There was a businessman next to him at the ‘charshia.’ His name was Nikolay. So, this Nikolay had planted strawberries. In those times, we had seen wild strawberries only on the hills. Nikolay had planted them and he even brought a plate full of strawberries once.

My father didn’t have any specific political views; he had been a right-wing socialist [social democrat] in his youth. Even when he got married my mother laughed at him because he wore a red tie. She was reactionary. [She didn’t support the socialists and the revolutionists.] She had nothing to do with the socialists. But later, when my father became more sedate and started his business, he became a radical. My father said about Stoyan Kosturkov, who was the leader of the radicals, ‘He’s the leader of the artisans and retailers.’ And he redirected to them. When he was a right-wing socialist, I remember him going somewhere in a cinema’s little room where they met but it wasn’t illegal. It always happens like that: when you are young, you are a socialist. Later you become a reactionary.

We didn’t go to the seaside. When I was a child, we used to often go to Bankya. [This was a small resort place in the past; today it is part of Sofia.] They say that when I was a child we went during the holidays to Tryavna, but I only dimly recall it. The air was better there. We went to Zheravna: there was a young shepherd there. I liked him and he liked me, too. He gave serenades for me. In the mornings, he passed by with his goats. He had a flute and played it and I stood at the window and watched him. I remember that once we went to Hisarya. [This is a Bulgarian mountain resort, famous for its healing mineral waters.] My mother took therapy there; she had high blood pressure.

Actors from different companies used to come to Karnobat. I remember Gendov; he had a traveling troupe. We often used to go to the old cinema, and then the community center was built. My father took me to the cinema where the silent films still existed then. Gendov used to come often with his wife and the troupe. They were very poor. People said that Gendov’s troupe used to rob the central shops when they came and always left debts behind, which they never paid off. But people weren’t very impressed; they knew it would be that way. We went to the theater regularly, but after the performance we hardly went back home along the dark streets. We couldn’t even think of transport then. I hadn’t seen a car in Karnobat. There were no cars. There were only carriages and some covered cabs. I think they were called ‘lando.’ We ordered a carriage in the evening when we had to travel because the railway station was a few kilometers away. We went to the cinema on foot. Sometimes I went to the confectioner’s with my parents. We sat at the table and were offered cakes and tarts from a big dish and everybody took what he or she liked. That’s how the tables were served.

I remember that we bought a radio around 1930. There was no radio in Karnobat and a man came to the cinema to show us what a radio set was. Until then, we heard the news only from the public crier. He came, beat the drum and said, ‘Tonight a man will come to the cinema who will show you a radio.’ So we all went to the cinema that evening. We bought tickets, the man entered, a table was brought in and he said, ‘Now I’ll tune in to a radio program from wherever you want: from Sofia, from Bucharest, from Istanbul.’ And he started turning a button. The radio started crackling, it crackled and crackled, but it wouldn’t transmit anything. The man went on turning the button but it still crackled and we became sick of it. My grandmother was the first to say, ‘I can make these popcorn cracks at home as well.’

She had a special pan for making popcorn. It was like a little drum with handles: she put the popcorn in the drum and put the drum on the brazier; it was made of iron and with four legs. She put charcoal in the middle and a grate upon it, and so she made popcorn. The man looked around and said, ‘If you leave, I’ll give back your money.’ So we didn’t see what a radio was but my father got interested in it and decided to buy one. He went to Sofia and brought home a radio. It was something unique for the whole neighborhood. They all came to us to listen to the radio and the old women asked if there was someone inside. When I told them there was no one they wondered, ‘How is it possible that it’s singing without anyone inside it?’ It was almost as big as a television. My father was very keen on it; he always searched for stations and listened to music from Istanbul. A Sofia station could be heard, too, but the signal was weaker. When different people came by, they asked, ‘Mati, is that you singing?’ I replied, ‘No, I can’t sing.’

There were balls at different occasions. The rabbi lived in a big house with a big hall where soirées took place. People danced quadrille, ‘Ladies change,’ and we, children took part only in the preparations. Then we, two or three girls, went to bed. There was, if I might say, an elite part of the Jewish quarter, which used to gather.

We went to the synagogue regularly. Mothers didn’t do it as often as the children. It was interesting. The rabbi sang and in a moment, the sexton would say, ‘Rise!’ and we stood up. Then he would say, ‘Sit down!’ and we sat down. We found that interesting. We didn’t know what happened but we were told what to do. We, the children, used to sit on some marble seats. There was a separate section for women. The men were in the lower part and sang from time to time; people used to collect money for the poor and for the synagogue in a very discrete way, the richer ones gave money too. Grass grew all over the churchyard and a mulberry tree stood there. We climbed on it and gathered mulberries during the day. We did it every time when we visited the synagogue. My father didn’t like going there too often; he wasn’t especially religious.

I vaguely remember my two aunts’ weddings. They married men from other cities: one was from Kyustendil and the other from Sofia. I was a bridesmaid. I remember we went to the synagogue where they stood under something like an arch. I held the trains at my aunts’ weddings. They weren’t big weddings.

I started studying in the junior high school in 1931. My first friends were from the junior high school’s first grade. We had a teacher for every single subject. I became very keen on literature because I had a very good teacher: Mrs. Todorova. She was a war widow, she had two sons and she helped them graduate as a lawyer and an engineer only with her teacher’s salary. She held firmly to Bulgarian and to orthography; I knew the old orthography perfectly. We had spoken before in the Eastern Bulgarian dialect, but at that time we started speaking in Western Bulgarian. In fact, Eastern Bulgarian is the correct Bulgarian.

We were taught in Bulgarian both in elementary school and high school. The geography and biology teachers were good and all the teachers’ staff was good. I didn’t like gymnastics. We were two ‘anti-sport’ girls in my class; the other girl had excellent marks [grade 6, which was the highest] in all subjects and was in the first position. I had excellent marks in all the subjects but I had a four in gymnastics, so I was in the second position. I couldn’t do well in gymnastics, that’s all. I was plump and slow and that spoiled my marks. Sometimes in the mornings my father used to test me, ‘What have you got today? Tell me the lesson immediately!’ I told him the lesson and he said, ‘Come on, you’re going to have a four and that’s all.’ I went to school and thought, ‘Fine, a good mark.’ I was examined and received a six. So I said to him, ‘You always underestimate me. Look what marks I receive at school.’ There was a library [in Karnobat] I had read all the books. I liked reading. My father read, and my mother read romance novels.

I graduated from junior high school in Sofia. When I was in the second grade, we moved to Sofia. Instead of sending me to Sofia on my own, my father found a job here so the whole family moved. We: my mother, my father and I, came to live in this apartment in 1932. My grandmothers wouldn’t leave their gardens. My father’s brother lived in an apartment next door. At first, my father worked with his brother, but later he opened a perfume shop on Lege Street with his sister’s husband and another man. They sold perfumes and crystals. In the meantime he was a ‘painkiller’ in a textile factory, which was at that time in a suburban area that’s now part of Sofia. He was an accountant, an organizer, and a work mover. The owners, I believe one of them was a Czech, relied on him a lot because they couldn’t do without his work. He walked there every day; there was transport only to ‘Orlov most’ Square then. He said that sometimes Prince Kiril’s driver took him in the car.

Of course, I felt pity when we moved to Sofia. I felt nervous that there were no hills in Sofia and there was no place where I could walk around. And the hills [in Karnobat] were all covered with almond trees. In the spring, the trees bloomed wonderfully. Sofia children weren’t better than I was, especially in literature. They all used a pompous style; a fact that made me anxious and I couldn’t understand why they spoke like that. I spoke in a different style. They didn’t laugh at me for speaking in a different manner because they knew it was the correct way. The Bulgarian teacher always emphasized my good style.

At some point I contacted a Jewish organization that was something like a leftist scout organization. Its name would translate as ‘The Young Guardian’ [This is the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth organization 4]. I became friends with some Jewish girls. I also became friends with Bulgarian girls in the high school. There was a Jewish junior high school in Sofia but I wasn’t ready for it, since there were only three grades in the Jewish school in Karnobat, and I went to a Bulgarian school. It was in October 1932. Some boys asked me, ‘Girl, what are you looking for? ‘I would like to enroll.’ ‘Well, go to the headmaster.’ So I was enrolled in the class E. And there I graduated from the junior high school.

After I graduated, I left for Paris. My mother laughed because I didn’t know French. I spoke only German; I had studied it in high school. I began learning French in Paris. There was a three-month course called ‘Pantheon’ where I began learning French. I studied really hard; I had really good written French. When I came back, the fact that I could speak French didn’t help me at all.

I liked medicine very much. My mother was never healthy, she used to take a lot of medicines and I became keen on medicine but when I was told that I would have to see dead men, I gave up. My father advised me, ‘Well, then enroll into French philology. What will happen then? You know that a Jew won’t be accepted as a teacher.’ There were no Jewish teachers indeed. My mother wanted me to study chemistry. I have never had a mark lower than excellent but I wasn’t especially keen on it. Well, I enrolled into chemistry but when my mother left for Bulgaria several months later, I moved to the Sorbonne and enrolled into Archeology and History of Arts. I had just returned for my holidays when the war began.

I spent a year in Paris and it was the best year of my life. The landlady was very strict; I lived at her place just for a while and later I took a separate room. It was very interesting there. I used to go out on the street at sunset and I watched Paris life; it was wonderful. I was a beautiful girl and people were very tolerant and accepted everything; I was from the Orient. However, I immediately turned towards the Bulgarians there. I was in the subway and two men, standing behind me, were talking, ‘Shall we try talking to her or not?’ And I turned, and said in Bulgarian, ‘No, you won’t talk to me, I’ll talk to you!’ So, they told me where the Bulgarians met. They were a great company. It included Iliya Beshkov, and Nenko Balkanski, an artist called Popov. [These are all eminent Bulgarian artists.] There was a little restaurant, which worked as a canteen also. Popov had painted it all. Stefan Sarchadjiev [a distinguished Bulgarian theater director] was there on a specialization. The great director, Krastyu Mirski, was studying there too. There were more modest people as well who had left Bulgaria because of their leftist political orientation. The company was really nice and we got together every evening.

In Sofia I had a good company of girls, friends of mine. They were all Jews. All of them were university graduates: engineers, dentists, etc., and we had all been friends since our high school years. I met my husband, Nisim Levi, in that company. He was the only one in that circle who had graduated in medicine, and who was sent to different villages all the time. We used to write to each other regularly. It was like that for three or four years; we were always separated, up and down the country. He was a Komsomol 5 worker in the villages of Kesarevo, Kilifarevo, and Dobromirka. He was enthusiastic about the Komsomol work. He continued his work in the villages after 9th September 1944 6 and then he was sent to Sofia. He started working here. We got married in 1945. Civil marriages before the registrar were introduced then.

I didn’t get married according to the Jewish tradition and my husband and I even decided to have a wedding without any ceremonies. There were no clothes, nothing. There are Jewish women who know the Jewish rituals but I’m not acquainted with it. Our wedding was very simple. I borrowed a dress of my mother, which was red and a little bit nicer than the others I had, and we went to the registrar. We couldn’t even do it on Sunday; it was Monday then. We went to a pastry shop with two friends, and then in the evening my mother killed a couple of chickens and cooked them and some people helped with the cooking. There was no other meat in those days. We ate chicken with rice and some cake; it was a very simple party. We gathered right here in this apartment but there was a door and the space was turned into a big hall.

In the beginning, we lived with my parents, then they died and then we lived with our children. We lived in Sofia during the Holocaust. There was another block of apartments opposite ours where a woman called Michkuevska lived. She was a tailor and lived with her parents. She had a fine apartment but she decided she wanted to have our apartment and we had to leave. That was before the Jews were interned in masses 7 and there was no [yellow] star 8 yet. She decided this and she made us leave. One day a man came here and said, ‘You’ll have to leave, because a lady from the palace wants to live here.’

We were among the first people who were driven away. We went to my uncle’s place. When restrictions for Jews to live in the center of the city were accepted, we were sent to live beyond Hristo Botev Boulevard; that was the boundary. Our family was ordered to leave for Pazardjik. We were about to be interned there when an order from my father’s bosses came stating that the factory couldn’t function without him and he had to be mobilized to return here, so we came back, but in the other quarter. Probably we could have taken some steps to get back to Karnobat, as we would have been allowed.

Air raids here were really horrible. I believe the first bombing was on 31st January 1944. Then there was another on 30th March and several smaller ones between these two. We lived at my uncle’s place and he was very curious. When an air raid was about to begin, he called me, ‘Mati, come to the roof and see how the entire Sofia is lit up.’ Sofia looked really beautiful. Then we walked in the ruins and jumped over the ditches.

We came back here after 9th September 1944, but my father couldn’t cope with many things. We came back to our old apartment. We were told that nothing could be done because she [the neighbor who had taken their apartment] was a worker. She was also a king’s woman; she was indeed a king’s woman, because her mother had been Ferdinand’s lover. She was a very refined lady, with a small hat with a veil on it, always on high heels. Her husband was an army officer. She used to say, ‘I’m a worker.’ She sewed complicated things. We did nothing bad to her, but she was very unpleasant. She left a great mess in the apartment but in the end she left it.

I couldn’t graduate from Law. I finished all the semesters because I had friends who signed my student’s book for me but I couldn’t go in for the examinations because I was a Jew, but I passed most of the exams. I enrolled into a course in Russian, sometime after World War II, and then I taught in different institutions. I know French. I spoke German because I studied it in high school.

At some point, I cannot remember the year, I moved to accounting. After I retired I worked for another ten years. First, I became a guide of Russian tourist groups. I traveled all over Bulgaria with the Russian groups and it was very interesting for me. I have seen unbelievable drinking-parties. Russians drink remarkably! On the next day the person in charge used to collect them and scolded them and they were so quiet. Then, for some time, I looked after my grandchildren but I was still working.

