A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

III THE BEAR AND THE PRINCESS OF LIGHT

My name is Tosho, Tosho the Dancing Bear. My stage name, that is; otherwise I am Todor. As in Todor Zhivkov, our beloved Bay Tosho, our Tato. I was named after him by a toothless old Gypsy Roma fittingly named Angel. Angel belonged to the only nonintegrated people in Europe, the one that managed to resist the Communists’ attempts at social engineering to create “new men”—as well as any other kind of social integration. He bought me from hunters and brought me up and trained me to dance. His family had owned bears for seven generations; we were their only source of income. Angel loved Todor Zhivkov, the first secretary of the Communist Party, the president of Bulgaria, and the most reliable ally of the USSR in the Soviet bloc. He is one of those who claims that during the thirty-three years of Zhivkov’s rule he felt more of a human being than he does today. By that he means that all of his eleven children went to school, even if only for a year or two. Health care, housing, employment opportunities, and social welfare—all of it was more available to his people before. Nowadays, however, said Angel, in the new, united Europe we are being persecuted more and more. Not only in Bulgaria, but all over Eastern Europe. In Hungary and Slovakia, in the Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovenia we are being expelled, beaten, stabbed, forcibly sterilized, shot dead, or burned alive in arson attacks. Our kids are still placed in schools for the handicapped, which predetermines their future… But maybe his memory is failing him. Anyway, twenty years after Zhivkov has been gone from power, he still keeps a newspaper clipping of Bay (Uncle) Tosho’s photo taped on the wall, right above his black-and-white TV set.

Now I live near Beltisa, in a beautiful park and resort—a destiny I share with some twenty other colleagues in the dancing profession. It is our new home, created especially for us—with the help of some European foundation, I assume. But as I get easily bored in this paradise, I decided to write a book of testimonies about life in captivity before the fall of Communism. Inevitably, that means writing about people as well. How could I avoid them? They held us captive, but our destinies were intertwined in so many other ways, too. It is not easy to understand that they also suffered. Because, even though they were the subjugators of animals, they were captives as well.

As my front paws are good for nothing because of my rheumatism, I am forced to dictate this manuscript to a pleasant young girl, an animal rights activist who comes here to help feed us. Evelina brings me apples and grapes, my favorite fruits. She is twenty years old—still almost a cub in human terms. At the beginning of this project it moved me to see how distressed she was by my stories, how hard it was for her to learn that we had suffered so much. But then I realized that she was troubled not only by the fact that we had been tortured, but also that we had withstood torture without even a squeak. She could not understand our passiveness. Evelina belongs to a new generation that grew up after the fall of Zhivkov’s regime, free from Communist Party ideology. I realized that recently, when she asked me, “But why didn’t you do something? You are so much bigger, so much stronger than the people who held you imprisoned! “ Yes, why didn’t we? “I’ll tell you why, young lady: Because the thought never occurred to us, that’s why! That was the secret of both Zhivkov’s and Angel’s rule—not only was your body captured, but so was your mind. I learned only in hindsight that what keeps one enslaved is one’s own captive mind,” I told her. “And if you are still wondering, Was there no one else to stand up for our rights, no one to stop this unbearable torture?—like neighbors or the police, or other citizens—I tell you: No! They all watched us dance and laughed! It amused them to see a huge and dangerous animal reduced to a pitiful clown. It proved their domination. A sad story of how beastly people can be, given the chance.”

Ah, it is perhaps useless to try to tell new kids what it was like to live before, to dance while somebody else yanks your chain… Nevertheless, I see it as my task. “You need to know that, you need to remember,” I say to Evelina, and she smiles at me with her beautiful, innocent smile, that of a child who doesn’t know what I am talking about. But all the while she understands the suffering of defenseless animals better than the suffering of the people. I must say that she has a point there. From where she stands, it is not easy to see that Bulgarian people were treated pretty much like us. They could not do much to change their own condition as “dancing bears,” so to speak. And maybe, after all, they did not want to.

My life with Angel, his big family, and his five dogs, of which Dobri was my best friend was… how can I put it? Once I was tamed, I guess it was bearable. Yes, the word is bearable. It means that I got used to such a life, one gets used to anything. We traveled a lot; he played the godoulka fiddle and the drum while I danced. On a good day Angel would collect decent money and then he would be nice to me. In the evening we would eat together and get drunk on beer, and sometimes even on his favorite brandy, rakija. On a bad day he would curse my laziness and my bitch of a mother. That would make me sad. But at least he did not beat me. I knew that it was customary to beat us dancers, and I must admit that I was grateful to Angel that he did not practice it.

