Tag #122907 - Interview #78508 (Mayer Rafael Alhalel)

Between 12,000 and 13,000 Bulgarians, Turks, Wallachians, Armenians and Jews [see Bulgarian Minorities] [15], all lived in Vidin. Each of those had their own neighborhood. The Jews were only 1,200 and lived in the Jewish neighborhood Kaleto [‘kale’ means fortress in Turkish and ‘to’ is the Bulgarian definite article, so it means ‘the fortress’]. In the past Kaleto had been surrounded by a ditch and that was the whole town. But at the beginning of the 20th century, the town expanded and only Jews remained in Kaleto. During the Law for the Protection of the Nation [16] it was turned into a Jewish ghetto. That’s why only a few Bulgarians lived there and we got along well with them. During the Holocaust Colonel Marko Borandjiev, the head of the Vidin garrison, lived here. He was also nice to us. His daughter was a classmate of ours. Although she was a Legionnaire, she sympathized with us. I don’t know why, probably because of the social environment here, which is friendly to minorities.