My elder son, Roni Levi, became an associate professor in mathematical analysis. I think he has inherited his talent from my kin. He had the best results when he graduated from high school. He was the most competent student in mathematics in the school. He was always absent, he always wandered somewhere. He should have been expelled because of the high number of absences but how could they do without their best student! My other son, Yosif Levi, works in the Bulgarian Academy of Science. He learned English in high school and started working as an interpreter. Now he’s engaged in it. He translates books. My two sons have two children each. One of the grandsons went to America. The second went to Israel and the third studies in Japan. One of my daughters-in-law, Mila Kozhuharova, is a doctor: an epidemiologist. The other one is already a pensioner.

Glossary:

Lilia Levi

Bulgaria

Violeta Kyurdyan 

2001

I know both my grandfathers. My maternal grandmother died very early and I didn’t know her. My grandfather married a second time.

My mother, Lora Baruh is from Kiustendil. My maternal grandfather, Moshe Baruh, was a very religious man and assisted with the services at the synagogue. He had become a widower with two children – girls -fairly early and married a second time to a woman who didn’t have any children. My two uncles were born afterwards. His second wife Ventura hadn’t been married before. Honestly, I found out very late that my grandma wasn’t my mother’s real mother. When I grew up Mum told me the story about her mother who had died having a miscarriage. Their stepmother Lili’s grandpa’s second wife raised all the kids in fact.

My mother wanted to continue her studies after she finished school, but her stepmother Ventura told her that it was not necessary for a woman to study anymore and that she had already been educated enough. She had a great desire to become an obstetrician, but she never managed to. My Mum got married very young. On the day when they [the in-laws] had to take her from Kiustendil, they my Mum and her relatives got to a certain place on the road, somewhere in the middle and my father and his relatives took my mother from that place with carriages to Dupnitza. Weddings used to take place in the synagogues according the Jewish tradition then.

How did my parents meet each other? There used to be traditional meetings between the Jews from Kiustendil and Dupnitza on various occasions. There was a Jewish chitalishte community center in both towns. “Suznanie” the word means Consciousness in Bulgarian –was the name of it in Dupnitsa, and “Dobro budeshte” Nice Future in Kiustendil. Amateur artists from each of the two centers made regular tours from one town to the other. That is how my parents met each other.

We used to go to Kiustendil on most of our holidays. That was an opportunity to see each other. I had an aunt and uncles there. It was a tradition to visit all our relatives when we went on holidays like Rosh Ha shannah there. My grandma had a neighbor who lived downstairs. This woman would have been really cross with us if we hadn’t visited her as well. That is how we grew up, in a fairly Jewish environment.

My father’s parents were both from Dupnitza. I was born there too. My paternal grandparents Isac and Linda Levi, used to live together with us and I spent my childhood with them. My grandfather died in 1942 and my grandmother survived the war. I learned much about our Jewish traditions from them.

My grandfather Isac was a deeply religious man and he used to observe all our traditions. I know our holidays thanks to him. In the Jewish school, we used to give performances on our holidays. I have nice memories of all the holidays from those years, because we used to meet all those people in our family we were close to then. We, children, liked Rosh Hashanah very much, because then we received new clothes, shoes, etc. We liked Purim as well. On that day, we used to put on different masks, and, gathered in small groups, we visited our relatives. Our parents usually made some small bags in which they put money. I cannot explain why they did that. Relatives, whom we visited, also put money in our bags.

For Hanukkah, at the Jewish school they usually gave us small loafs with bun and halvah – a traditional food on that holiday. For Pesach, of course we had a traditional seder. We used to sing traditional songs till late in the night. In those evenings, neighbors without relatives came to celebrate with us. Quite often, people took the table and the dishes and thus they went to their neighbors. Nobody was alone, or only with his own family, on that night.

Grandpa attended synagogue regularly. We used to celebrate all our holidays. He even got out of his sick bed to read the prayer at the table on Pesach. My grandfather had his own set of religious books at home and my father also had his own set. They both had a tallith [prayer shawl]. I don’t remember anyone wearing a tipi [skullcap]. Men would put on a hat when they went to the synagogue. That is definitely how I remember it.

My grandfather didn’t like to go out very much. He was a reserved person and he could hardly stand us – a bunch of children, bothering him with the noise we used to make. Apart from that, he was a good man. I remember that poor people used to come to him and he usually gave them some things from the shop. There were people in our community who were really starving – disabled, lonely people… He was compassionate, but not sociable, in contrast with my grandmother who was a very sociable person. She used to contact many people. She was in touch with her sisters all the time; some of them [her sisters] lived in Dupnitza and one - in Sofia. She had some brothers as well. Their families have always been in contact with each other. We also became close with their parents and their children.

On holidays, especially on Pesach, the whole family used to get together. Usually all the relatives came to our house because there was more space. We were several families and everyone used to bring some food. While my grandfather was alive, he performed the whole ritual. The houses were thoroughly cleaned before Pesach as well as everything inside. The dishes were not simply washed up but even “boiled.” We used copper baking dishes, so if there had been some tin fallen from them, my mother used to send for a tinsmith – usually a Gypsy man – and he would come with his blowing device and would tin all the containers. All the cleaned containers and dishes had to be kept for the Pesach, they had to be paschal, which means cleaned and sanctified especially for the holiday. It is not allowed to eat bread on that holiday, only matzah. The matzah should be put into water first, then squeezed, squashed, and mixed with eggs. After that we make balls from that mixture and fried them. We call these balls burmulikus. They are usually dipped in syrup. Some part of the pastry may be made salty. We also used to make some small loafs of bread from matzah that are called boio in Ladino. Those breads were made of water, flour and salt only and they were extremely hard. We used to eat only that during all the 8 days of Pesach.

My parents and grandparents only ate kosher meat. But the young people changed that. We couldn’t make my grandmother eat pork or anything prepared with fat even during the war, when it was hard to find absolutely anything to eat. Anyway, my mother usually mixed fat with vegetable oil when she was cooking. All the old traditions just faded away after the war. Or the families that really wanted to keep them left Bulgaria.

When I was young families often gathered together for every holiday. For example when a boy was born, all the relatives gathered on the day of its circumcision;,then again for the Bar-mitzvah. If there were weddings, or deaths, my grandmother’s relatives always gathered together.

As far as wedding go, there was such a tradition in the past – if the wedding was supposed to take place on Sunday, all the women together with the future bride went to the baths on Friday. And after that everybody went outside the baths, which were of Turkish type, there was some room for sitting outside, and they had a small party. Afterwards they went to the bride’s house. And the very wedding procedure was taking place at the synagogue. Nowadays young people are restoring this tradition little by little. Recently I went to a wedding only to refresh my memory about how it used to be in the past.

When my grandmother got married, there were a number of things that had to present in the trousseau – among them some coverings, a little bit of Turkish type, made of velvet with gold-thread embroidery, it was called bindali. Some women used to wear dresses made of bindali on their wedding. But it was obligatory to prepare such coverings for cushions and whatnot made of the same material [to have them in the trousseau]. Later it was not necessary that they were made of that material, but still there had to be a personal coverlet, pillow etc., because women used to give birth to their children at home, with the help of a midwife, and in rare cases - of a physician. Hospitals were mainly private at that time. And not only this – it just wasn’t accepted to go to a hospital for the delivery. We were also brought into the world at home. There had to be some clothes for the baby [in the trousseau] as well. Before the wedding, the trousseau was put before the relatives, so that they could see what would the bride bring. Women [usually the bride and her mother] did their best to work out a perfect trousseau. I have seen some underwear with lace and embroidery, a slip, a nightgown, also embroidered from my mother’s trousseau. Sometimes they put a sheet of colored paper under the embroidery in order to make it more contrast and visible. Once I created a splendid blouse from one of mum’s nightgowns. I was a student in the first year at the university and my colleagues were very impressed by that blouse.

Our [Jewish] religious funeral rites require that the deceased person be fully purified, i.e. thoroughly bathed, even internally. There were groups of old people, specialized in that, men for men, women for women, they were called ruhisim. I remember when my grandfather died they came to our house with special plates, large enough to put the whole body on them. According to our Jewish rituals, deceased are buried naked, only covered with a shroud. Before the funeral the closest relatives made kria: they cut away a small piece of the dead person’s clothes that would remind them about him/her in the future. In the past, women didn’t go to the cemetery. Only men did. Women gathered together at home. And after the funeral the family stood “in siete” – the closest relatives (brothers and sisters) sat on cushions on the floor for seven days. Nobody was cooking. Close relatives were coming every day bringing food. These rituals are no longer observed. Even my parent’s generation didn’t observe them.

My grandfather owned a small-ware shop for vegetables and other goods. He had served as a soldier in the Balkan War. My grandmother was a housewife. She used to assist him in his work. Grandpa sold foodstuffs in his shop, and fruit and vegetables as well. He was a retailer. He always stuck firmly to the quality of the goods. I remember that they used to divide nice fruits from fruits with lower quality, and they set a lower price for the latter. I also remember that in the winter they were selling fish as well. I remember a funny incident in this connection. They had just bought some fresh fish and had to pickle it in brine. My two uncles and my father used to assist my grandfather with the work in the shop, for he couldn’t cope with everything alone. The three of them [Lili’s grandfather and her two uncles] went to prepare the brine. And my father was just coming back from school. He was wearing a soft hat. And he decided to help, too. And his hat fell into the brine. It was funny.

The shop wasn’t big, but they had lots of customers. The shop was closed on Saturdays and Sundays. Saturday was a market day in our town. People from the nearby villages brought fruit with their horses or asses that day. My parents usually went there to buy some fruit, although it was not accepted to work on Saturday. My grandfather didn’t go, because he was very strict as far as it concerned religious issues, but my grandmother did. After all, there had to be fruits for selling during the week. In wintertime they worked hard to preserve the fruits, they put them into hay when it was extremely cold. There was a small room in the other house (there were two houses in our yard). They used to put the fruit there and light large braziers with charcoal in the room to prevent the fruits from freezing. They had to work really hard to survive, my grandparents.

My father had two brothers, Leon and Albert. He was the only one from the three of them who succeeded to get a good education. The others had been short of money so they had to start work very early. My father was the oldest and after finishing school, they his parents managed to send him to the university with the help of some relatives. My father was a physician. He had the possibility to go abroad and specialize after graduating from university. Unfortunately, the family had already been deeply in debt so my father had to start work in order to pay off the family debt. My father didn’t serve as a soldier; he was a student at the university at that time. I remember they used to call him to the reserves on a regular basis together with other physicians. My uncles Leon and Albert started work immediately after finishing school. They both worked in the shop, one of them constantly. The other went to a tailor to learn the trade, but he used to assist with the work in the shop in his free time. [After World War II] one of my uncles fell seriously ill and retired on a pension. The other continued his work at a state shop, again as a seller – it was forbidden to have private shops. They had both been soldiers. They are both deceased now, but they have families – one of them has a daughter, she is a physician, too, she is married and has two girls. They all live in Israel now. The girls are married as well. My other uncle has three sons who also live in Israel. They moved there after his death. Their mother stayed here for a while and later she also went there.

My grandparents Isak and Linda Levi had contacts with other Jewish people. Many of them The Jews in Dupnitza lived in the Jewish quarter. Our house was in the center of the town on the main street. We had lived in another house before - a smaller and an older one, which was situated in the rear part of the same yard – that’s where I was born and where we all had lived together in our childhood years – my paternal grandparents, my two uncles and my father’s family. Afterwards we moved to the new house. My father did some reconstruction after he bought it from some friends. He bought it on the investment plan. It was a two-floor house. On the first floor, there were only stores. We had three rooms, a kitchen, and a hall in the middle. The original kitchen was facing south and happened to be the sunniest room in the house. So, my father reorganized one of the north rooms and made it a kitchen. It was a fairly large room and usually it was the best-heated room and my brother and I used to stay there. The other rooms were heated late in the afternoon, before we went to bed. We couldn’t afford to heat the whole house, because it was big and with very high ceilings. There was a toilet in the house, but there wasn’t a bathroom. We used to go to the public baths. There were some baths very close to our house; they called them the Jewish baths, because they were in the Jewish quarter. They were granted on lease to different families that were managing them. Even when my daughter was born, these baths still existed and her grandmother used to take her there. It was not until my brother graduated from the university and came back home that he made some reconstruction work and then a bathroom was made in our house. We used a coal burning stove for heating. Later on my two uncles got married and left the house. My grandparents stayed to live with us. When my grandpa died in 1942 grandma went on living with us.

My grandparents spent most of their time working at the shop. In the past, they used to make vermicelli at home and the so-called tarana, something like couscous [a kind of paste in the form of tiny little balls]. It was a really hard work, which had to be done in a single day. First, they kneaded the dough. Then, after it dried up a little, they rubbed part of it between their palms to make the couscous. They rolled out the other part forming thin sheets, then folded it many times and cut them with a knife, making thus the vermicelli. Every family prepared some winter supplies, because only few things could be found in the stores. We used to make plum jam, treacle. We used to make different sauces – tomato sauce, for example, and other different things from peppers. We didn’t sterilize [as we usually do nowadays]. We regularly used to dry the peppers. That is why women from the neighborhood used to gather and work together.

The atmosphere at home wasn’t always calm, especially when my uncles were there, but… One of my uncles was a little bit strange. When my mother’s relatives visited us, he was irritated and was trying to cause some little troubles. Apart from that, there weren’t conflicts at home, despite the fact we were a big family. Nowadays children want to have separate rooms for themselves; everyone wants to have his own desk to write on, etc. My brother and I used to study in the kitchen, because there was no heating in the other rooms. That was the kind of life we lived until we graduated. Thanks God we both did it well and became physicians.