I was the most famous dancing bear in the whole of Bulgaria. We traveled from his village in the mountains to the seaside, to Varna, Plovdiv, Blagoevgrad, Ruse, even to Sofia. I remember how curious and excited I was when I was young, and I must say that I learned to enjoy such a life sometimes. In the years after the collapse of the Zhivkov regime, we were even filmed several times by foreign TV crews. Angel naively believed this would contribute to my fame and his budget—and even to Bulgarian tourism. But it proved to be exactly the opposite, because this led animal rights activists straight to us later on…

I believed that Angel and I were friends after all those years of living and performing together. This in spite of the fact that he kept me on a chain, with a ring through my nose. He convinced me that it was more for the sake of appearance. “This is for your own safety, eh! People would go mad if they saw a bear walking free in the street,” he used to say, reassuringly. “They would kill you right away. People are cruel, believe you me. I have seen it many times in my life.” As if I did not know that!

I met with human cruelty for the first time when my mother was killed. It was a beautiful spring day, and we had just climbed up to a hill when we heard a strange sound. Only one shot was fired, and our mother collapsed right in front of us. I still remember her last glance at us, full of despair. My sister and I spent a day hiding in a cave nearby. We were small cubs, alone, hungry, and frightened. The hunter’s dogs found us. I never saw my sister again, and for a while I kept wondering if perhaps she had become a dancer, too? Or was she living in a cage in a zoo or, even worse, in a circus? I asked my young friend Evelina, did she know what a circus was. To my surprise she answered that she had only seen it on TV. Of course, she added, she would never, ever go to see poor tamed animals performing ridiculous and humiliating tasks. True, I agree that these animals are much worse off. I sometimes think of lions and elephants freezing during our long winters, and I don’t know how they can survive. Perhaps I should collect their testimonies, too? Although here, in this refuge, I have heard enough terrible stories from other bears, as each of us has our own to tell.

Angel kept me in the yard together with his five dogs. In the beginning I thought I was a dog! And day after day, he also taught me how to dance. He said that he needed to teach me to dance in order to go around and make money with me. I must say that I don’t like to go back to that particular memory of my torture, of jumping like crazy on a hot metal plate while listening endlessly to his fiddle… This is how they trained us: They either heated a large piece of metal or just spread hot coal on the ground, and then forced us to step on it and “dance.” We bears immediately realized that it was better to spare at least two paws, so we would stand up on our hind legs and lift first one, then the other. It looks like dancing to people, I guess. For some reason it even makes them laugh. All I can say is that it is unbearably painful. Afterward you lie in a corner, half dead, licking your blisters and the raw flesh of your wounds… and you are only a baby. But it was useless to expect pity; in a traditional peasant society there is no pity for either domestic or wild animals. They are there to be used and abused. They must be made useful. In their Marxist lingo, it was called “productive labor,” I remember. Even a dog, the first domesticated animal ever, has to work. He guards the house or the herd. A cat catches mice. No place for pets in the countryside! A child plays with a chicken and has it for soup the next day. Most animals are bred to be killed, anyway. The only difference is that domestic animals are rarely tortured the way we were.

But in the beginning of the seventies a change happened in Bulgaria, when Lyudmila Zhivkova, the daughter of Todor Zhivkov, was appointed to a number of high party and state offices. She was installed in high positions while her relatives occupied lower ones. Her appointment was not at all unusual; when a king or a dictator does something like that, it is hardly a surprise. After all, Bulgaria was not alone in this; such was the custom in other, similar societies, like Romania and Albania. But the difference was that Lyudmila was not incompetent. On the contrary, she was a historian by training, and even wrote a few books (supposedly with a little help from her staff). She studied history in Sofia and Moscow, and even spent some time at Oxford University researching a book about Turkish-Bulgarian relations. From 1972 on, and within a very short period of time, Lyudmila became: chairwoman of the Committee for Culture; a member of the Central Committee and the Politburo; chairwoman of the Commission for Science, Culture, and Education; the People’s representative (MP) in their Parliament; and a member of the Council of Ministers. In 1975 Lyudmila became the minister of culture.

