2024-03-04 09:48:21
Tsvetana Germanova was imprisoned at only 20 years old, and as the youngest, she vows to describe the whole experience in a book
She spends 40 months on charges of anarchism, she is punished, she is shot several times
He met Lea Ivanova, who was one of the political prisoners. They did not fulfill the orders of the authorities and built them again
These days, the last survivor of the death camps passed away – Tsvetana Germanova, imprisoned in 1949 with the following characteristics:
“To Tsvetana Lubomirova Germanova from the city of Dimitrovo, born on March 20, 1928. She comes from a working-class family. She was imprisoned by the DS on January 19, 1949 as an anarchist for a period of 1 year.
For some time now he has been in a bad mood, now in a good mood. Her husband has been calling from different parts of the country lately, never giving his address. He regularly sends her BGN 8,000. The letters are full of mysteries. He invited her in the letters to come to him rather so that they could travel together. She works well, but she has no intention of giving up anarchism. She says she couldn’t convince herself otherwise. He is in close friendship with Elena Al. Sofiyska, Maria Lukova Doganova, Liliana K. Pirinchieva and Sonia Ivanova Kaneva and only shares with them. In sex. etc. work is involved, but formally. Due to the fact that her husband is of an unknown address, and she has not shown in any way that when she goes out, she will no longer engage in anarchism, I suggest that she transform herself for 6 months.”
This is one of the documents of Tsvetana Germanova, known as the last woman who survived the “Bosna” and “Belene” camps, which document shows how her stay in them was extended. She tells about her experiences in her book “Memories from the camps”, where she describes her life there in detail. In it, she tells about her cellmates – Lea Ivanova, Raiko Alexiev’s sisters, opera singers Milena Baramova and Tsvetana Mihailova – arrested for singing on the day of Georgi Dimitrov’s death. Her story later takes her to the Belene camp, in its women’s section on Sturcheto Island, where she was transferred.
The legendary woman died on February 19, shortly before her 96th birthday. This became clear from a post on the “Sofia Platform” Facebook page. Her life story is worthy of a movie and a novel.
Only 20 years old, she was imprisoned there for political reasons. He lives 3 years and 4 months.
She was released in 1952 without any explanation
But even before that, perhaps because she is the youngest in the camp, she makes a promise to the women she meets – to tell their stories so that this madness will never happen again. He kept his word and wrote his book, where he shared that the system was cruel to dissenters, crushed everyone, destroyed everyone both physically and mentally, because they did not recognize their ideology.
Tsvetana Germanova herself was born in March 1928 in the Perni village of Leskovets. He has been a wrestler since he was a child and undertakes various activities. Her most significant and great merit was the electrification of her village. The power line to Radomir ran less than 4 km away. Several young men drove the posts and strung wires, and she and the other girls went around the village to collect copper waste. Thus, although with a lot of effort, Leskovets became the first electrified village in the district after September 9, 1944.
She got carried away by the leftist ideas of anarchism even as a girl, when the first secretary of the Remsist organizations in Pernik, Grigor Iliev, denounced her because she did not agree with the creation of a youth organization in the village.
Until then, this word is completely unknown to her
and she became interested. A friend of hers took her to the community center and the first books she read were “The Dead Siberian Fields” by Viktor Falk and “For Every Day” by Leo Tolstoy.
“What was our fault – Germanova asks in her book. – That we, 17-18-year-old youths, wanted to live freely, according to our traditions, to solve the village-wide problems ourselves. To elect the mayor and release him, when it does not work for the benefit of the village.
We accepted the gypsies who lived in the village as equals, their children were with us in the school, in the community center and in the brigades. And this was in the years when the Ku Klux Klan in America was killing blacks, and in Germany the cells in which the Nazis burned millions of Jews had not yet cooled down.”
Germanova graduated from the Pernish girls’ high school (1946) and applied for the “Agronomy” major at the University of Sofia, but was not allowed to continue her education only because of the lack of mandatory characteristics by the local committee of the Fatherland Front.
In the meantime, word quickly spread that the group of young people around her refused to form a Rems organization in the village, so they became the object of interest on the part of the anarchists.
