Tag #124738 - Interview #78126 (Mazal Asael)

I did not want to move out of Sofia but had to anyway. My family
got a notice that we had to leave for the town of Dupnitza and my parents
made me to go with them. Both my older brothers were in labor camps at that
time. My family left for Dupnitza at the end of May. I went back to Sofia
the next day. My parents did not know about that. They suspected that I
would join an armed anti-fascist guerrilla squad and didn't want me to go
back to Sofia.

I went back to Sofia with a fake ID card with a Bulgarian name on it, which
I got from my friends in the RYU. I lived in the lodging of a friend of
mine, Boris Brankov. After that I moved to the underground group in the
Lozenetz Quarter. We decided to join a guerrilla squad but the head of our
organization was arrested and so we failed. I was also arrested in June
1943. Someone had disclosed the fact that I was Jewish and I was sent to
Sveti Nikola, a concentration camp near Asenovgrad in South Bulgaria. These
camps were built as prisons for the anti-fascists but not especially for
Jews. I was sent there because of my anti-fascist activities, not because
of my Jewish origin. I stayed there until it was closed in November 1943.
The Bulgarian government changed that year. Ivan Bagryanov's government
came into power and he closed all political prisons but also founded some
new ones such as Sveti Kirik. When I came back to Sofia from the camp I
didn't have any identification again and I hid in the home of some friends
of mine. I understood then that my parents had been moved to the town of
Mihailovgrad, which was named Ferdinand then.