I know that many saw her for what she really was: a second generation of the Communist nomenklatura children, groomed to become the heir to her father’s throne. At that time Bulgarians did not live in the twentieth century, as people call it—we bears count time differently. They were stuck in medieval times, when the country was treated as the private property of a family, and power was handed down from father to son. Or, in the case of Lyudmila, to daughter. In many old Bulgarian folk songs, a woman is a magical creature, a mediator between the earth and the sky, between the natural and the supernatural. Such a woman is called a samodiva, or a wild fairy, and she possesses the untamed spirit necessary to maintain balance in the universe. It turned out that Lyudmila did indeed act as if she were a samodiva, linking two totally opposite worlds, one material and the other mystical and occult. Raised with the atheism and materialism of Marxist dogma, she embraced the opposite: yoga, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as the folk medicine of Peter Dinev and the prophecies of Vanga, an allegedly clairvoyant illiterate peasant woman.

In fact, the story of Lyudmila reminds me of our old fairy tales… In my view, a fairy tale about her would run somewhere along the following lines:

Once upon a time, in the faraway land of the dictatorship of the proletariat, beneath the Balkan mountain there lived a young woman by the name of Lyudmila. She was not a beauty, but she was quick, intelligent, and ambitious. Moreover, she was a princess, the apple of the eye of the mighty King Todor I. After finishing her education and becoming learned in history and many other important, not to mention unimportant, subjects, one day she approached her father with a plan. “Beloved father,” she said, “I have thought long and hard about how to improve the lot of our people.” Her words caught the king’s attention, and he was delighted, as he himself had devoted his whole life to this very aim, alas not very successfully. His kingdom was a sad place, where people and animals dwelled in misery. Something needed to be done before his subjects, having nothing to lose, would rise up and start to rebel against him. Something that would make them love their king even more. “I know how to turn them into harmonious human beings, full of celestial light and eternal beauty. The whole universe would rejoice in our new life of wisdom, truth, and spirituality!” the princess explained to her father.

These words sounded strange to the king’s ears, which were used to a very different vocabulary, but what the heck? If his little darling could do something to change life in the kingdom—even if only in spirit—so much the better. He knew that in order to accomplish this she had to become the high commander of culture. The Council of Elders, or Politburo, approved his decision instantly. Of course, it was merely a formality. So the princess, the apple of the king’s eye, presented to the council her master plan of improving the soul of the entire nation. “Balance will reign in our beloved Bulgaria,” she promised them. The old men applauded; they could do nothing else anyway. They were experienced enough to know that the new language she spoke, and which they could not understand—and were sure that nobody else could either—carried an important message: In real life nothing much would change for them. Or for other subjects, for that matter.

Princess Lyudmila threw herself into her work. She dispatched envoys to bring to her the best scientists and artists, the most distinguished writers and academics, and the finest intellectuals. They together would create magnificent plans and programs to implement beauty in the everyday life of the people—especially through education. For it was clear to her that one has to start with young minds not yet molded by reality…

Some of these envoys she sent abroad to search for beauty and light there, as she herself did by traveling to exotic kingdoms like India and Nepal, many days ride by horseback. More important still, she reached out to the people. In her speeches she tirelessly and enthusiastically explained how they could benefit from the creative powers of spiritual change that each of them possessed within themselves—it only needed to be awakened. Everywhere the princess went she was met by enthralled masses of people; it was a sign that she was speaking straight to their souls. It was so evident to her that her subjects and her country needed a spiritual renaissance, and she often wondered how it was that nobody had understood this before her.

Among all these frantic activities she found time to marry, divorce, remarry, and have two children. However, she expressed the desire for her private life to be kept out of the public arena….

The ambitious princess, the apple of the king’s eye, was capable of rising even higher above the harshness of reality. She wanted to present the little kingdom of Bulgaria to the world, as this was the home of great Thracian treasures, and of beautiful orthodox icons. Under her supervision and command, exhibitions sprang up and traveled around the world. The king had to squeeze money from his subjects, but that was never a problem when a higher cause demanded of them such a sacrifice. The most important of her many projects was the celebration of the thirteen hundredth anniversary of Bulgarian statehood. But the neighboring Great Soviet Empire was not really pleased with Lyudmila’s barely concealed nationalist projects. They thought that the planned celebration was a daring display of Bulgarian national identity. As if Bulgaria were an independent kingdom and not merely one of its many satellites! Such an act was dangerous, because it could inspire other Eastern European satellites to think that they, too, could have an identity (and life!) separate from the Great Soviet Empire. That simply could not be allowed. Especially because there were signs that the princess might be the next in line for the throne and—according to spy reports of the time—she was but a dangerous lunatic.

