Tag #125876 - Interview #98885 (Bitoush Behar)

I hadn’t felt any anti-Semitist attitudes until 1939 – 1940, until the moment when the Fascist organizations Brannik [26], ‘Han Krum’ Legion were established in 1941. In the Jewish quarter their members – all of them young men - would come to break windows, to eventually beat somebody and they went away. I had such a case. We used to have a neighbor. His name was Kasurov and he used to live on the corner of ‘Tsar Samuil’ and ‘Yuri Venelin’. One day he saw how the members of Brannik were coming into the quarter ready to vandalize and ran towards them because they started bullying some of my friends. ‘Bastards, what wrong have these people done, leave them alone.’ We realized the Jewry was in jeopardy at the very moment of the begetting of fascism, with the appearance of the book ‘Mein Kampf’ by Adolf Hitler. A lot of the Jews were aware of the real dimensions of the situation, of the fact that a peril was approaching because we received information that the Jews from the region of the Aegean Sea were sent to the camps of death and we knew that was our destiny as well [Deportation of Jews from Aegean Thrace and Macedonia] [27]. But nonetheless, we were used to being in good relations with the Bulgarians, to being tolerated by them and that gave us reasons to believe that those terrible things were not going to happen in Bulgaria. It was not by chance that a lot of the Jews joined the armed fight as a reaction against the jeopardy.