A soup kitchen in Pazardzhik in 1944

A soup kitchen in Pazardzhik in 1944

A soup kitchen in Pazardzhik in 1944. I?m in the back with the coat. To the front, on the right, is my friend Liska Natan. I don't know the others. The photo was taken on the school campus. An inscription in pen says: 1944. Giving aid to the interned  at a soup kitchen in Pazardzhik.?

In 1941 they closed all the Jewish organizations and someone from the central direction of UYW came to inform us that if we became members of UYW we would help the anti-fascist movement. And we all started assisting that movement: we collected clothes, money, and food, in order to help the partisans and the political prisoners. And I moved from Maccabi to UYW.

After that the interned citizens of Sofia came to Pazardzhik. We had to accommodate them in our houses. Some of them slept in the school on bunks. There were some ill people among them. My mother, father and brother slept in one room. I and one of the daughters of Mois Farhi, one of the interned families, slept in another room. The third room we gave to the mother, father and her brother. The living room, through which all of us passed, was used by another family also from Sofia: a man, his wife and two children. I can't remember their names. We also gave out the room in the attic. I still can't believe that all we had gathered through the years - rice, flour, sugar - was what we had to share with those people from Sofia.

In the beginning we didn't have the right to go out after nine o'clock. All of us had to be home by 9.05pm but the time for staying out was gradually reduced; we could stay out for only two hours a day. Some of the peasants brought us food but we organized a soup kitchen for the people from Sofia. One of the women did the cooking: something like a soup with a few potatoes, beans; a meal with lots of water, that we poured into mugs with a ladle. I was one of the first to give out the food. We had job restrictions, we didn't have food coupons, and so we weren't allowed to attend cultural events. We were attacked on all sides. They said all the time, 'The Jews in Pazardzhik became too many".

Open this page