A cunning plan was put into action. Lyudmila’s lover, Alex, was one of the Soviets’ many men in Sofia. They wanted to install him in power after the king’s death. They instructed Alex to talk Lyudmila into an attempt to overthrow King Todor I, whereupon he would take over power. But her pride was hurt: She had envisioned this position for herself! When the plan was discovered (perhaps thanks to her hurt pride?), the king went mad with fury. Yet he forgave his daughter, as he knew that her heart was full of love for him, for his kingdom, the whole world, and even the universe. “My dear child, all in good time! The throne will not escape you. You have proven to me that you are worthy of it,” he told his daughter. Lyudmila was relieved. Being the harmonious creature that she was, she did some more yoga stretches and meditated a bit upon the divine and eternal—and for her, the matter was settled.

But not for Alex, who understood that his Politburo career, if not his life, was at stake. What was to be done? He contacted his patrons, and they came up with yet another devious plan. Of course, in such medieval states, the custom was simply to resolve such complications with murder. But they did not put it so bluntly to Alex. In the meantime, who knows, he might have been influenced by all this light and beauty blah-blah of the princess. The Soviet secret police, the KGB, gave him a small crystal vial in a red velvet box. Allegedly, Alex was told that it was a magic potion. Once Lyudmila opened and smelled it, she would fall in love again and help him to the throne.

When Lyudmila, busy with preparations for the anniversary exhibition, received his gift, she was very pleased. She took it as a sign of remorse. Being a woman, she could not resist but to open the bottle right away, believing that it was a perfume. The sweet fragrance enveloped her. He still loves me, she thought, before her spirit left her body, only to become one with the universe—as she herself would have put it. She was thirty-nine years old… When the servants entered her chamber, her body was gone. No one noticed the small green frog that jumped through the window into the garden.

After her disappearance, darkness fell upon the kingdom. It lasted for the next eight years, when a new light descended upon Bulgaria, this time from the West.

“I think that we Bulgarians were blessed with her in a strange way. She had the power to do more bad things than she did. That is why I like the idea that she did not die of poison (which is only one of the many versions of her death), but rather turned into a small, fragile green frog—into a little animal, that is,” I told Evelina. “Ah, yes, how very typical of Bulgaria! Unlike in other fairy tales, in this one the princess turns into a frog and not the other way around. I like your interpretation! “ exclaimed Evelina, not really knowing much about the said Princess Lyudmila.

But she really did behave more like a princess than a party bureaucrat. Regardless of whether she was allowed (or not) to behave differently because she was protected by her omnipotent father, the truth is that she was educated, intelligent, and ambitious. Bringing a whiff of modernity to Bulgarian art and culture was a very positive attempt.

Even if her ideas were often very, very strange.

Take her “national program for aesthetic education,” as part of the “construction of a mature socialist society.” As much as she tried to put it into practice, her directions were vague and abstract. No wonder, because it was not an easy task to link “development according to the law of the spiral” with development according to the dominating laws of economic determination in Marxism: The material world represents the “base,” while the “fluffy” stuff of culture, beauty, and spirit belongs to the “superstructure.”

Or take her rhetoric. Her rhetoric was delightfully fuzzy and deceptive. Here is a quote from a 1980 analysis by the journalist Jordan Kerov, which Evelina found somewhere for me (I think she called the place the “Internet,” but I don’t know where it is situated):

Lyudmila Zhivkova’s opening speech at the 1979 “Banner of Peace Assembly” in Sofia, for example, contained the following words or concepts taken directly from the oriental mystics or from their occidental proponents: harmony, harmonious development of man, and perfection, etc. (occur 33 times); light, celestial light, brightness, etc. (35 times); the Universe, the Planet, the Galaxy, Endlessness, the Infinite, the Eternal, Nature etc. (33 times); Beauty, Truth, etc. (38 times); Wisdom (19 times); creative powers, dreams, aspirations, etc. (36 times); and Spirit, vibrations, energy, blessing, etc. (16 times).

Lyudmila Zhivkova also uses phrases like the “effulgent purposefulness,” the “sonorous vibration of the seven-stage harmony of the Eternal,” and the “vibrations of the electrons.” All this she managed to put together in a speech lasting only about 15 minutes and, which is the most amazing, addressed to children of up to 14 years of age.

