Adela Levi

This is a picture from the time I finished my secondary education before I started working for the ?Narodna Mladezh? newspaper in 1950. After the war my sister Rashel went to work as a babysitter in a Jewish family. The family was rich. Their family name was Arie and they gave her clothes, money or food. She brought everything home. My mother no longer sewed because there were no orders. We lived like that until I started work at the editor's office of the newspaper 'Narodna Mladezh'. This happened in 1950. I was the secretary of the editor-in-chief. Then I was office manager. I had started studying in an evening high school so I finished my secondary education before I started work at the newspaper firm. I worked there until 1959. I was already a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Before the newspaper I worked for a short time in the Committee of Science, Arts and Culture in the personnel department and also in the publishing house 'Medicine and Physical Education'. I also worked for a short time in radio 'Sofia' as a program dispatcher. I kept in touch with my relatives, we wrote letters to each other and spoke on the phone, which was a luxury then. They called more often. I remember that one of the times my sister and her husband were passing via Bulgaria to go to a Romanian festival, and they called to tell us that they wouldn't pass through Sofia, but through Gorna Oriahovitsa. They asked our mother to go and see them there. My mother was very worried there because she couldn't find them on the platform. They were in a special wagon and weren't allowed to go to Sofia. Those were special festival wagons. They weren't much different from the others, but they were only for the participants in the festival and no other passengers traveled in them. There was some kind of problem and my husband took my mother home. At that time Ivan Bashev was in charge of the Bulgarian representatives in the festival and I was his secretary in 'Narodna Mladezh'. Later, he became Foreign Minister. So we called him and he did everything possible to find my sister in Romania and put her through to my mother so that at least they could speak on the phone.