Tag #139885 - Interview #90481 (Avram Pinkas)

The anti-Semitism in Bulgaria came from the institutions and the laws that were adopted. The Law for Protection of the Nation [17] put restrictions for us. My father as a trader had to pay a one-off tax that swallowed his capital. He had to close his shop, because no Jews were allowed to run stores in the main street. However, the students who were studying at the high school were not expelled from there. But the Sofia students who were interned [18] to Ruse from Sofia were not let to study in the high school. We were not allowed to walk in the town’s main street, we could only stay in our neighborhood. We used to go for walks in David Street which was the central one in our neighborhood. Our group of friends had chosen another street where to walk – it was a smaller one. We were around ten of us and the writer Dragomir Asenov was one of us [The real name of Dragomir Asenov is Jacques Melamed (1926-1981): a writer and playwright. Dragomir Asenov is a literary pseudonym and not a changed name. He spent six years in an orphanage. He graduated university after World War II. In the early period of his work he wrote a lot of pamphlets, articles and features for the press. The late works of the writer are devoted to Bulgaria's history and the modern times. His most famous works are his plays 'Birthday' (1964), 'Roses for Doctor Shomov' (1966), 'Hot nights in Arcadia' (1970), which were staged in Bulgaria and abroad] – he used to lecture us; there were other interesting people, too. We used to gather at somebody’s home, mainly at the houses of two of the girls. At our gatherings we didn’t only have mere talks. Our parents approved of these meetings because they could see we were serious people. We had to wear those yellow stars. The curfew hour was set to 9 p.m. By that time in the evening we had to be back home and we couldn’t go out after that. The so-called legionnaire boys came to our neighborhood to have fights with us. Some more strict nationalists used to curse us at school. We continued studying at the high school, but in 1942 the high school was dismissed and we were sent to our houses to hide from the bombardments. I had then only two years before graduation. And we resumed our studies yet in 1944. They didn’t change our names – we had, however, four names. Instead of Avram Moisey Pinkas I became Avram Moisey Mayer Pinkas. They just added our grandfather’s names to the three we already had. We had yellow identity cards, where the four names were written.      

In 1942-1943 I started working for a young Jewish man – his father had a cardboard workshop. He was making dressing-cases of cardboard and leather. There were mirrors in them and room for combs. I worked for him for several months until one day I came back home and told Dad we could make such things alone. He had long been despaired – no jobs for us, Mum had let all the rooms in the house – some relatives had come to live there because they had been interned from Sofia, as well as a man from Ruse together with his wife from Romania. And when my father heard what I had said he uttered: ‘Let’s see.’ So my brother and I made some of these dressing-cases, he took them and he went out to the bazaar. When he came back he was fluttering with excitement: ‘We are starting, we are starting’ he shouted. After that, he bought mirrors, cut them into smaller ones and we started producing these cases. He came back to life – he was a tradesman. And it was this way that we managed to patch up the situation somehow because Dad had to take loans before that - my uncle Chelebi had helped him for a certain period.