Even if I try very hard, I just can’t imagine Madame Ceausescu or Madame Hoxha giving a similar speech in front of children or workers or Communist Party members or the Politburo. Many compared her to the powerful wives of other leaders, like Nexhmije, the wife of the first secretary of Albania, Enver Hoxha. Or like the notorious Elena Ceausescu. Both of them had power but didn’t even attempt to do anything good with it. Unlike women in positions of power acquired through their relationships with dictators, Lyudmila did something good, at least in one particular field. In spite of her folly, her reign as the minister of culture is nevertheless considered the golden age of art and culture in Bulgaria. Artists traveled abroad to study, and abstract art was exhibited in galleries—unheard-of in the other satellite states. Under her reign, a national palace of culture was constructed and the National Gallery of Art was replenished with formidable works of art. The exhibition “Thracian Gold Treasures from Bulgaria” traveled to twenty-five cities around the world, and many countries also saw the fine exhibition of Orthodox icons. Last but not least, a big “manifestation,” “Banner of Peace, World Children’s Assembly,” was held in Sofia, under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

At a time of such a feudal type of rule as Zhivkov’s in Bulgaria, of strong oral tradition, myths, folk songs, and fairy tales—because in spite of all the lip service, none of this was eradicated by the decades of socialist government—it was also normal to keep dancing bears.

Why, then, did we animals see in Lyudmila the possibility of salvation at all? I think we believed that, if she understood art and beauty and their importance in life, there was hope for this society and its primitive treatment of animals. Not to mention the fact that her father, like all other Communist heads of state, was a hunter! But she believed that animals have souls! Surely she would do something about bears dancing under her nose with burned paws and bleeding noses? If only she knew about us! If only the ruler knew the real condition of his subjects, he would change it, for sure. Rulers are just. Surely she was just. Or so we hoped for a while.

I must say that, frankly, I was impressed that she was a vegetarian. This custom was pretty much unheard-of in Bulgaria. Yes, there were some sensitive souls who couldn’t eat meat because it belonged to a slaughtered animal. Instead of a piece of meat on the plate, they would see a little calf calling for its mother. But such individuals were few and far between. People ate meat if they could buy it; anything else was considered to be eccentric and likely to be ridiculed, maybe even declared as the “decadent influence of the capitalist West.”

At first I thought that to be a vegetarian in a country where many people could not afford to eat meat—where such a diet was not a matter of taste or choice—was an extraordinary, enlightened decision. You have to be really high-minded and spiritually oriented. Because vegetarianism is more than a diet—for example, as when an ill person is prescribed vegetarian food. It is also more than a taste preference, like when you do not enjoy the taste of meat. It is an ideology, and it fit well with her other ideologies. But apparently I was wrong. Long after Lyudmila was gone I understood how easy it had been for her to be a vegetarian. She defended the rights of other living beings, mostly mammals, because animals are like people; they feel pain, they feel fear. Therefore, she appeared more human herself. On the other hand, she did nothing to change their conditions. Her activity in our favor was restricted to just that—not eating meat. And hoping that one day everybody would come to the conclusion that it is not moral to feed on creatures that endure as much pain as humans do.

I naively imagined how, for example, she could have given the order to ban the capture and torture of wild bears. Or, for that matter, to let people travel abroad and then decide for themselves what beauty and light and harmony are. But this would have required much more from her than grand words. It would have also been more dangerous to deal with human than with animal rights. At the time, human life was seldom perceived in its single form; it was usually seen as only a mass, a crowd. Our princess fled to the safe sphere of the spirit and light. When she spoke, it was in the lofty language of symbols and poetic metaphors. There was no real change; there could not be any. In the end, even if her intentions were good, our life went on without change. Freedom—be it for animals or for humans—was not her priority. How could it be? She had little or no contact with real life, with real underdogs and underbears. She simply did not see us as being enslaved. The simple truth was that socialist leaders could not care for us animals because they did not care for people either. We were all the same to them.

As far as my life was concerned, darkness fell upon it, too. And so it remained until a year ago, when activists from the Free Bears Now! organization come to rescue me from Angel. They saw that fatal TV footage of me dancing in Sofia and tracked us down. Apparently, I was one of the last dancing bears in the Balkans to be saved. Now I see that it was about time for my rescue, because I am old, exhausted, and in pain.