There were some girls coming from the nearby villages to take care of us when we were children. My parents had to hire these girls because our house was really big. My father had a consulting office in the house, my grandfather’s shop was downstairs and there was a lot of housework as well. These girls used to come and work for food and clothes. Many of them wore their traditional dresses, as you’ll see in the pictures. When my brother was born, there was a maid who was extremely clean and tidy. Her dress was always shining white as the snow. People were turning round to look at her on the street. Later she got married but she stayed close to my parents. Her daughter came to Dupnitza to study years after that and she stayed at my mother’s. She kept on visiting them. She was like a member of our family. There was always a girl helping with the housework. And we used to hire a woman for the bigger cleansing. It was impossible for a single person to maintain such a big house. At present, my daughter-in-law [who lives in the same house] hires a woman when she wants to do a big cleansing.

My mother was a housewife, so it was mainly her that was doing the cooking, but my grandmother also took part for some dishes. She [Lili’s grandma] was very good in preparing pastry. I hadn’t prepared any winter supplies until Mum died. She used to say that I won’t need to prepare it as soon as she could do this and that I would have to decide whether I would go on doing that or not. She was extremely dedicated. And she was very skillful – knitting, needlework, fancywork, everything. She was very good in fillet work. I still keep many things made by her. Women used to gather together for handiwork in those days. I remember Mum sewed the underwear for the whole family for many years.

My father loved to read. He was always with a book in his hands. Even at the end of his life when he couldn’t walk any more he was constantly reading and was aware of all the novelties concerning his job. My mother also loved to read very much. And she was also a very sociable person. After the War [World War II] she started with social activities.

I have one brother who is younger than me. He was a child when the War [World War II] broke out. He was only 10. He also went to the Jewish school first. Then the bombardments started and we left for Sv.Vrach. He was a lively child. He was playing with all the other kids in the neighborhood. But he was a very good student. He finished high school and then became a medical graduate. He went to work in a village as a physician and then started work in our town [Dupnitsa]. His wife is from Blagoevgrad. She is an assistant pharmacist. She wanted to become a pharmacist graduate, but she got pregnant. I even remember that she came here [in Sofia] to pass her first exam and caught flu. Then my brother decided she had studied enough. They have a son who is also a physician, as well as his wife – we are a big medical family. Their son is now in the first class at the Jewish school. He has lived with his grandmother in Dupnitsa till now and he came here recently but he still cannot adapt himself. He hadn’t spent a lot of time with his parents. My brother is a very sociable person. It doesn’t take him a long time to establish contacts with people. He had to work in Varna for several years. He worked as ship-doctor as well. Thus, he visited many countries. In fact, that was the main reason to accept that job. Otherwise, it was impossible to travel. He is retired now. He lives in Dupnitsa. Recently they called him to Belogradchik, as they needed a surgeon there. They asked him again to go there about a month ago. His son is here [in Sofia].

We spoke in Ladino at home. That was the language we knew best My daughter speaks a little Ladino also, because her grandmother raised her while her brother attended kindergarten.

I graduated from a Jewish school. It was only till 4th grade. We studied everything there, including Hebrew language, exactly the same way as they do at my granddaughter’s school now. We went to synagogue every Friday evening when I was a student at the Jewish school. There were some parts of the service in which we took part in. My grandmother was very proud that I sang in the temple. After the Jewish school, we went to schools for primary education

There was a choir at “Saznanie” institution the Jewish community center and many young people used to sing there. I have many sweet memories of that time. I learnt many songs there, not only Jewish. The conductor was very good and he became famous later. I have heard his name many times after that.

My parents used to sing in the choir and got together with friends. There was a place - they called it “The Casino,” I don’t know why, for it wasn’t a casino at all. It was something like a café. My parents used to go there in the evenings to meet some friends. Sometimes they would let us go with them, and we used to get a piece of Turkish delight there. When they went without us, they always promised to bring us a piece of cake if we behaved as “good children.”

Mum wasn’t a vain woman. She demonstrated a refined taste in her clothing. Before the War [World War II] women didn’t walk around without hats, and her hat was always chosen according to the season and to the case. My parents liked music very much, so I was a little child when they started to take me to concerts and operas. The “Ivan Vazov” State Theatre [it usually performs in the capital now] used to tour throughout the country in those years, so I have seen their performances in Dupnitsa, on the stage of the chitalishte [community center]. Later, when we came to Sofia, we used to go to the opera. And people were very elegant when they went to the opera. And if it was wintertime, there they put on the so-called shushon [kind of waterproof boots] over their shoes and took them off before going into the hall. In the past, especially in my student years, it was a real event to go to the theater or to the opera, because it was very hard to buy tickets. Theater halls were always full.

I am a sociable person by the way. I used to have many friends, most of them were Jewish girls, but there were others also. My first unpleasant experience with the Law for Defense of the Nation was when I graduated from high school. There was a tradition in our town that the best students, who finished junior high school, received their certificates at a special ceremony at the community center. I was one of those students, so we all got dressed and headed for the school. The school director called us in his room and told my father that he was very sorry but he had received an order that I shouldn’t be given my certificate at the ceremony. That was in 1942-1943. Of course, that was a real tragedy for me and I kept crying the whole day, my parents would do anything to console me – they even brought me to a confectionery!

Then it was time to enter a high school. There were certain quotas for us - the Jews. Practically the only students with very high grades managed to enter high school. There were other Jews in our class. Classes at school were formed according to the foreign language that we wanted to study. And, as we [Jews] were ill disposed towards German because of all the sufferings we had borne, we were all inscribed in a French parallel [a class for students studying French as a foreign language]. We were all girls at the same age. And we are still friends. I even meet those who are still here from time to time. There were Bulgarian girls who were our friends as well. We entered high school in the years of the War [World War II]. There were different youth organizations then – Brannik, etc. Our classes took place in the afternoon. And sometimes electricity cut off and [as it was too dark to see] our teacher used to make us sing. Usually girls who were members of Brannik insisted that we sing their songs [songs of their organization]. But we didn’t. I remember one day a girl stood up and said: “Madam, Jews and communists don’t sing.” There was a classmate of mine who was a little pushy and she was brave enough to answer “Let’s sing some song that we all want and can sing.” Out of school most of my friends were Jews, maybe because we lived close to each other. As far as it concerns the subjects we studied, from the very beginning I liked mathematics. Our math teacher was a very nice person. Sometimes you like the subject because you like the teacher. And I had another teacher who was teaching Geography. He wanted to rate my work with a lower mark. I don’t remember why. There was a school-leaving examination for students with lower marks. So, I was forced to pass that final exam because I needed high scores to have better chances when applying to the university.

Not far from Dupnitza is Separeva Bania, a town where there are mineral springs. All the adults enjoyed going there very much. We – the children – often went there to play. We didn’t go anywhere else on vacation, because my father was always busy and he couldn’t leave his patients. There are still people who tell me that my father had been their mother’s doctor and their own doctor also. He usually used to take care of the whole family. He was something like a GP.

Both my parents loved mountaineering. We climbed mountains regularly, mostly the Rila Mountain. My father even organized groups who went to the mountain together. We have gone to the Rhodope Mountains together with a group. My mother used to complain a lot that she couldn’t find any time for herself, a time for a real vacation. There was a time when my father worked at the Social Insurance Fund. They used to send groups of employees to a holiday house in Samoranovo village in Rila Mountain. The doctors who went together with those groups had the right to take their families together with them. So for 2 or 3 consecutive years we went there on vacation. We liked it very much to do marches in the mountain. I saw the sea for the first time in my life after the 9th of September 1944.

There was a train passing through our town, and there were cars as well. There were buses traveling from Dupnitza and Kiustendil. During the war [World War II], on their way back from the bombings on Sofia, the planes dropped several bombs on my town. Fortunately, I wasn’t in there at that moment. I was at my aunt’s in Kiustendil together with a close friend of hers. We wanted to go back to Dupnitza, but there were no buses, nothing. I remember a private driver agreed to drive us with his car and as there were many other people traveling in the same car I had to sit in this woman’s [her aunt’s friend] lap. The bombs ruined a lot in a short time. Many people died, there were our compatriots among them as well.

Repression against us [Jews] began in 1943. We started wearing badges – every Jew at the age over 14 had to wear the yellow star; we couldn’t go out after 9 o’clock in the evening. Later, when the deportations began, the military trains with Jewish people from Macedonia passed through our town. They put these people in tobacco warehouses for a day or two. It was announced that clothes and blankets had to be gathered for them. Many of our compatriots responded to that request. Carriages full of clothes and blankets were gathered, but nothing was given to them in fact. People told us that they went closer and threw some food to these people over the fence for they were starving.

Soon after that, an order came that we should be kept inside our homes for an indefinite period of time. My father was sent to Radomir. There he and another Jewish physician organized a meeting place for all the people who were supposed to leave for the camps. That was the first time that I saw my Dad crying. He was a really tough man. He warned us that we might never see each other again. So he left and we stayed alone with our mother. My grandmother was with us too. She and my mother sewed bags for us to carry things in. They didn’t know where we were going to be sent. We all thought that we were going to be sent to the labor camps. We had no idea of the truth.

There was a man, an old friend of my father’s - a pastry-cook. He had come to Dupnitza from the Aegean region with his family. He was a very good man. I remember that our house could be accessed from the narrow street in the back and he came and spoke to my mother. Later she retold us what he had already told her. He said that the place where we were about to be sent wasn't a good one. He proposed that we - the children stay with him and promised to find a place to hide us.

Only children under the age of 14 had the right to go out to buy bread. And one day - my 14th anniversary had already passed, but really not long before - I decided to go to the Jewish bakery, which was nearby. Grandma told me to buy a loaf of bread for her sister too and bring it to her because she had no children. She lived some 100 meters away from our house. The bread was already in my hands when a group of brannik soldiers stopped me. There was a classmate of mine among them. One of them asked me rudely where I was going. I answered that I was out to buy some bread. He said that I was obviously not 14 years old. I turned to my classmate and said that she knew my age exactly because we had been classmates. Then in the same rude manner they told me to go with them straight away. They took me to their headquarters. Their chief wasn’t there. I had been waiting for him until noon when he received me. He started to swear and warned me that if I went out again nothing good awaited me. Meanwhile my poor mother was having a horrible time not knowing where I was. About a week later we got the message that our deportation was canceled.

My father got to come back, but the chief of his camp kept them in the camp for an two extra days, just to abuse them. After that he was sent as a doctor in the Jewish labor groups who worked on the railway line – a wide gauge track was under construction on the place of the narrow gauge one. Some time after that he was moved to Sveti Vrach near the town of Lom. We also went there and stayed till the 9th of September 1944.

The truth is that ordinary people weren’t bad to us. Most of our classmates at high school didn’t make a difference between them and us. And we never thought of ourselves as different from the others. We only observed our traditions. We knew that on New Year’s Eve, for example, we received new shoes, new clothes or something like that. My mother had many Bulgarian friends. My father kept contacts with many Bulgarian colleagues.

We lived in rather miserable conditions in Sveti Vrach. The place was half a town, half a village. We hardly managed to find a place to live and practically we lived four people in a single room, which was big enough for two beds only – one for my parents and one for my brother and me.

There were only one or two Jewish families there. Our first contacts were with them. Later on many of our compatriots came to work on the railway as laborers and technicians. We used to gather at one of the Jewish families, especially on Jewish holidays. We celebrated according to our means. Once, I remember they weren’t sure about the exact date of a certain holiday so we arrived at a compromise [about the date to celebrate].

Nobody treated us in a different manner. We didn’t have to wear badges there. The only thing was that we couldn’t do was to leave the town without a special permission from the police. It had been like that since the Law for Defense of the Nation was accepted. Only once, when my grandma got her eyes operated on [for she had a cataract], my mother accompanied her. Nobody else left the town till the 9th of September 1944 when we all went back home in Dupnitza.

My mother has always told us that we should have our own profession and be independent. She said she had never been deprived of anything, but every time she had needed something she had to ask my father and tell him about it. There was another thing that she kept on telling - and that was because she had always lived in a big family – first with my father’s parents, then when my brother got married she lived with his family. She used to say that I had to consider these words of hers as a testament to me. She told me never to live with my children when they are already married. She told me always to do my best to help them but live separately. My father was strict and tough, but he had never raised his hand to beat me. We have always taken his opinion into consideration, but he was smart and he has never tried to work his will. For example, he has never meddled when we had to choose profession, although both of us [Lili and her brother] became physicians. There was a time when my brother, who has a good taste for music, declared he was going to study music. My father only told him that a musician cannot take care of a family, but my brother gave up the idea all by himself.

I graduated high school in 1946. I applied to the university in 1947, but I wasn’t admitted. I managed to enroll in 1948. I became a student in medicine in Sofia. [As a student] I lived together with another girl in lodgings. It was a tough period for me - there was a problem with heating, we could use only a limited amount of wood, coal etc. Moreover, there was a rationing system. If our parents hadn’t sent us some food, we would have been lost. The rationing was canceled in 1952. When I was a third year student, my brother enrolled in the university too and from then on we lived together. My father kept sending money to us and we did our best to survive with it, while Mum used to send us some food.

As my father hadn’t succeeded to take a specialty before the War, he signed up for a course after the War. I was a student in the 4th year then, and he had enrolled a course in internal diseases and was sitting in our classes. My colleagues would tease us that “father and daughter were studying together.” He passed the exam and became a chief of the internal department and then head physician at the hospital in Dupnitza.

I graduated in 1952 and I got married the same year. My husband Mois Rahamim is from Sofia. I had a colleague at the university who got married before me. Her husband had some friends. We started to go out together, most often for a walk in Vitosha Mountain. That is how I met Mois. Practically almost every boy from that group got married to a friend of mine. And we kept our contacts afterwards. Our children became friends too. Unfortunately some of them are now dead. But I still meet their wives. When our children were little we were inseparable, our children grew up together and they are still friends. And now the “Zdrave” club in the Jewish cultural house provides us a wonderful opportunity to see each other more often.

