Tag #128251 - Interview #78202 (Anelia Kasabova)

I had to join the army after graduating from the language institute. That's why I enrolled in a nurse school in Jerusalem, where I studied for two years. I was in touch with my future husband, Liubomir Kasabov, and I had already made up my mind to go back to Bulgaria. A friend of mine had introduced me to my future husband at the time when I was studying at the language school in Lovech, before I went to Israel. At that time he was studying in the Higher Military School for Construction Officers in Sofia.

I came back to Bulgaria alone, in 1956, to marry and live with my husband. There wasn't any good transport to Bulgaria then - neither airplanes nor regular ships - and I traveled by a small Bulgarian ship from Haifa to Burgas [a port town in Bulgaria]. I knew the captain, who lived in Varna, and I often met him in the town afterwards. He kept reminding me of that small ship on which I had returned to Bulgaria. My future husband's family welcomed me in Burgas - his mother, his father, his brother and his brother's wife. That was a great event! My husband was very brave to marry a Jew from a 'capitalist' country with which Bulgaria wasn't in warm diplomatic relations. We got married the same year, in 1956, in Varna. My husband was an army officer and he could have been fired for marrying a 'capitalist' country citizen. I accepted the Bulgarian citizenship the same year.