Tag #124345 - Interview #95940 (Victoria Almalekh)

And so we used to live well on the Jewish street before the war started in 1941, the flood in 1942 and the outburst of scarlet fever in 1943. In 1942 the Danube froze over, because it was very cold. This closed the German floatable route to the Eastern front. They started bombing the bottleneck at Zhelezni Vrata to open it. The ice dollops started floating down the stream and made specific noises. We could hear them at night and mom said she had been through a lot of years with the Danube frozen, but noises like these meant that something unusual was going on. The next morning we heard there was some heaping of ice dollops at the village of Archar, which is a little after Vidin. There is another bottleneck there. This was the reason for the flood. On the night of 2nd March mom took us to a tailor to take our coats. On our way back some people met us and told us the Danube was overflowing. We were walking down the streets and water was coming after us. Our neighborhood didn’t get flooded because it was on the highest place. When the water receded we had to be evacuated because there was a danger of epidemics and we went to Sofia to my mother’s nephew Rebeka Beraha. We stayed there for a month. Despite all the measures there was an outburst of scarlet fever in Vidin after the flood.