My husband worked in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He got discharged right after Stalin’s death. Many compatriots there at the Ministry had the same destiny. My husband was really very embarrassed, but later he was employed at NarMag short for Public store, state trade institution. He had started work very early, because my father-in-law had been ill [he had raised cows] and they hadn’t had enough money. My husband had a brother and two sisters – the three of them were twins. His brother was killed as a partisan together with his wife. His sisters are younger than he is. They all started work very early and they finished night school.

We have two children – a daughter and a son. Zelma Mois Levi and Yosif Mois Levi My daughter is a physicist, she works in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and my son is an engineer; he works in the Telecommunication Company.

Before the War [World War II], there were many religious obstacles for mixed marriages. If a Jew decided to marry a Christian, he had to convert. And I know people who have become Christians in order to get married. But later mixed marriages between Bulgarians and Jews have become something usual. It became more and more rare to see couples that are entirely Jewish. There are many people now who are not Jews who feel like Jews no less than their husband or wife.

My father was rather opposed to the idea of moving to Israel. When the emigration process began in 1948 he told us that we should not even mention it and that he would never agree to go there. At that time there were two groups – the Zionists and the others. The relations between these groups, at least in our town, were hostile. They the “others” thought the Zionists were nationalists. And my father was a member of the Comsomol Young Communist League, then a member of the Communist Party. He told us that even if we went to live in Israel we should not expect that my mother and he would go with us. That is why we stayed. We made our life here, found a job and we were no longer thinking of emigration. But honestly I am a little sorry that we didn’t go when our children were little, it would be different, but… Thank God, they graduated successfully and set up.

I have a bad memory – they ruined the synagogue in our town, and it was a very beautiful synagogue, with a nice interior design, but most of all, with marvelous acoustics. The War finished and they decided to make a store out of it, and afterwards they decided to destroy it. While they were destroying it, as my nephew told me, they found some clay pots built in the walls from which that splendid acoustic must have been coming from. I am deeply sorry that they did that stupid thing to the synagogue, it was a great monument.           

Translated by Violeta Kyurdyan

Sofia

Bulgaria

Interviewer: Dimitar Bozhilov

Date of interview: October 2004

Professor David Kohen is among the most respected Jews in Bulgaria. His long years of work in the State Central Archive are internationally recognized. He inspires with respect with his clear and objective point of views on the events his life made him a witness to during the whole 20th century. He thinks of himself as a happy man, because of his relatives, friends, as well as the opportunity to have a profession and vocation that gives sense to his life even at present. 

My ancestors came from the Sephardic 1 branch of Jews who were expelled from Spain 2 in 1492 by King Fernando and Queen Isabela because they didn’t want to be baptized. Jews crossed the Mediterranean by boats to reach Northern Africa; many of them, however, by land through Southern France and Italy, went to the Balkan Peninsula, where the Ottoman dynasty ruled. [Editor’s note: The Sephardim mainly settled in Ottoman maritime cities, first of all Salonika, today Greece. They probably went there by sea and less typically by land.]. The Jews were warmly received there. The Ottoman rulers then needed their knowledge in the field of medicine and handicrafts. [A typical occupation of the Balkan Sephardim was textile production and trade.] According to some reports, there were even advisors to the sultan who were Jews. The Jewish people were granted the right of freedom of religion, which was very important to them. [According to the Sharia (Islam religious code), the Muslim state was to tolerate all people of monotheistic faiths. As a result Muslims, Jews and Christians coexisted relatively peacefully within the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years.]. So they remained within the borders of the Ottoman Empire.

Jews who came to live in the Bulgarian territory 3 came chiefly from Salonika, Adrianople and Istanbul [both today Turkey]. There a compact mass of Jewish people lived, and as far as I know my paternal and maternal grandparents came from Adrianople. In Bulgaria they found a place granting them full religious freedom, which they needed very much, as well as the right to practice their professions. [The territory of Bulgaria was an integral part of the Ottoman Empire up until 1878.] Here, as it was in Spain, they were detached from land and didn’t occupy themselves with agriculture. Their professions were connected with the city life; they were into handicrafts and small trade. Since they had relations with many of their coreligionists throughout Europe, part of them managed to establish profitable connections with large Jewish centers such as Rome, Vienna, and Paris.

My paternal grandmother and grandfather, Luna Kohen and Yuda Kohen, were grocers in Plovdiv. My maternal grandfather, Aron Mori, was engaged in production of confectionery in Nova Zagora. I have heard my father, Bucco Kohen, bantering with my mother, Klara Kohen, that her family promised to give him a wagon of sugar in dowry, but he never caught a glimpse of that wagon. Of course, there was no such wagon at all. It was just that my father had a very good sense of humor.

My father told me that in the mornings, before he went to school, he used to put a tray full of snacks on his head, which had been prepared by my grandfather. He would go to the market to sell them, and it wasn’t before it that he would go to school. Thus he helped his family, which wasn’t small at all. They were four brothers and one sister. My father was born in 1888, most probably in Samokov. He died in 1982. He was the eldest son in the family. One of my father’s brothers, David Yuda Kohen, died during World War I 4 in French captivity. According to my father, he was killed by Bulgarian soldiers who envied him for allegedly being in a privileged position before the Frenchmen since he spoke French very well. We can’t be sure if that was exactly the case. I don’t know where my father got this information from. Another brother of his, Israel Kohen, immigrated to France at the beginning of the century and was captured with his wife during the fascist years. His daughter and my cousin Jacqueline happened not to be at home by chance; she was with a friend. Her parents were taken to Auschwitz where they were gassed.  

My father’s last brother, Samuil Kohen, ran a grocery store in Haskovo, next to Boff railway station. I don’t now when exactly Uncle Israel immigrated to France, but it was at the beginning of the 20th century. He left in search of a better job. He was a white-collar worker. My cousin Jacqueline, his daughter, showed me the recommendation letters he had when he changed jobs with different companies. He had been recommended as a clerk who worked consciously. I have seen a picture of him on a beach in Marseilles where they first lived. He changed his name in France from Israel Kohen to Jacques Kohen. His wife’s name was Victoria Kohen. They both died on 16th September 1942. He was only 39 years old. His daughter, Jacqueline, managed to move to Algeria during the war to stay with a maternal uncle, who was an industrialist there. She worked as a blue-collar laborer there for a while and returned to France after the war ended. There she married a Frenchman: Henry Chevalier. They have a very nice family with three children: two boys and a girl.   

My father grew up in Plovdiv, where he studied at the Alliance Israelite Universelle 5 up to the seventh grade. He studied accountancy on his own and started working as a white-collar worker with various companies. His work required him to move to Nova Zagora, where he met my mother and married her. I was born in Nova Zagora, while my two brothers, Aron Kohen and Leon Kohen were born in Haskovo.

My father married my mother, Klara Kohen, nee Aron Mori, in Nova Zagora in 1915. My mother was born in 1889 and died in 1958. At one of the annual meetings of Balkan Sephardi Jews [The ‘Esperanza’ festival of culture and creative work of Balkan Sephardi Jews was set up in Sofia in 1998. It’s held every two years under the auspices of Joint. Up to now, it has taken place thrice in Sofia and once in Belgrade with participants from Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Croatia and Turkey.], I mentioned this family name and one of the participants exclaimed that there was a family carrying the same name in Adrianople. I can’t say where my mother was born for sure. Maybe she was born in Nova Zagora, where she lived with her parents and where she met my father, but it’s also possible that she was born in Adrianople, where her parents had moved from. 

I hardly remember my maternal grandfather, Aron Mori, but I can recall my grandmother, Mazaltov Mori, very well. She was a very religious woman. There was an interesting incident that took place in Haskovo shortly before Pesach. The whole house was to be cleaned up perfectly, of course. There shouldn’t have remained even a single crumb of bread or speck of dust. She carried out a special inspection of the house lest a crumb of bread had remained. A special check up of the whole house was conducted. All the dishes were washed and polished to brilliance with boiling water, soap and sand, and then they were put into a special cupboard so that nobody could touch or pollute them. Once it happened that the dishes were put into the cupboard, but there was a pot of jam in it. I liked jam and I took a spoon and had a bite. My mother saw this and she told my grandmother who had all the dishes brushed anew, washed and dried, because of my touching the cupboard where the dishes for Pesach were put.

My grandmother used to visit us often for long hours and on Saturdays as well. My mother was also very religious and she didn’t work on Saturdays, she also wouldn’t touch money nor would she kindle a fire on Saturdays. When she was with us on Saturdays, she hired a Turkish girl of our neighbors to switch on the light at night. I used to ask her if it was a great sin to switch on an electric light. She would confess it was, and I would then ask her why she always made this girl commit a sin. She couldn’t answer. This and some other events made me start alienating from her, in contrast to my other grandmother whom I loved very much.

We lived in Nova Zagora only for a couple of years after I was born; I have only one memory of this time. We used to live in a rented apartment in the building of a vet doctor, Vitanov. This name was often repeated in my family. Our kitchen was exactly above theirs, and there was a hole in the floor so my family could directly speak with the Vitanovs. They didn’t have children and often had rows. But in my presence they would always cool down. They wanted to have children very much, that was all. My mother told me she had often sent me to them and this settled down the disagreements between them every time.

There was no Jewish neighborhood in Nova Zagora. In Haskovo the Jewish neighborhood had between 600 and 800 inhabitants. There was a self-contained Jewish community and no Jews lived outside the neighborhood.

My father was the deputy mayor of Nova Zagora in 1919, because the legally elected mayor had been arrested in the barracks. The party of the narrow socialists supported him and he was elected mayor of Nova Zagora. Bulgaria’s socialist party 6 had split into narrow and broad socialists. The narrow ones were with Dimitar Blagoev 7, while the broad ones were with Yanko Sakazov [Sakazov, Yanko (1860-1934): socialist leader, elected Member of Parliament eleven times from 1894 to 1934, participant in the Socialist International. In 1918 he became Minister of Trade, Industry and Labor and introduced the eight-hour working day. Sakazov started the construction of the first state workers’ home for miners in Pernik, and initiated projects for developing measures for the protection of children and women workers]. After he became the mayor, a woman assistant told him that representatives of the municipal administration didn’t work. My father was surprised and asked about the reason. She told him that up to that day it was routine for every new mayor from any party to fire all the employees of the administration and to appoint new people from his own party for their positions. Then he gathered the salaried staff and told them he would assess them only by their work, nothing else mattered, so that they could calmly continue doing their work. The people calmed down and took on their tasks.

My family moved to Haskovo in the early 1920s and I lived there until 1945. I have unforgettable memories from my childhood years and I’ll keep them for the rest of my life. Those two events: the one with the repeated dish cleaning for Pesach, and that with the Turkish girl, who was hired to switch on the light, as well as another one, which took place when I was in the first or second grade, determined me as a life-long atheist. The third one was as follows: A wooden box for pens, pencils and rubbers was stolen in my classroom. The box belonged to a girl whose father was the wealthiest Jew in Haskovo. He was a patron of the Jewish community and the synagogue. Our teacher panicked that the girl’s father may learn about the theft. He started persuading us to give back the box, with no success. And as a last resort he told us he would bring us to the synagogue, which was in the Jewish school’s schoolyard, he would make us stand in front of the bimah, and every one of us would have to swear that he or she hadn’t stolen the box. God would punish the liar by sending him an immediate thunderbolt. We were curious to see how the thunder was to fall from the skies. Then, in front of the synagogue, we had to form a queue and our teacher asked for the last time who had stolen the box. Nobody answered and he changed his mind and scattered us to go home. He didn’t have the guts to make us stand in front of the bimah. Thus into my childish mind crept the question why he didn’t have us enter the synagogue and ask in front of the bimah who had stolen the box. My childish conclusion was then that there was no God at all.

My father was an atheist, but tolerant to religious people. He never mocked at the religiosity of my mother or my grandmother. He was a broad-minded person. He was the chairman of the Jewish community in Haskovo. He would always put on a praying shawl for the high Jewish holidays. He also had a prayer book. We used to wear hats in those days, regardless whether there were caps or bowler hats; the important thing was that the head was to be covered. We didn’t have kippot then. It wasn’t a part of the Bulgarian Jews’ everyday life then. Kippot were introduced here after 9th September 1944 8 as an instance of influence from Israel. I recently saw a Bulgarian movie called ‘Journey to Jerusalem,’ directed by Ivan Nichev, it was about the rescue of a Jewish girl during the war [WWII], and the Jews were wearing kippot there, which was simply not in line with the lifestyle in those years.

My parents didn’t know Ivrit and we didn’t speak Ivrit at home. We usually communicated in Bulgarian, but when my parents wanted to hide something from us they spoke with each other in Ladino. I didn’t like that because my mother could start a sentence in Ladino and finish it in Bulgarian; we used to think those days it was Spanish. I wasn’t pleased to hear her putting Bulgarian, Turkish and Ladino words in one sentence.

I have always spoken Bulgarian in my family. I didn’t want to speak the language of my mother intentionally [the mixture of Bulgarian and Ladino], because in my views it was broken Bulgarian. It was just the language of Sephardi Jews that passed through many countries and every one of them imprinted on it part of its own linguistic culture. People passed through Italy and borrowed some Italian words, from Africa they took certain Arabic expressions, others were borrowed from Turkish, and that is how the present-day Ladino was formed. This was the way Ladino became a steady communicational tool between Jews in Bulgarian territories, but not only here. I remember that my father could write in Ladino using a strange alphabet called Solitreo. I begged him to teach me the alphabet, since I thought it might turn useful one day, but he said there were different versions of letters [sic] for designating separate sounds and he couldn’t teach me Solitreo, because he found it too difficult.

In Haskovo we lived in rented apartments. We moved to different places every year or so. My mother was a great housekeeper and cleanliness loving person. When we were to move to a new place she would always stay to the end to brush the wooden floors with hard brush, sand and soap until they literally started shining [Some special stuff called ‘Ikonomia’ with solid quartz granules was used for polishing solid surfaces], so that the people who were to come and live in the place after us might say that a civilized family had lived there before them. I remembered this as one of the burdens of our endless moving from place to place. After that we lived in a house owned by an Austrian company for production of tobacco, ‘Nikotea,’ for which my father worked as chief accountant. It was in the town’s suburbs near the tobacco warehouse. My father was well paid at this company and he also received bonuses. When the Austrian officials came to carry out an inspection, the whole enterprise was alarmed. My father always made a good impression because he kept the books very precisely. The plant’s director was a Jew and his name was Pinkas. His son was my classmate in the Jewish school.

