Tag #123034 - Interview #95883 (Gitli Alhalel)

Usually there was a fair on the 28th August in Vidin. All students and children, including me, loved going there so that our parents would buy us confetti and sweets. But unfortunately, I remember the bad events more clearly. For example, when the Law for Protection of the Nation [15] came out in 1942 a disgusting man appeared in the Jewish neighborhood, Ivan Zviara [meaning ‘the Beast’]. I witnessed how he banished our neighbors, the Pizanti family, from their own house. They were five of them and they had to sleep in the hen-house. They slept on the floor, without being able to enter their home or use their belongings. People said that the same fascist and evil Bulgarian, Ivan Zviara, went to the Aegean Sea when the Germans led the Aegean Jews [16] sacrificed by King Boris III [17] to the ships, which transported them to the Maydanek concentration camp [18]. People also said that returning from there Ivan Zviara brought back so many unnecessary clothes and things that his wife did not know what to do with them or what they were used for.