Anyway, at first I did not want to leave Angel for a better (but unknown) life in a resort. So when two activists visited us, both Angel and I tried to reason with them. Angel swore on his life that I am to him like his own child, that he feeds me the very food he eats. Of course, he was exaggerating. He fed me mostly stale bread and leftovers from their disgusting, unhealthy, sometimes carnivorous meals. He even shed a tear or two for me. Angel could shed tears whenever; I never understood this ability of people and how tears could be taken seriously as an argument among their kind. I, on the other hand, tried to verify his story in a way these young people might perhaps understand, so I displayed my figure and fur and bared my poor teeth as proof. But the iron ring in my nose, and the fact that Angel kept me chained to a mulberry tree in front of his shack, spoke strongly against him. In the end, the older of the two, a serious, businesslike young man, gave Angel an offer he could not refuse: a lump sum of money as compensation. He actually was not in a position to argue, because dancing bears had become outlawed, anyway. Plus, Angel badly needed to repair his roof. Even though Gypsy Roma people are famous for their disregard of the law, my transfer was duly arranged. I was not asked for an opinion, of course. Democracy yes, but not for bears!

Ah, the wheel of fortune—or, perhaps, the wheel of history?—turns in unpredictable ways.

Before they left, and while Angel was signing the papers for my release, the young activist said, “We especially care about these poor beasts because they symbolize the Bulgarian people, whom Todor Zhivkov kept chained!” Well, he couldn’t resist an ideological statement, could he? I guess he meant that people under Zhivkov did what he wanted and never rebelled against him. True, very true! The other side of this picture was, however, reflected in Angel’s case, where the socialist government provided the basic (bare) necessities for them. Most people, not only this Gypsy Roma, valued that. I know it from my own experience: however meager the provisions you get, if you get them regularly, they make you feel safe. Before, it was a simple trade-off: One traded one’s freedom for security. After all, what is freedom without anything to eat? I must add that my friend Evelina strongly disagreed with me. She repeatedly shook her head, exclaiming that never, ever would she trade freedom for anything. But saying “never” in such an adamant way is so typical of young people, simply because they have no idea what they are talking about.

Was I truly rescued as a symbol of a society? Then and there, I understood that it is hard for past and present to meet. The bear-rescuing mission was some kind of a new dogma for these youngsters. While people are left to struggle for survival in the jungle of the market economy, it is the turn of the animals to be taken care of and sheltered. A new, free generation just assumes that in a democracy people should take care of themselves.

Seriously speaking, it was not easy to leave the old man, his people, and his village. “You obviously repressed the fact that he was actually your torturer. You developed a Pavlovian reflex ,” said Evelina. She learned about that at school, I guess.

“This is why even today you start dancing whenever you hear the godoulka or any other kind of music playing.” She was talking about a recent event when she had brought her iPod and let me listen to some rock music. I started to dance with the iPod in my paw and the headset on. It was grotesque, I know, but the urge to dance was stronger than my will to resist it. She was saddened by this episode, and so was I. Indeed, I think that she might be right. A hot-metal training plate had been installed in my brain forever. This might be the reason why I don’t think that I can fully understand and appreciate the new freedom I enjoy. Besides, every freedom has its limits. But I am an old bear; there is no salvation for old bears trained to dance even when no one is yanking their chain.

As if that diagnosis were not enough, Evelina concluded that I had probably developed the “Stockholm syndrome” as well. This is when a victim identifies with his captor, and even feels grateful to him. The young man from Free Bears Now! was definitely right. In that respect, I surely represent the Bulgarian people from the time of socialism. Except, perhaps, for the Gypsy Roma people, who never really fit into that system. They were indifferent to the government ideology, they just got used it—and I respect them for that. By the way, I noticed that Angel and his family have not been saved by anyone so far. There are not many—in any case, not enough—special organizations I know of that protect the rights of Gypsies Roma, even if they are the most discriminated against minority in Europe today. Unlike us, they are humans, and they are supposed to integrate into the society. But as Angel once said to me, “What if I don’t want to integrate? What if we want to go on and live the way our people have lived for thousands of years? Who is going to protect our right to live as we want?” Today, when I know more about the outside world, I could tell him: not many. You have to protect your rights yourself, because you Gypsy Roma, it seems to me, are a kind of modern-day wild bear. And the hunt is on.