While working as a chief accountant, my father figured out that we needed a house of our own. He decided to become a self-dependant tradesman. Of course, he couldn’t compete with the large companies and their capitals. One day he told my mother about his idea of owning a house. But he didn’t have enough money to carry out his plans. Then my mother went to the sleeping room, turned something over in a chest, found some money and put it on the table in front of him. All this happened in the presence of my second brother, Aron Kohen. My father’s eyes opened wide and he asked her where she had gotten this money from. She said she had saved it from the sums he had given her in order to keep the household. That’s how my father bought a house in Haskovo.

My mother was a really thrifty person. She kept the household alone, and she used to patch our trousers. When we tore our socks, she didn’t buy us new ones immediately. She taught us how to mend them and she checked if we did it the right way. My second brother was the best at mending. We used to wear mended clothes: a ragged spot was mended by a thick patch of threads. We used to sew our collars alone. She had taught us to be well groomed. Once a week each of us had the obligation to clean and polish the shoes of the whole family. There was a special place under the staircase where I gathered all the boots, shoe-creamed them and then polished them. My two brothers also did it. We had to keep the house very clean and every day we brushed the floor covers, because we lived next to the street and there was a lot of dust. My mother didn’t let us throw out any food. There was a sentence she always repeated in such cases: instead of throwing food into the washbasin, throw it into your mouth. 

It was I who started accompanying my mother when shopping and after me, my brothers did as well. There was a ‘village’ market on Saturdays when villagers from the nearby settlements came to sell their goods. My mother would always walk around the whole market to see where the best product was sold at the lowest price. One day a village woman cheated her nicely. My mother had bought a bar of butter, which looked very nice, but when she put it in the water, this was the way we used to keep butter then, she found a small head of cabbage in it. I should confess that I gloated over it a bit, because her pretensions at selecting the right product for a long time tormented me.

We also used to go shopping in the trade street of manufacturers where pupils’ clothes were sold. Sometimes my mother would select something from the top shelf and the shopkeeper had to mount a chair to reach it. My mother looked at the clothes for a long time and we often went out of the shop without having bought anything if she didn’t like the clothes. That she did again and again in several shops, so that I started worrying about the sellers who had a hard time with her. However, they would always see her politely to the front door and invite her to come again.

In Haskovo we were surrounded by Bulgarians, Turks, Armenians, Gypsies, but I never heard a bad word about them at home. We shared the same yard with an Armenian family in Haskovo, and they were good neighbors, I should say. Turkish was widely spoken in Haskovo, because many Turkish people lived there then. My father spoke Turkish very well, I knew a little bit, too. As a whole, Haskovo was an international [multi-ethnic] town and there was no separation between the people.

In Haskovo there was a Jewish school that consisted of four classes and a prep-class. There were as many as 20 pupils in a class. The school building had one storey only: a high ground floor. Once, I remember, I was punished not to go home for lunch for misbehaving. We, the kids then had the so-called gangs: a small group of friends with whom we played and walked around with. The boys from my gang then came and the ‘captain’ of the group put his back under the window so that I stepped on it and managed to escape. I ran home, had lunch and they helped me enter the classroom through the window again. The teachers didn’t realize that I had escaped. Usually we had only half-day classes and I don’t remember why on this day we had classes after lunch, too. 

We had two teachers in Ivrit. The first one, Saul Levi, was a good teacher, but a bad pedagogue. He used to punish us for the least misbehavior. He beat my palms with a steel ruler. We didn’t like him and had our revenges in our own ways. We had slings and our pockets were always full of pebbles. There was a garden near the Jewish school where a local inhabitant, Aunt Vanya, grew vegetables. The garden was at a lower level than the street and was irrigated by this old-fashioned mechanism driven by a donkey. Saul Levi was used to walking along the garden on the street, reading a newspaper. We used to wait for him to pass by, his attention wholly occupied by the newspaper. Then we ordered ‘Fire!’ and shot five or six pebbles onto his back after which we hid. We had some other teachers who used to punish us, but they had milder ways of doing so. 

The Jewish school was a four-year one. After that I attended a Bulgarian three-year junior high school and a Bulgarian five-year high school. In high school the Jews were free not to attend religion lessons. Our rabbi in Haskovo launched a course called ‘Shar Hatorah’ – Gate of the Torah [in Hebrew], where we studied texts from the Bible, and I still remember almost the entire text of the first book in the Bible, which I had then learnt by heart. However, I was curious and used to attend the lectures in Christian religion. I learned by heart all their prayers only from hearing them. Once just before Easter, the teacher wanted to examine one of my classmates in prayers and he, alas, didn’t know them. I whispered it to him, but the teacher heard me. She made me stand up and say not only this prayer, but some others, too. Then she scolded him for not knowing the prayers, as he was a Christian, and I, who was a Jew, knew them perfectly. Christian pupils were on special duties to attend the religious services in the churches on Sundays, and I didn’t have to go. But I always went with the others. I didn’t want to differ from them. 

Zionist ideas were spreading in Haskovo then. I was a member of one of the Zionist organizations, Maccabi 9 until I became a university student. Other organizations were Betar 10, our opponents, and Hashomer Hatzair 11 with which we were on friendly terms. There were organizations of the General Zionists 12 in the town, as well as of the Revisionists, and Betar was the youth revisionist organization. They had one common goal: to set up Israel. General Zionists tolerated Maccabi, which wasn’t very connected with political parties. On high Jewish holidays [on Passover only] we greeted each other with the phrase ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ We wanted to incorporate our language in the Jewish organizations: we used to sing songs in Ivrit, danced Jewish dances, spoke Ivrit as much as we could.

My religious coming of age [bar mitzvah] was when I became 13. I had to learn my speech that I had to make at the tevah, in the synagogue. There the Torah scrolls are kept [read]. I had a text in Ladino, of which I remember only the salutation now, and I studied it for long hours. On my birthday, or on Saturdays, I had to read something from the Torah using a sliver pointer, since one must not touch the scrolls with fingers, after which I made my speech. That happened in the synagogue in the presence of my parents. So I came of age and could form and be part of a minyan: the quorum required for reading prayers [the Torah]. The synagogue in Haskovo was in the schoolyard of the Jewish school. The offices of the Jewish municipality were next to the school, but they looked down the street. Nothing remains now from these buildings, since they were destroyed, most probably because new city plans were developed.

Except for my brothers, I had a sister, too, Mazaltov, who died at the age of two from diphtheria. The doctor didn’t pay attention to her festering coatings in the throat that suffocated her. My mother had a great desire to have a daughter. The most pampered of us was my brother Leon Kohen. There is an expression in Ladino for that: ‘the child of the old age.’ In Ladino it sounds like this: ‘еl ijiko de la chikes’.

My second brother Aron became a doctor. He became a chief inspector in Haskovo’s regional healthcare department, after which he was appointed head of the healthcare department in Kardzhali. My third brother Leon was an examining magistrate on criminal cases and he was promoted to the rank of major at the Ministry of the Interior. We all had the opportunity to study at university, which wasn’t easy in those days. I remember that one day, it was after 9th September 1944, my mother expressed her wish to change the curtains in our house. I asked, ‘Why don’t we buy new ones.’ This happened in the presence of my father and his answer made me feel sorry for having asked at all. He answered that if they had bought everything they wanted to, the three of us wouldn’t have finished our university education. We used to lead a modest life and we never denied ourselves food. 

I enrolled in Varna’s Finance University in fall 1938. My father accompanied me to the town to help me find lodgings. I had a meeting with the rector of the university and I went there in my high school uniform. My father asked him if I could become a student in my school uniform. He said I could, but it would be good if he bought me a red hat for my personal self-confidence. This was my first non-school clothing and it was much later that I had a suit made. So I became a university student in my school uniform. 

In Varna I was a very good student. I found my place in the circle of people attending the Poor Student Canteen. This was an organization of anti-fascist students, while legionaries 13, who attended a different canteen, were supporters of fascism. On 24th May 14, when we were out on manifestation and we were formed in different lines, I realized that we outnumbered them four to five-fold. Representatives of the police came to persuade us to unite the two manifestations. We refused and the police scattered us, but we went in front of Varna’s cathedral on our own.

The university offered four-year courses, but meanwhile Sofia Open University was formed and ours was closed, so many of us found it convenient to complete our education in Sofia. In the third year of our studies we were already in Sofia. Many of the subjects were comparable and we had most of our exams acknowledged there. 

I took all my exams in 1942. I had an ambitious Jewish girl for a colleague. She was from Pleven and her name was Regina Pinkas. We used to revise for our exams together. She had to pass all the exams that semester, because Jews were then no longer allowed to study at universities. It was also possible for us not to be allowed to sit for the exams at all. I also sat for all the remaining exams and passed them all, ten of them. They were really difficult. I stayed with one of my aunts on Dunav Street and in order to go to the university I had to go uphill and I staggered with exhaustion. 

In Sofia I found myself in the circle of the Union of Young Workers 15 at [now called] Emil Shekerdjijski chitalishte 16, which was also known as the Jewish chitalishte. I was there for two years and I did relatively well at university. It was only once that I postponed a June exam for the fall one. I graduated in 1942 and I had just come back to Haskovo when I received the message that I had been mobilized into a [forced] labor 17 group for correction of the river flow of the Haskovska River.

I have written an article on the Jewish forced labor groups. I explained there that the legal basis for the formation of such groups was embodied chiefly in the Law for the Protection of the Nation 18 where there was a strict passage clarifying the status of the Jews as people who couldn’t be summoned to service in the army, but had to serve their time as soldiers in the labor corps. They were set up in January 1942. However, this happened after insistence from the part of the German Labor Front [The National Socialist Party created the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront-DAF) in 1933. The purpose of the German Labor Front was to ensure the political stability of the German labor unions by converting them into a centrally controlled organization lead by National Socialists.], which declared it would cancel all its contacts with Bulgarian labor troops [Construction corps, formed in 1920 by the statesman Alexander Stamboliiski, in order to ensure the rebuilding of infrastructure after the devastation of World War I. Labor troops became an alternative form of the military service, being part of Bulgaria’s armed forces and were created as a subdivision of the Ministry of Public Buildings, Roads and Regional Development. Construction corps existed until 2003, after which they were transformed into a state-owned enterprise.], if Jews were accepted as servants there, Jews weren’t sent to serve in the labor corps, but to separate labor groups set up by a verdict of the Council of Ministers and attached to the Ministry of Public Buildings, Roads and Public Works.

These groups were given separate projects for fulfillment such as corrections of river flows and drying of swamps. The Jewish labor groups were formed only of Jews. Until 1941 Jews weren’t separated in special labor units and took part in the construction corps with everybody else. After their separation in special labor corps they expended hard physical work without any payment in severe field conditions. The main difference between the Bulgarian labor troops and the Jewish ones was that we used to go there in our own clothes and shoes and our work wasn’t considered a military service. These groups were operating throughout the country and each of them was between 200 and 400-men strong. I was first mobilized to make correction on the river flow of the Haskovska River, and after that to Svilengrad to carry out correction on the Kanaliyska River. I also worked for the factory of Georgi Chonev near Haskovo, we dug the bomb shelter under Yamasha [a hill near Haskovo] and we worked there only in the evenings. In 1942 I was with my brothers after which I was sent to Smyadovo while they were in Haskovo.      

The work was hard and most of the guys hadn’t done hard manual labor before. We used picks, spades and wheelbarrows for our work. We had a target of four cubic meters of soil but it was hard to fulfill it every day. As a result of the hard work my hand got infected and I was likely to lose it. The infection was caused by the excessive exercising of pressure on my hand in the area of the wrist. In the evenings I had to visit a surgeon, but he didn’t have the instruments to help me. He froze my hand and he made a section with ordinary scissors. After that I had to go to the hospital to disinfect it for two weeks. Haskovo’s hospital was near the railway station and about one or two kilometers away from the city center. In order to go there I had to ask for permission from the police commander. My father also had to ask permission from this institution so that he could take me there. I was bandaged for a month, but when I got well I had to return to the digging again.

In 1944 I got mobilized in Smyadovo for the construction of the Smyadovo-Veselinovo road. I was in the fourth group of workers out of nine that were building the section. We were accommodated in bungalows and the food was very bad. Our supervisor was an extremely wicked man and he didn’t allow anybody to get detached from work. There were people with malaria among us. A friend of mine suffered from malaria tertiana. The supervisor knew very well when my friend was expected to lose consciousness. Once he asked me to see him to the toilet because he was about to faint. And in fact, we hadn’t taken fifteen steps when he lost consciousness. Even these sick people didn’t get released from work. The situation was similar in all other work groups. There were a lot of Jewish forced labor groups working on the bank of the Danube. Malaria was raging there. Three thirds of the people there were ill. Only few of them, however, were released. For example, around five ill men were released out of 100; the others had to continue working despite the cruel conditions. In my group there was an engineer named Gesharov, who was a tormentor. He used to drag a gun and threaten to shoot us because we couldn’t fulfill the daily target. He worked us until late in the evening and left us without food, so that we could possibly fulfill those four cubic meters of soil.

On 8th September 1944 we heard that the Russian army was nearing. Meanwhile I was sent to work at the office of the water management construction department in Smyadovo. I got an order to prepare a poster for the welcoming of the Russian troops. [On 8th September 1944 there were changes in the Bulgarian government.] I had no political training and I wrote the first thing I thought of. So it read: ‘Welcome, dear guests!’ A man argued that they weren’t guests, but liberators. However, what I wrote was hung as a slogan above the street. First came a reconnaissance automobile with machine-guns fixed to it to see if there were any troops nearby. A crowd of villagers flocked to the car. One of them mounted to one of its footboards and made a speech. There was also a group of women in black head-cloths, who were standing near a well crying. A Soviet officer asked why they cried and he was answered that in the well the bodies of dead anti-fascists had been thrown. We were quite excited on this day.

