David Levi as a detective at the Ministry of Internal Affairs

This is my husband David Levi as a detective at the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Sofia, in 1949. I knew my husband, David Levi, from early on, because he was a famous illegal activist and a lot of people knew who he was. He had been imprisoned for a long time and I knew about him although we had never met. He was born in Sofia and arrested here. He was sent to the Sofia prison, then to the Varna one and then to the Burgas one. He also worked in the Jewish labor camps. He was sentenced to ten years imprisonment for UYW activities. We met at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. We fell passionately in love and got married on 19th January 1947. We had nowhere to live together, so I lived at my mother's and he lived at his parents' house. We met in the parks. David was a great sportsman, a tourist: we went to the Vitosha Mountain and to other mountains as well. From time to time we went to his parents' house; there was a small room there: they slept on some kind of panel beds, I don't know how they had managed to preserve them. And there was a couch at the foot of the bed where we slept. We lived like that until 1948 when we were given a room in the big apartment of the Kulevi family. The man in the family had been a producer of enamelware and his wife was German. After 9th September 1944 he had run away and his wife remained here. She was about to leave, but one of the rooms in her apartment had been nationalized and given to us. I remember that we lived there for a very short time, because Kuleva was leaving and someone else wanted the whole apartment for himself. They told me that we had to leave because some prosecutor was going to live here. My husband got so angry that he said, 'I'll not leave this apartment, let them throw my baggage away and if Georgi Dimitrov passes by and asks whose this baggage is, they will have to tell him: it's Dick's baggage outside!' You can see how naive we were at that time. He still worked for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, he was there until 1949. After all we were given two rooms to rent in a bigger apartment on Hristo Botev Street, but this time his parents also came to live there. There were two more rooms where other families lived.