Tag #125834 - Interview #98885 (Bitoush Behar)

He used to be a right-wing socialist and then he became a left-wing, revolutionary socialist. [origin of Bulgarian Communist Party] [13] He was in jail because of the Jewish conspiracy. There was a Jewish conspiracy in Plovdiv (its members were communists and BCP was banned at the time [14]).  They were accomlishing educational activities and defended the interests of the poor, mainly of the workers. At the beginning the conspiracy didn’t have a name but later it took the name of its leader Pardo. I can neither say the names of the people who took part nor where their headquarters and sphere of activities were. It started operating in 1935 – 1936 when I was only five or six years old.


After a failure my father was sent to jail. The charges were that he had faked a stamp in order to forge the ID card of someone from Silistra region [a town in Northeastern Bulgaria]. And I saw what real friendship means. In his group from the conspiracy there were only three married men, all the others were bachelors. At that time my father was already married. And the leaders took a decision which ordered the bachelors to take on the blame and to back up the married ones so that the married men would get a suspended sentence and go out to look after their families. And one of the accused said at the trial: ‘Mr. Judge, sir, if there is a man with a gun standing in front of you, you would do what he tells you to do. That’s why Yuda faked the stamp. I was with a gun pointed at him.’ And my dad was released because he had made the stamp under threat of being shot. And that wasn’t true. Yes, that’s esprit de corps, a sacrifice in the name of your comrade. There were people from the conspiracy sentenced to fifteen years in jail and they were released on 9th September 1944.