Motorized infantries came with trucks after that, I managed to mount onto a truck and I went thus to my fourth forced labor group. The guys from these groups were hitch-hiking the trucks; they were jumping into them and singing with joy. It was this way that the forced labor groups were disbanded. I got onto a truck and reached the ninth forced labor group where the guys from Sofia were. The Jews there were playing instruments and dancing ring dances around the Soviet soldiers, who begged to make space for them to move ahead. All of us were enchanted with joy. When I got back to my forced labor group I saw one of the workmen with a knife, who was ready to tear the canvas off our tent. I took his hand and stopped him. He wanted to have his revenge, but I told him it was our property now and didn’t belong to the previous government any more. The people were ready to work off their bad temper on the belongings.

From there I took a cargo train and reached Targovishte, where the family of my girlfriend had been interned. I had met her while studying in Varna. She was from Varna. I stayed there for one day and returned to Haskovo by a cargo train again. At the railway station in Haskovo there were armed guards, who checked us because it was rumored that Colonel Marinov [commander of the Second Rhodopean division of the Bulgarian Army supporting the pro-Nazi government in Bulgaria.], the head of the Second Rhodopean Army was approaching the town. They recognized me and let me in. So, 9th September 1944 found me on my way to my town.

I have always regarded Bulgaria as my fatherland, even when the day came to decide whether to stay or to immigrate to Israel. My wife was then in Varna with our older daughter. I had received a letter from her where she said we should go to build our fatherland. I can still remember what I told her. I said she was free to go whenever she wanted, but I would remain here. She didn’t go, so we made our choice. Years after that it happened that my older daughter, Klara, went to live in Israel. My granddaughter [Viktoria] has a family there and I now have a great-grandson.

After 9th September 1944, my parents lived in Haskovo. My second brother lived in Kardzhali and Dimitrovgrad. He was an anatomy pathologist. My younger brother was a criminal examining magistrate in Haskovo. He was a good expert.

I had had a long correspondence with my girlfriend from Varna and after 9th September 1944 we decided to make a family. We went to Varna, but her father was ill then. In Haskovo my parents weren’t ready for celebrating a wedding, either. So we decided to go to Sliven, where both of us had relatives. We had our wedding there. Meanwhile I joined the Guards Regiment [a military subdivision acting as police] in Haskovo and I was wearing a uniform, but without epaulettes. We couldn’t afford suits and my wife borrowed a bride’s veil, while I wore the uniform. We didn’t have civil marriages then and we called the chazzan to come home, because I had got the flu and had a fever. This was the first Jewish wedding after 9th September 1944 that was carried out in line with all the rituals. We married at a relatives’ house on 20th January 1945. I can’t tell any details because at a certain point I lost consciousness due to the high temperature. 

The Guards’ Regiment scattered the military brigade in Haskovo and started operating at its place [In those days the brigade was a part of the army.] It included the ex-partisan squad ‘Asen Zlatarоv’ [Zlatarov, Asen (1885 – 1936), well-known Bulgarian scientist and public figure. Studied in Geneva, Grenoble and Munich, taught in Plovdiv and later in Sofia. He was an editor of several scientific magazines and the author of studies on literary criticism.] Its commander was Ivan Arakliev. The Guards’ Regiment was a subdivision of both the Defense Ministry and the political administration. Its goal was to strengthen people’s power, as we used to say then. Police headquarters in many parts of the country were captured and there were volunteers among the members of the Union of Young Workers, communists, socialists, representatives of the Agrarian Union 19, that is all representatives of the Fatherland Front 20.  

In February they proposed that I get sent to Varna Military Academy, so that I might receive military education. I declined because I didn’t see my future in the army. My superior said to me that I had to leave.

I came to Sofia and started looking for a job. My wife and I stayed with relatives. An acquaintance recommended me as an administrative director in a plant in the ‘Hadzhi Dimitar’ neighborhood, where they produced combs and buttons. I worked there for two months but I realized that the owners wanted to use me against the workers. The workers insisted on pay raises and improvement of the work conditions and I took their side. Then I got appointed as the director of supplies, but they didn’t give me any previous supplies information. We had hard post-war years and supplies with raw materials were a really difficult thing. I couldn’t handle it and we reached an agreement with the owners to let me leave. 

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.

Hadjinikolov then invited me and proposed to write a dissertation on the ransacking of Bulgarian economy during World War II. I became very enthusiastic and ambitious about it and for two years every day after work I would take my bicycle and ride to the Archive of History Department, where I would read until the library closed. I wrote some 120 pages and gave them to him to review. One day I went to hear his opinion. He started with remarks about many oversights. I went out very unsatisfied with my manuscript. When I calmed down I continued working for another year, after which I managed to defend my dissertation on Bulgaria’s economy during World War II.  

The chairman of the State Archive, Michail Alexiev, insisted that we all speak one major European language, so he invited paid teachers for us. I took up French. A teacher from the Bulgarian News Agency, Miss Alkalay, came to teach us. She was a very good pedagogue. With her help I learnt French very well. At my examination, I immediately began a conversation in French and I received the maximum possible grade. I tried to do the same on my exam in Russian, but it was more difficult. The main test was, however, the most difficult. My examiners were Professor Hadjinikolov and his assistant, Lyuben Berov, who became Prime Minister in 1990 [Editor’s note: actually from 1992 until 1994]. Hadjinikolov understood my uneasiness and with Lyuben Berov he went to the opposite part of the hall, so that they could leave me alone in peace and quiet. After an hour and a half, I found myself and managed to elaborate on the question. After that, they examined me on the whole material and assigned me a five out of a maximum of six. Many years later I met my scientific supervisor and we talked about the exam. He was a man, who managed to hearten young people. His students became professors and PhDs.

During the period I worked as an archivist, I visited Auschwitz and particularly the museum of belongings that remained from the deported Jews who had been killed. I had an ambition to find out more about my uncle and his wife who were burnt there. The museum shows a horrifying picture of the life in the camp. There are belongings of old people, women, men, children, even babies. They have a sickening collection of baby’s shoes and socks. There I had the chance to take hold of a bar of soap, where the letters RIF were engraved: Rein jüdisches Fett, which means [in German] ‘pure Jewish fat’. [Editor’s note: In the Polish ghettos the German occupants distributed bars of soap with the inscription ‘Rif.’ The Jews in the ghetto interpreted it as ‘Rein jüdisches Fett’, that is, ‘pure Jewish fat,’ and that is why the belief that the Germans made soap out of Jewish bodies spread. In reality RIF stands for ‘Reichstelle für Industrielle Fettversorgung’.] I kept this bar of soap in a small case next to the yellow star 21 that the then-government had decorated me with. With the years this bar just fell into pieces and turned into dust. In that museum I saw a lampshade made of human skin. I had another experience: while I was examining the museum, a very noisy group of Bulgarians passed by. And this is a holy place for both the Jewish and Polish people. They step into that place in reverence as if they enter a synagogue or a church. These people, however, were rather noisy and I reproved them. They understood immediately and got out of the museum.

One of my co-workers remained there to search for information and I have received a book from her, published by the museum of Auschwitz. There she states the date when the Trancy’s echelon near Paris, where the Jews from France were deported from, reached the concentration camp in Poland. This was an important date, because based on it they found the lists of people who were there, so I learnt that my uncle and aunt were sent to the gas chambers, where they were suffocated and [later] burnt. My father would often sigh that Bulgaria seemed too narrow to my uncle and he went to try his luck far away abroad. 

After 9th September 1944, in my family we celebrated the high Jewish holidays, such as Pesach, Sukkot, Purim, and Chanukkah. We celebrated mainly those holidays that were somehow related to our history. Up to the time my mother was alive, we celebrated them at home, but after that we used to go to the synagogue. My father had leftist socialist views and was not religious. I asked him how he managed to match his political orientation with attending the synagogue, and he answered me very wisely that he was where the people were. 

I have two daughters. The elder one’s name is Klara David Yosifov. She married a Jew in Bulgaria and went to live in Israel several years ago. She works as a [computer] programmer. The other one is called Shelly Palikarieva. She married a Bulgarian and lives in Sofia. She also studied informatics and is a [computer] programmer, too. I have also three grandsons and a great-grandson.

I wasn’t brought up to specifically marry a woman of Jewish origin. My youngest brother, for example, married a Bulgarian. My second daughter married a Bulgarian. We didn’t differentiate between Jews and Bulgarians in our family.

Although I didn’t speak Ladino when I was a child, a lot of Ladino words and sayings remained from my childhood memories. I heard my mother saying them. Two years ago, when the Ladino Club at the Jewish community center was set up, I went to listen to this speech, and I was astonished to learn that I still understood everything. Before that I had an interesting experience at an international archivists’ conference in Copenhagen. Next to me the chairman of the Spanish State Archive was speaking in Spanish with a Russian colleague, who was in the chair of the Spanish section at UNESCO, and I understood the whole conversation. Without any practice I asked if I could join their talk. The director of the Spanish State Archive was extremely amazed. He started patting me on the shoulder, congratulating me that I was allegedly speaking the language of Cervantes. [Although the Sephardim were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula hundred years earlier, Ladino probably reminded him of the Spanish Cervantes wrote in.] He was simply not able to understand how I could speak that way. He had read documents of this period, but he had never heard the sounds of this speech. This incident encouraged me and once when I was in America on a business trip I used Ladino again to help my poor English. I was in California and whenever I used Spanish, they answered me. Many Spanish people had immigrated there.    

I remember the publishing of documentation of the Central Co-operative Union. Their old archive was situated in a basement on Slaveykov Square [a central square in Sofia]. My colleague and I went there as representatives of the State Archive. The air inside was soaked with steam from a cracked pipe from the central heating utility. Our feet were slapping in the mud on the floor. The committee that was to process these materials on the part of the Central Co-operative Union consisted of six or seven people. We worked with them. The moisture and steam had formed a mould layer of twelve centimeters on the files. We inhaled this poisonous air every day and began to run a temperature. This was one of the hardest situations in my work as an archivist. There were no such things at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. We were encouraged to make science and I had a lot more opportunities to work.

From the State Archive I moved to the archive of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences [BAS]. I had already received my scientific degree ‘Candidate of Historical Sciences’ and a career opportunity was open for me at BAS. I became a senior research fellow. I retired from BAS in 1982. The whole atmosphere there was academic. I felt morally encouraged, because I was making science, as opposed to the situation in the State Archive, where the work prevailed.

No members of my family immigrated to Israel during the Great Aliyah 22. I thought that it would be a good thing for my family to live in the country where I was born. However, I continued supporting the young Jewish State.

Once the director of the Institute of History told me, we, the Jews, were great. It was sometime during the [Israeli] wars with the Arabs 23. I told him it was a matter of nationality only. In Israel [meaning the wars between Israel and its neighboring countries] there was a clash between the high culture and the lack of civilization; yesterday’s shepherds without education were opposed to people who came from the towns of the high-civilized Europe. Brains and culture were behind every gun there. He said I was right.

I can say that 9th September 1944 was one of the greatest events in my life, because it put an end to that anxiety and awful situation in which we, the Jews, were forced to live. We started working for the new regime with all our strength. It was a new beginning for us, and a new life, too. In every field we worked selflessly with our compatriots. We believed in very high ideals. The idea for social equality was our goal. The fact that sometimes there were mercenary motives is another question. But as a whole our expectations were realized.

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.

Bulgaria has never had such a massive emigration of young people who now earn their living abroad. I think the figure of such emigrants has already reached some 800,000 or 900,000. Years ago foreigners came here to earn their living, chiefly workmen in construction, and gardeners. Now, our young people receive their education here, in order to sell their work abroad. What’s the profit for Bulgaria then? Nothing good awaits Bulgaria if no sound people come into power, who should find a way out of this situation.

I have a scientific interest in several areas. First of all, it’s the history of economy. I have also worked on the history of Bulgarian Jews, mainly during the period of World War II, because this is the most expressive period, filled with disagreements and clashes. I also have some articles concerning local Jews during the period of Bulgaria’s liberation from the Ottoman yoke 26. I have worked in the field of historical metrology, too – I’m speaking of the old Bulgarian measuring system.

I’m thankful for my fate as a workman in the field of archives, because this opened for me the gates of science. I still do some scientific research. I write and publish articles. Perhaps not so intensively, as in previous years, but you see, I have a book at the printer’s now, which will be something like a supplement to Moskona’s ‘Lifestyle and Mentality of the Bulgarian Jews’ [Moskona I. 1970. Lifestyle and Mentality of the Bulgarian Jews. In: Yearbook '70 - year V. Sofia: Organization of Jews in Bulgaria.].

I found by chance a book from the ex-Jewish Institute [Institute of Balkan Studies in Sofia, where both Hebrew and Ladino as well as the culture of Sephardi Jews were also studied.] written by Eli Eshkenazi [lawyer, founder of the Institute of Balkan Studies in Sofia] and the chief rabbi Hananel [Hananel, Asher (1895-1964): rabbi of Sofia, later Bulgaria’s chief rabbi]. After the institute stopped its activities its archives were brought to the State Archive and there I found a very interesting collection of Jewish sentences and proverbs. I included in my new book what Moskona hadn’t published. It’s also hardly likely that the Jewish organization Shalom’s yearbook will come out without my article in it. I was the editor-in-chief of the publication for many years.

Sofia

Bulgaria

Interviewer: Patricia Nikolova

Date of interview: June 2003

Mois Saltiel is an energetic, sociable, good-mannered and dedicated man. He is responsible and devoted to his work for the Jewish community and Bulgarian society. He lives in a cozy two-room apartment in the suburbs of Sofia. He is an introvert, but talkative, emotional and an easily impressed person.

