These are soldiers who are checking each other for lice during the Balkan War in 1912.
My father Morduhay Levi is the first on the left. I do not know the others. There is no seal of a photographic studio on the back.
There is a stamp of 5 stotinkas and a post seal. Its back is like a postcard. There was a writing in pencil but it has faded and is unreadable.
My father Morduhay Yako Levi (1896 - 1972) graduated high school and was mobilized as an infantryman at the front.
A year after that he was captured during an attack. He said that it was the most horrible massacre that had taken place during World War I.
The soldiers ran with the bayonets forward and butchered each other. The battle happened somewhere in France, but I do not know where.
My father was lightly injured and sent to a camp in Marseilles where he stayed until the end of the war from 1915 until 1918.
He learned there to do electrical engineering work and the French language, which he had studied in high school.
When he left the camp, he remained to work in France, at first in Marseilles, then in Paris. He worked as an electrical engineer.
He also made some big improvement on the mechanism of the electrical bulbs. And since he knew no laws and he was not a very practical man - he was very honest and guileless - he took the originals to some electrical company to adopt them.
They took his unpatented designs and they started using them without paying him anything. He was very disappointed with them.
When he came back to Bulgaria, he brought his designs, but the bulbs had already been introduced. He decided to return to Bulgaria and marry a Bulgarian Jew.
