Avram Moisey Pinkas and his brother Yakov Moisey Pinkas in Israel

I (on the left) and my brother Yakov Moisey Pinkas in Israel. The picture was taken on 29th September 1999.

I was born on 24th March in Ruse in 1927. My father's first wife got ill and died in hospital in Bucharest. Her sons, Yakov and Mayer, were five and six years old when dad married my mother. I am my mother's eldest son; a year and a half after me my brother Marko was born and much later, in 1934, - my sister Suzana, as we used to call her, but her birth name was Sultana. When she married in Israel her mother-in-law and father-in-law changed her name to Elana - so that she would have a Jewish name. 

[As a boy] I had some books at home, but not many. My elder brother Yakov (Jacques) had more books because he had got influenced by the leftist ideas during his study at the high school. I remember he had books by Maxim Gorky. I had looked through Yakov's 'Brown Book' for the persecution of Jews when I was still a teenager. He used to receive the newspaper of the Youth's Union. When he graduated from the high school, Dad sent him to Romania to study industrial chemistry, because my uncle (my father's brother Chelebi) lived in Constanta, Romania. I remember that my father used to read something before going to bed, but I can't remember what exactly. Our family received the 'Utro' daily and some other newspapers. I learnt to read and write from the newspapers - I loved reading them. When once I found newspapers from 1927, the year I was born, I read them to see what had happened this year.   

When my father died in 1945 he was 56, while Mum was 41, alone and with three children. They didn't make difference between the children from his first marriage and us - we were equal and we felt each other as real brothers. The younger son [Mayer Moisey Pinkas] from his first wife died of cancer - he was a very good technician, he had golden hands as we say. For a long period of time he was denied his request to start working for the military complex in Israel, because he had been a member of the Union of Young Workers in Bulgaria. Finally they accepted him. After that, I remember him showing me some magazines where they praised him for something. The elder brother [Yakov Moisey Pinkas] did not have any profession. In 1948 he started working something in the accountancy department of ZHITI factory (for iron and wire). His wife was economist and in 1949 they decided to move to Israel. 

Photos from this interviewee