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My husband’s relatives had gone to Israel, my aunts and uncles and their children, too. They tried to persuade him to leave; they claimed that I would be treated with a lot of respect there. And they started thinking that I was the one to blame for making him stay in Bulgaria. That was true, by the way.
I had embraced the Zionist idea and considered it to be most sacred. I’m convinced even today that Jews need their own fatherland, which, in my opinion, can be achieved through purchasing the Jewish lands. They considered Zionism to be a reactionary ideology. That’s not right. The very word Zion means a Jewish state. So Zionism comes from that. The Jews should return to their original fatherland, not to chase the population away. Let them live together. We were talking of a bi-national state. We weren’t talking of chasing somebody away. But they wouldn’t accept exiles. They just didn’t accept them. And we studied about the Zionist fight in Palestine. We had information that when somebody had settled somewhere the locals would bury the place under pyramids of stones at night. They were killing them, didn’t accept them at all. They considered them to be conquerors. It hurt us a lot that the official Bulgarian policy was against Israel although there was an official decision that the UN and the Soviet Union had given its consent for the creation of a Jewish state on a small strip of land [38].
And what happened when the Arabs attacked Israel – the USSR supported the Arabs by giving them weapons. So Stalin believed that the new State of Israel would be pro-Soviet because he thought that after coming out of the labor camps the Jews would be people weakened by suffering, financially weak and that they would embrace socialism. But they chose the USA. All that and the official Bulgarian policy were making me feel bad, very bad. Nonetheless, my husband continued his correspondence with his relatives in Israel. The letters were real horror. My father-in-law was reprimanding him because I came from a communist family: my brother was a person of firm communist convictions. It turned out that all that had gone wrong was my fault, even the communist outrage in Israel, because there was a communist party in Israel, which was pro-Arab. My husband’s relatives wrote that those were their enemies and they knew that I was going to read that. At the meetings at my work place there were also speeches against Israel and the Jews.
Yes, especially during the first war between France, England and Israel for Suez [39] – oh, good heavens! Do you know what words were spoken – ‘Why didn’t Hitler kill all the Jews? They wouldn’t be giving us trouble now!’ Upon my word! Can you imagine somebody saying that to you – a colleague who you see every day, in front of an audience, at a meeting?
I had embraced the Zionist idea and considered it to be most sacred. I’m convinced even today that Jews need their own fatherland, which, in my opinion, can be achieved through purchasing the Jewish lands. They considered Zionism to be a reactionary ideology. That’s not right. The very word Zion means a Jewish state. So Zionism comes from that. The Jews should return to their original fatherland, not to chase the population away. Let them live together. We were talking of a bi-national state. We weren’t talking of chasing somebody away. But they wouldn’t accept exiles. They just didn’t accept them. And we studied about the Zionist fight in Palestine. We had information that when somebody had settled somewhere the locals would bury the place under pyramids of stones at night. They were killing them, didn’t accept them at all. They considered them to be conquerors. It hurt us a lot that the official Bulgarian policy was against Israel although there was an official decision that the UN and the Soviet Union had given its consent for the creation of a Jewish state on a small strip of land [38].
And what happened when the Arabs attacked Israel – the USSR supported the Arabs by giving them weapons. So Stalin believed that the new State of Israel would be pro-Soviet because he thought that after coming out of the labor camps the Jews would be people weakened by suffering, financially weak and that they would embrace socialism. But they chose the USA. All that and the official Bulgarian policy were making me feel bad, very bad. Nonetheless, my husband continued his correspondence with his relatives in Israel. The letters were real horror. My father-in-law was reprimanding him because I came from a communist family: my brother was a person of firm communist convictions. It turned out that all that had gone wrong was my fault, even the communist outrage in Israel, because there was a communist party in Israel, which was pro-Arab. My husband’s relatives wrote that those were their enemies and they knew that I was going to read that. At the meetings at my work place there were also speeches against Israel and the Jews.
Yes, especially during the first war between France, England and Israel for Suez [39] – oh, good heavens! Do you know what words were spoken – ‘Why didn’t Hitler kill all the Jews? They wouldn’t be giving us trouble now!’ Upon my word! Can you imagine somebody saying that to you – a colleague who you see every day, in front of an audience, at a meeting?
Period
Location
Sofia
Bulgaria
Interview
Sofi Eshua Danon-Moshe