My ancestors came from Spain in the 16th century. They settled in the Ottoman Empire and some of them went to live in Bosnia. Later they moved to the town of Pirot in present-day Serbia and shortly before my elder uncle was born, my grandfather Avram Saltiel moved to live in Sofia. The reason was that his wife Tamara died in Pirot and he married her friend Mazal, which was the tradition at that time. [Editor’s note: Actually the tradition is that if somebody’s wife or husband dies he/she must remarry one of his spouse’s single siblings.] Mazal looked after his children after the death of his wife. Mazal was from Pirot.

I do not remember my grandfather because I was born in 1923 and he moved to Jerusalem in 1926. I also do not remember my grandmother for the same reasons. What I know about them, I have heard from other people who knew them. So, it is difficult for me to talk about them, because I have no personal impressions of them.

What I know is that my grandfather was a glass-maker and at one point he was a gabai of the synagogue in Pirot. He spoke mainly Ladino, his family talked in Ladino 1 at home. I do not know how they dressed; I do not have any photos of them. As far as I have heard, they were religious people. They observed the Jewish tradition.

I do not know what my father [Solomon Saltiel] did before he married. As for his sister, Tamara, she was married to Avram Ashkenazi, who was a teacher. He taught geography in the Jewish school in the capital. They married in Sofia and lived at the corner of Sredna Gora Street and Stamboliiski Street. They had a bookstore under their apartment.

They had two sons and one daughter: Shlomo, David and Yodita. Shlomo died in Israel. David also lived in Israel, but later immigrated to the USA where he founded his own company for vinyl records. I don’t know when they immigrated. Yodita died in Israel where she moved around 1948. I do not know to what extent they were religious. But I think that in principle Bulgarian Jews are not very religious.

My father had four brothers and one sister. As I said before, his sister was Tamara and the brothers were called Meshulam, Yosif, Benjamin and Mois. None of them is alive any longer. Mois died in 1921 in Sofia; he did not have a family.

Benjamin and Yosif were merchants. They had a shop on Nishka Street where they sold materials for cobblers. They had secondary education and many heirs, who now live in Israel.

We kept in touch with most of our relatives, but we met most often with my aunt Tamara and uncle Benjamin. They did not come to our house often, because we were poorer. They were all better off financially and we were the ones to contact them. My aunt Tamara gave a plot near the entrance to her house on Stamboliiski Street to my brother Haim so that he would build a shed and start repairing shoes there.

I do not have any information about my mother’s life before her marriage, but I know where she lived before that. The family house was on 10 Bregalnitsa Street in Sofia.

My parents were Solomon Avram Saltiel and Rebecca Eliya-Kyoso, which is her father’s family name. They were born in 1892 and had secondary education. They spoke Bulgarian and Ladino. My mother was a housewife and my father was a cobbler. He had a workshop where he repaired shoes. I do not know how they met or if the marriage was arranged or not, because I was not born yet. They had a religious wedding in Sofia. They dressed in accordance with the tradition at those times.

We were not doing very well financially. We were not extremely poor, but we were not rich either. We lived in my maternal grandparents’ house so that we would not have to pay money for rent. Our home had two rooms, where the six of us lived. My parents slept in one of the rooms and my three brothers and I slept in the other. At first we did not have a kitchen or closet so we made a small kitchen in the corridor. We used coal-burning stoves for heating. We did not have a garden or animals.

In the beginning there was a maid, who helped our mother, but my mother looked after us mostly – we did not have a nanny or a governess. I did not go to a kindergarten. I spent my childhood at home with my mother and playing games with the children.

We had mostly secular books and a few religious ones. My parents read books, but only when they had some free time. My father’s obligation was to earn money to support us, and my mother’s – to cook and buy food. They also helped us in our education – advised us what to read and how to study.

My parents were not very religious, but they observed the Jewish traditions – mostly on the high holidays Pesach, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, and Sukkot. They were not members of any political parties or cultural organizations. They got along well with our neighbors, most of whom were Jews, but there were also Bulgarians who were very tolerant.

I had three brothers. The eldest was Albert, who was born in 1916. Haim was born in 1918 and the youngest, Yako, in 1928. They all spoke Bulgarian and Ladino, had a secondary education and studied in the same Jewish school as I did. Albert was a dental mechanic. Haim was a cobbler, but later in Israel he worked in the El-Al [Israeli national airways] company, and Yako, who was the first to move to Israel as a young man, worked as a salesman in a shop in Yaffo.

My brothers lived in Bulgaria until 1948 and then moved to Israel. Albert had two children – Solomon and Pnina; Haim also has two children – Rivka and Tali [affectionate forNaftali], and Yako’s children are Rivka and Shlomo.

My brothers Albert and Haim Saltiel married in Sofia in 1943 and 1945, respectively, in accordance with the religious ritual. Yako also had a religious wedding, but in Israel in the 1950s. They were not very religious, but they observed the traditions.

I was born in Sofia on 30th November 1923. This is the capital of Bulgaria – a city surrounded by a mountain range, in the middle of which is the beautiful Vitosha Mountain. I was born at the corner of Boris I Street and Tsar Simeon Street where I lived for four or five years. This was in Iuchbunar 2, the poor Jewish quarter in Sofia. Then a big fire broke out in our house and spread into many of the rooms, where other families lived. We moved to live in the family house of my mother on 10 Bregalnitsa Street in Sofia.

In contrast to our previous home, which was close to the town’s center and closer to the central Jewish synagogue, 10 Bregalnitsa Street was at the heart of the Jewish quarter [Iuchbunar]. Of course, there were Bulgarians there too, but most of the people were Jews, who were very united. At that time there were around 20,000 Jews in Sofia.

There were a number of synagogues: the central one, the Iuchbunar one, the Ashkenazi one and maybe some more, which I did not know. There was a rabbi, a shochet, a chazzan – I cannot say how many they were. This is what I remember.

The [Iuchbunar] Jewish school where I had my elementary and junior high school education was close to our house. I finished my secondary education as a student in the evening high school in Sofia on Stara Planina Street. There we studied all subjects, which were taught in the other schools in Bulgarian and Ivrit. I cannot remember who taught us Ivrit then but one of the teachers there, who is still alive today, was Mati Albuhaire. My favorite subjects were literature, maths and French. I did not take private lessons.

Most of the Jews in Sofia were craftsmen or street vendors. For example, my father had a small shoemaker’s workshop. It was located on Serdika Street and occasionally the Jewish school used to organize an auction for the manufacturing of the students’ shoes. During the times when my father won the auction, our economic situation improved, because we had more money. Then we could afford to buy some new clothes or shoes for the joy of the children in the family.

We had electricity in the house, but no running water in the kitchen. We had a faucet in the yard, where we had to go in the winters and in the summers to pour water, although we lived on the first floor. A little later, we made another faucet in the corridor on the first floor and used it instead of the one in the yard.

On the whole, the Bulgarian people treated the Jews with tolerance. As a child I was a typical Jew, so to say, with red hair and a freckled face. So, the Branniks 3 and Legionaries 4 vented their anger on me; that is, they beat me up and insulted me for being a Jew, but I cannot say that I suffered much strong anti-Semite attitude directed towards me when I was young.

On the contrary, I remember occasions showing quite the opposite. For example, every vacation I went to work in a shop close to my father’s workshop. It was owned by the Bulgarian Nesho Draganov and sold electrical appliances. He was always very understanding, gave me work and he saved us from being banished from the country, on which I will return later. We had other neighbors, too –Hristo, a knife-grinder, close to my father. My father and I got along very well with him.

As for the way we were brought up at home, naturally, we, as all the other children, celebrated the Bulgarian holidays. If there was a parade, we went to watch, but I do not have any concrete memories. When Simeoncho 5 was born, we went to the palace to celebrate the birth of the heir to the throne.

We, the children, learned patriotic poems and songs. But I cannot sing them to you, because I cannot sing well. We observed the Jewish traditions at home, but no one was deeply religious to such an extent as to observe every minute detail of the holiday ritual.

Besides the vegetable markets, which were not as many as today, what is interesting is that there was also a market for servants. It was situated in a park close to the place where the present-day Tsentralni Hali [central covered market in Sofia] is located now. When the season for hiring servants and maids came, all girls from the villages were brought by their parents and a kind of bargaining began – if you needed a maid, you went there and started bargaining for this or that girl – you asked the father, the neighbors and then hired a maid.

We went shopping to the neighboring shops, which were mostly owned by Bulgarians, with whom we got along well. There was a grocery on the corner of Bregalnitsa Street and Positano Street where we went when we had no money – the shop assistant gave us the food we wanted for free and wrote down in a notebook the amount of money we owed. When we had money, we went there and paid our debts.

I had many friends, most of whom were Jews and classmates of mine. I can name Professor Shimon Ninyo, Тiko Israel, Solomon Haimov and many others. I spent my free time in the Jewish organizations. I met my future wife, Juliet Fridman, there, because we went out with the same friends from the Jewish community center.

At that time there was an association named ‘Tоshavim,’ which means ‘Natives’ [nonpolitical Zionist association whose members gathered regularly to discuss contemporary issues related to Israel]. Its head office was at Stamboliiski Blvd. opposite the Bet Am 6. It had a small library and young people went there to borrow books and read various papers. Different youth groups formed there. The leader of our group was Albert Kohen – a future writer, who is no longer alive. Other members were David Elazar, Zacho [Isak] Benvenisti and others.

In fact, my journalist career started there in 1941, when I made the first ‘live’ newspaper in the form of a notebook, including articles, short stories and poems. The newspaper had only one issue – a notebook, which was handed from one person to the other between the members of the association. Unfortunately, the police banned it. Everything was done with educational purposes, but they said we were engaged in anti-fascist activities.

As a student I was also a member of Hashomer Hatzair 7. As scouts we learned the history of the Jewish people, prepared for our departure for our own land there, and on the whole did everything that the present members of Hashomer Hatzair do.

I got on a car for the first time quite late, but I traveled by train, with a steam engine, for the first time in 1934 when I went to Kjustendil. I had surgery on my appendicitis and I went to my aunt in Kjustendil to recover. My favorite place to spend the vacations was the seacoast. I saw the sea for the first time after 9th September 1944 8 – in 1947 or 1948.

I had various jobs. I started as a worker in the workshop owned by Nersez Shirinyan, and later, between 1941 and 1942, I worked as a clerk in the lawyer’s office of Yosef Moshev. I did not have any trouble at work for being a Jew. My first boss was an Armenian and the second one a Jew, so there were no problems.

In 1941 the government ordered that all Jews, who had foreign citizenship and who were not protected by the relevant country should leave Bulgaria. Since my father was a Serbian subject, we had to leave for Varna. Our whole family, that is, my parents, my younger brother and I – because we still did not have Bulgarian passports and were regarded as Serbian nationals – were ordered to go to Varna and wait for transport to Israel.

So we went to Varna, but before that we took pictures with our friends, relatives, and of our house. We settled in a village near Varna waiting for the ship. Meanwhile, some Bulgarian friends of ours started looking for ways to cancel our deportation order. One of them was Nesho Draganov, former officer of the reserve, who had connections with the police. While we were there, he managed to arrange an order allowing us to remain in Bulgaria and return home. One of the ships, which we probably would have boarded, sank at sea and all passengers drowned.

When the Toshavim association was forbidden in 1941/42, I became a member of the Jewish state community center, which had a library on the corner of Stamboliiski Blvd and Opalchenska Street. Various groups formed there and some of them became members of the UYW 9. We read a lot, we presented various papers, went on excursions etc. At that time the anti-Jewish legislation was adopted – the Law for the Protection of the Nation 10, together with the fascist legislation – and we became involved in anti-fascist activities.

One of our activities, for which I was sent to prison, was as much comic as tragic. In 1942 the platform of the Fatherland Front 11 was read on Hristo Botev radio from Moscow. It had some demands and tasks set by the Fatherland Front for the democratic development of the country, including some against the anti-Jewish legislation. We decided to popularize this platform, because the government and the newspapers said nothing.

I was the leader of a number of [UYW] groups. In one of them we decided to make copies of the platform. Writing by hand would have taken a lot of time and we had no printing house. Then we decided to make copies of some passages in a photo studio. One of the members, Sabat Melamed, worked in one. He took the necessary materials and a cassette for film copying and we gathered in the apartment of Mois Perets on the corner of Odrin Street and Stamboliiski Blvd. at around 11-12 o’clock at night in August.

We started working. But the opening and closing of the box, in which we took the pictures was very noisy. The house was run-down and some Bulgarians lived on the floor below. We had put blankets on the doors and windows so that the room would look dark from the outside.

But we made a lot of noise and when it was midnight the neighbors came upstairs to see what was happening. They tried to open the door, but we locked it. They said, ‘You are doing something illegal, we will call the police if you don’t leave’. They went downstairs and we decided it would be best to stop working and leave.

One of us, who lived nearby, Leon Levi, took the box with all the materials to hide it at home. But there was a policeman in the café on the opposite street who noticed a young man carrying a box at night. He started shouting at him, ‘Stop! Stop!’ Leon started running. We heard everything from the room. Leon was caught and arrested.

Meanwhile, Sabat Melamed and I climbed over the roof and walking on the roofs of the small buildings reached the corner of Positano Street and Odrin Street where another friend of ours, Daniel Albahari, lived. We entered the house, waking the people up, but they let us spend the night there.

Meanwhile, when Leon Levi was beaten up, he confessed who lived in that house and Mois Perets was also arrested. That was when our illegal life started. The police started searching for me. They took a photo of mine from home and sent it everywhere. I hid at various places, but the police arrested many of the people who were members of my [UYW] groups, they organized a trial and sentenced me to death. But since I was under age, I was sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment. The sentence was by default because I was not present at the trial.