They joined them and started clashes with the militia
A seemingly funny incident introduced her to one of the main actors of the movement – Lubomir, who pretended to be looking for girls in the village, and her cousin lied to her that he needed help killing a snake in the yard. She jumped over and ran into a group of men along with Lubomir. Years later, he became her faithful companion in life. For some time the two were together unofficially, and on October 28, 1948, their marriage was legalized.
Her husband left for Burgas, where he served as a soldier. The two had an agreement that he would look for a place to stay and that from January 1, 1949, she would go to his place.
However, their dreams fell apart and this happened only after 3 and a half years.
On December 16, 1948, during a large action against anarchists throughout the country, she was arrested.
“Precisely at 6:00 a.m., the DS authorities, like their colleagues from the Gestapo, broke into our homes, conducted searches, seized literature and arrested us – writes Tsvetana Germanova in her book. –
The day was not chosen by chance
It was well thought out and carried out days before the Party took the most despicable of socialist ideas and established a dictatorship of the proletariat. With our arrest, she showed how she would deal with any opponent in the future. The anarchists had a clear opinion – socialism cannot be built with a dictatorship, even if it is a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Just for this statement of theirs, they should have been arrested, sent to the camps, tried, and some even killed.”
They put her in a narrow cell of the DS in Pernik, where she spent 20 days. It goes through all the ways to extract information.
She was questioned only once, but she wrote the truth in her testimony. The authorities did not like this. She realized that something was happening when she was not released for days. One of her confidants, Maria, was also brought to her. The two often sang.
The evening before they were to be interned, the head of the DS came to them. He asked to see the women who announced the government with songs. After a short conversation his last words to them were:
“Sing to yourself, sing to yourself. There’s plenty to sing to yourself”
They received clothes, shoes and food from their relatives and on January 7, 1949 they left for the “Nozharevo” camp, Tutrakansko. Later they moved her to “Bosna”. She took care of vegetable production and animals. They cultivated about 1000 acres of land. They planted wheat, corn, beans, and tended an orchard, mainly with apricots, vines and raspberries. One year he also planted poppies, but the older women, from the political camp workers, dealt with its processing. An agronomist explained that this crop is sown by order of the Ministry of Public Health for pharmaceutical needs. They raised 500 sows for breeding, there was a poultry farm with 1000 hens and chickens.
There was also a sewing room. Mrs. Groys, the mother of the famous director Luben Groys, was responsible for it. Interned women were often punished for not fulfilling the day’s quota. They were different – deprivation of letters, parcels, or a week in prison.
The beatings were carried out by the inspectors from the DS,
who came for inspections from Sofia.
The policewomen who guarded them were hostile towards them. The worst was Zdravkova, who shot Germanova and her friend Adelina because they went to get water without asking her permission. The bullets went past her ears.
The head of the militia was even more cruel. He always came on horseback, with a whip in his hands, which he never let go.
In the winter he punished them by marching in the snow and singing “The wheat shone before us,” and in the summer they stood upright in the hot sun until they fainted,
it all ended in solitary confinement for a week
That’s how they were re-educated when they were tired and walked home freely, not marching and singing.
In the camp, Germanova also met a large group of girls who were defined as political prisoners associated with foreigners. These were Anna Dietrich, Lea Ivanova, Zhana, Ingeborg, Zita, Olga Ognyanova and others, who were accused of having a relationship with soldiers from the American contingent stationed in the country after the signing of the agreement on the surrender of Bulgaria in 1944. Anna Dietrich was associated with German intelligence. She married an official from that department who left the country together with the entire German mission. According to Germanova, she was always ill and did not go to work.
“Lea Ivanova, Olga Ognyanova and the rest of the girls
were known in the camp as cabaret artists
– writes Tsvetana in her book. – Most of them also served the Bulgarian secret services, simply lying to themselves. Some did not fulfill their commitments and returned again. All of them (except Olga Ognyanova) enjoyed a freer regime. Lea Ivanova returned to the camp twice during my stay.”
* Who are the other interesting women with whom Tsvetana Germanova meets, and what they hid from society, read in the next issue of “24 hours – 168 stories”.