Later on, still living illegally, despite my efforts the police caught me because of the betrayal of one man and because I was not shrewd enough to evade them. It happened in 1942. Since I already had a sentence, I was sent to Sofia prison. After half a year I was sent to Skopje prison in Idrizovo.

During that period, 1942-1943, the anti-Jewish legislation was fully in force, and in 1943 my parents as all Jews in Bulgaria received orders for internment to Razgrad 12. My younger brother and my parents went there, while my two brothers were sent to labor camps. My mother’s health deteriorated, because while still in Sofia my family was often beaten by the police who were searching the house for me.

The life of my family in Razgrad was very hard. My mother died in 1943 while I was still in prison. I was not allowed to go to her funeral. I know that her funeral took place in accordance with the Jewish traditions. Of course, all that reflected on my education, and although I had finished my secondary education, I could not go to study at university. My father also suffered, because he had to close the workshop, sell some of the property and give the rest to friends to keep. So, my family led a very difficult life.

The conditions in the prison were very bad. It was a two-story building situated in the center of a farming field, surrounded by a tall stonewall, and there was a faucet in the yard. We lived in big rooms, which at first had had spring beds, but when we arrived these beds were taken away and wooden bunk beds with hay mattresses full of dust and bugs were made for us. We were 19 Jews there. To name but some of them: David Shabbat, Samuil Nisimov, Isak Samuilov, Solomon Haimov, David Solomonov, Rudolf Levi, Rudolf Benvenisti, Isak Alvas and others. We were allocated in eight cells.

Let me tell you about the death of one of the Jews – David Shabbat. By coincidence, he was sent to prison for a reason similar to mine. He had decided to spread the platform of the Fatherland Front. His friends and he had bought a lot of sticking labels for notebooks from bookstores. They wrote some passages from the platform on them and stuck them to post boxes, fences etc. He was arrested and beaten by the police. They deliberately kicked him in the kidneys and damaged them badly. The police arranged a trial and sentenced him to many years of imprisonment.

At first he was in the prison in Sofia and then in the one in Skopje. From the beating he continued to suffer strong pain and swelling of the kidneys. So David turned to the management and asked them to send him to hospital for treatment. They ignored him completely. He turned to the prosecutor and asked him to help him. The prosecutor said to him, ‘You should be sent to Hitler to help you.’ The political prisoners went on a hunger strike demanding that David be treated.

After that his condition worsened – he fainted and then he was taken to the Skopje prison, seemingly to treat him in hospital. In the evening they locked him in the moist lock-up room where he shouted in pain and asked for a doctor or to be sent to hospital, but no one of the guards came to help. The prisoners from the neighboring cells also banged and shouted, but no one went to help David the whole night. In the morning when the guard opened the door of the lock-up room, David was already dead. So, a nineteen-year-old young man died only because he wanted to make the [Fatherland Front] platform more popular.

Most of the other Jews were in that prison for similar reasons. I must say that we, the Jews in the prison, were under even greater stress, especially at the beginning of 1944. German officers came to the prison in Idrizovo, and one of the guards told us that they asked him if there were political prisoners and Jews there. He said that they were only criminals.

So, we found out that the deportation of the Jews to Germany was being organized. Meanwhile, in 1943 all Jews from Macedonia were sent to Auschwitz. The leadership of the political prisoners organized our escape from prison and on 28thAugust 1944 we escaped with the help of some soldiers from the guard, and with the support of the Third Macedonian Youth Partisan Brigade we reached Bulgaria. Let me tell you how that happened.

We were often sent outside on the field to do hard physical labor – harvesting and other things. We organized the escape of four people – two local Macedonians and two Bulgarians. They contacted the partisans in Macedonia and together with them arranged for some progressive soldiers to be sent as guards to the prison.

One of the organizers was Metodi Stoev, who kept in touch with the soldiers and was allowed to sleep outside prison – in the rooms where the guards slept. Vasil Ivanovski, who managed to escape, contacted the partisans and organized the contact with the partisans.

We realized the escape in the following way. After we, the political prisoners, were taken out to do our everyday work on the field, the older one of the guards was distracted by a political prisoner with some stories. When he was no longer paying attention to the other four prisoners, they managed to escape.

They had a preliminary arrangement to meet some people from Macedonia. Through these people from the Bulgarian army our people contacted the Macedonian partisans. In this way the guard at the prison was replaced with progressive soldiers who kept our connection with Metodi Stoev. That is why, after the escape the guards were on our side.

After the escape while we were on our way to Bulgaria with the Macedonian brigade a big army unit came from one of the villages to accompany us, because they saw that the situation in Macedonia was not good for the Bulgarian army. We dressed in army uniforms and reached Bulgaria on 15th September 1944.

I went to Kjustendil and from there to Razgrad to look for my family. I arrived in Shumen and found out that one of our political prisoners, Metodi Stoev, was already director of the police there. I worked as a policeman for some time to help maintain the people’s authority in Shumen.

Later, seeing that my family wanted to leave Razgrad, I went there, found them – of course, without my mother who had passed away – and returned to Sofia. Our house had been preserved. My father had given most of the household stuff to friends to keep so we settled in our old home although it was much more humbly furnished than before.

At the end of 1944 our neighbors and friends were very happy to see that we were alive and well. Although our property had dwindled significantly, we still had our home – a place to sleep and start our lives anew. Each of us started work – my father reopened his workshop, I started work in the Head Office of the People’s Police.

Yako, my younger brother, was the first to move to Israel. In 1948 my other relatives also decided to go there. We all gathered and discussed what we wanted to do. I did not want to move to Israel, because I had devoted my youth and my health to create a new authority. I thought that it was my duty to work for its strengthening in Bulgaria, for the realization of our dreams. So, I remained here to work, while my family, even my father, left. They reached Yaffo by ship.

Juliet Fridman did the same even before we decided to get married. When her parents decided to leave, they prepared to get passports including for all their children. But Juliet went to the police and said that she did not want to leave.

Juliet was born on 17th December 1925 in Sofia. Her mother tongue is Bulgarian, she had a secondary education, and she worked as a sales assistant. Her parents were Yosif and Blanche Fridman, they both moved to Israel and are no longer alive.

My wife’s parents were relatively religious, which means that they observed the Jewish traditions, but not every single detail of them. Juliet’s father was of Ashkenazi origin, that is, a Russian Jew, and her mother Blanche Israel was of the Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria 13. After they left for Israel, they lived in the town of Yazur.

Juliet’s brother, Shrata Fridman, still lives in Israel. He worked as a construction technician, and now he is a pensioner. The only information I have about his family is that he has two daughters and a son: Hanita, Pnina and David. They have a lot of grandchildren. He was relatively religious.

When I went to prison, Juliet was interned to Asenovgrad and occasionally she would send me postcards secretly from her parents. When I returned from prison we renewed our friendship. She started work, we became close, and we got married in 1947. We married before the registrar, that is, we did not wed in the synagogue in accordance with the Jewish ritual.

She had a bed and a chest and I had another bed, quite different. But we put them one close to the other and made a double bed out of them. But we had no stove for heating. There was nothing in the shops to buy, everything was distributed in rations. To buy a stove, we had to get a special note from the Supply Commissariat. Since my wife got pregnant, we went there and asked them for such a note. They gave it to us to keep the baby warm. We bought a cooking stove to use it for various purposes.

We have three children: Solomon, Yosif and Ani. They were born in Sofia where they live now. Solomon is professor, doctor of sciences, working in the area of quantum electronics. Yosif is automation engineer, has a private company. Ani is an architect and is not working at the moment.

They have families and each of them has two children. I even have two great-grandchildren from Ani. Ani’s children are Nikolay and Elena Mladenovi. Nikolay works in Canada as a computer specialist, and Elena is an engineer in the Water Supply and Drainage company.

Yosif’s children are Georgi and Monica Saltiel. Georgi graduated in chemistry from the Chemical Technical Institute, but he also works with computer technology. Monica is a student in the tenth grade in the Sofia Natural and Mathematical High School. Before that she studied in the Jewish school on Pirotska Street near the synagogue in Sofia.

Solomon’s children are Juliet and Kalina Saltiel. Juliet is a third-year student in architecture management at the American University in Blagoevgrad. My great-grandchildren – Mladen and Anton Mladenovi – seven and two years old, are the sons of my grandson Nikolay and grandsons of my daughter Ani.

We did not educate our children in the Jewish traditions. Maybe this was a mistake. They know what had happened to my family and me during the war, but they do not talk much about it. They know that they are Jews, but I do not think they feel Jewish. We celebrate the Jewish holidays very rarely, we started doing it only recently and we invite them here, but they are not used to that. They do not go to the synagogue.

All my children are married to Bulgarians, so they celebrate both Pesach and Christmas, but they do not celebrate Christmas in a religious way, they just mark the holiday. My wife prepares some Jewish dishes, she also taught her Bulgarian daughters-in-law to prepare matzah, make a soup with matzah balls, make pastel for Pesach, agristada 14, anjinara 15. My wife Juliet learned the recipes for these dishes from a special collection of recipes published by the Shalom publishing house at the Shalom Organization of Jews in Bulgaria 16.

I was a member of the Communist Workers’ Party and I still have the same beliefs and think that they are the most adequate. I became a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1946 17. I have not changed my views. I do not feel I have to give an explanation why I still find them relevant today.

I remember, of course, all friends who left for Israel. I went there on excursions a couple of times and met them. I have been to Israel three times: the first time in 1974 when my father was still alive. Then I saw all the sights, met all my relatives and I was very impressed. My other two visits were in the 1980s. Now we still write to each other, they come to visit, we go there – so we still keep in touch with our friends and relatives in Israel.

I have a lot of friends today. They are mostly Jews, with some exceptions. We do not meet often with our relatives in Israel, but we respect each other. One of my hobbies is to make a complete family tree of my father’s family, my mother’s and my wife’s. I have made much progress in collecting factual data.

Thanks to the family tree made by me I got in touch through the Internet with cousins of mine living in Jerusalem – ancestors of Meshulam. He was a brother of my father, adopted by an Israeli citizen when he was eight years old. His ancestors sent me their own family tree and I combined the two into one.

My family tree is the only one of the Saltiel family in Bulgaria and other family trees were sent to the management of the international meeting of the Saltiel families in Thessaloniki, where all saw it. For more information about the meeting, one could read the electronic edition of the Saltiel magazine and of the Bulgarian newspaper ‘Evreiski Vesti’ [Jewish News], which is published by the Shalom Organization of Jews in Bulgaria.

For 16 years I worked as an editor of the ‘Protivopojarna Ohrana’ [Fire Prevention Service] magazine, I contributed to many Bulgarian dailies, radio and television in the area of fire prevention.

I want to tell some anecdotes of how my Jewish origin influenced the attitude towards me at my work place. After 9th September 1944 I had a responsible job at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But there was an order at that time, which started in the Soviet Union and came to Bulgaria, which said that people who keep in touch with relatives abroad cannot work for the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

My colleagues respected me very much and wanted me to keep my job, but the management pressed them to fire me, because I was a Jew and had relatives in Israel. So, a friend of mine told me, ‘Listen, you will not survive long here in State Security around such people. Let me transfer you to another job, where you will survive. I can appoint you as a deputy director of the Fire Prevention Service Bureau. Do you want to go there?’ I agreed, because I was tired of fighting.

In 1953 I started working in the Fire Prevention Service. I worked there for 26 years and a half. I worked in the system of the ministry more than 36 years. I had one more conflict when I worked in the Fire Prevention Service. In 1957 during the war between Egypt and Israel 18 the attitudes towards Israel here were very negative and strong.

I said to a neighbor ironically, ‘These ‘brothers’ the Arabs, who you Bulgarians regard as brothers, will play a bad trick on you. You should be careful about them…’ He wrote a report to the ministry and they started questioning people trying to prove that I was a Zionist – I have never been a Zionist –, that I was saying bad things about our friends, the Arabs.

At that time the Interior Minister was a man who had been a prisoner in the Skopje prison with me, Angel Solakov. The deputy minister was Vladimir Borachev. They told me that I was doing a very good job, but I must not remain there. They sent me to a lower position, although I was paid the same salary. That was the second case. Although I retired in that system, I was continuously appointed to more and more insignificant positions, although I received the same money.

After 10th November 1989 19 the dictatorship fell. There is freedom of speech, but the economic instability is greater than before. There is political freedom, but the economic freedom is weak, because people are not well financially. This is especially true of retired people like us, because I receive the maximum pension, which is now 200 levs, less than 100 dollars, with which it is hard to make a living. My wife receives a pension of 100 levs.

After 1989 my contacts with the Jewish community changed. Firstly, the activity of the Jewish organizations increased, because the new conditions allowed it. Many institutions were created within the framework of the Shalom organization in 1990. The Organization of Jews in Bulgaria has existed for decades. Until the changes on 10th November 1989 it was chaired for many years by Yosif Asparuhov, who was a deputy of the Bulgarian Communist Party and represented Jews in the Bulgarian Parliament.

In the second half of 1990 the organization’s name was changed to OJB ‘Shalom’ [Organization of Jews in Bulgaria]. It was chaired by the theatre director and art critic Eddi Schwarz. He was a chairman for two mandates and then he was replaced by Emil Kalo, who is doctor of philosophy sciences and has lead the organization ever since.

I was a chairman of the Jewish State Community Center ‘Emil Shekerdjiiski’ for four years and member of its management for eight or ten years. For two years now I have been a member of the ‘Golden Age’ club uniting the efforts of 100-150 retired Jews living in Sofia. Every Saturday there are some programs and birthday parties organized, we mark the contributions of various people from our community to different areas of culture – music, art.

The Jews in our town live in the same way as those around the world – everybody has some problems, but the good thing is that we can get together at events organized by the Jewish community.

I, personally, do not receive aid, but many people from the community receive aid from Joint 20 and other organizations. My wife and I received money from Switzerland; I do not have precise information. Germany rejected our request for compensation, because they do not regard our pain and suffering as a sufficient reason for compensation.

Glossary