Shimon Behmoiras
by Simon Behmo
My parents met in Barcelona (Spain), where they got married on July 14, 1935. My father, aged 30, who had graduated from the Engineering School of Zwickau (Saxony), was staying there with one of his brothers, Isaac Behmoarash. Isaac was later killed during the Spanish Civil War. My mother - aged 24 - had been invited to Barcelona by a close girl friend, who was married to a Bulgarian; the latter, as a matter of fact "arranged" an encounter between the girl from Salonica and the man from Varna.
After their marriage, my parents left Spain and tried to settle in Greece, where father, mother and sisters of my mother lived, but they encountered great difficulties because of the Bulgarian citizenship of my father. They thus moved to Sofia where my father managed to start an import-export business; later he began building machines for the packaging industry.
The family of my father consisted at that time of my grandmother, née Marie Benbassat, who had just lost her husband, Shimon Behmoarash, and two brothers, Shapat and Marco. Shapat lived together with his wife Bertha, daughter Marietta, and his mother in Varna. He was running the then quite prosperous packaging workshop created by my grandfather. Nobody seemed to be too worried with the war, which was spreading throughout the rest of Europe, but everithing changed after the enacting of the anti-Jewish Law for the Defence of the Nation in the beginning of 1941, when the Jews of Bulgaria were obliged to sell their businesses to straw men and were preparing themselves for the worst. The first deportations started in the summer of 1943: my father, as all able Sofia Jewish men of military age, was mobilized to a labour unit for the construction of a dam in the South of the Country. My mother and I were put - along with other Jewish families deprived from their men - in a train whose final destination may have been an extermination camp in Poland; thanks to the protest of many Bulgarian civil and religious authorities, and also of the reluctance of King Boris III, our train did not go further than Vidin, a small town on the Danube. There, we were confined in homes, which had been left unoccupied by their inhabitants. Vidin was a 'mild' concentration (not extermination) camp where, as a child, I enjoyed some kind of liberty of movement. We stayed there until August 1944, when the anti-Jewish Law was abolished. My father joined us and we moved to a village where other members of the Behmoarash family were staying. My father decided not to return to Sofia where the straw man who ran his business had kept it and to start some kind of new trade in Varna. It took him some time to succeed. In the meantime, we heard the bad news that almost all the Jews of Salonica who had been deported in 1943 would not return. My mother had kept the faint hope to see at least one of her sisters again, but had finally to admit the terrible truth, which definitely ruined her health and morale.
The Nazis were followed by the Communists, which were not any better. Even though the business of my father was not affected by the nationalization of 1946, he felt it would not last forever and began to make plans for leaving the country for Israel - which was the only emigration option (open exclusively for Jews). His brother made the move first and we followed three months later on the same emigrant ship "Bulgaria". We landed in Haifa on March 17, 1949. Initially we lived in a tent in a beit ha-olim in Pardes Hannah, and then in a barrack in Bat Galim. My recollection of the six months spent in Israel is very vivid and positive: I liked to be free (but did not spend much time in school) and to move around hitchhiking in the country. I had friends with whom I played and explored the vicinity and did not care about the future. My parents were less positive, mainly because it was hard for them - who were over 40 - to adapt to the pioneering spirit, which prevailed in the country. We therefore left Israel for France where my mother had an uncle and cousins in Brive-la-Gaillarde.
Then began a new era for us: my father finally found a nice job as a mechanical engineer with the Philips Company; I studied seriously and managed to graduate as a chemical engineer from École Centrale de Paris and, then, got a PhD in Law from Paris University. I am also a (non-practicing) lawyer. After completing my military service, I left France and spent 35 years at The Hague in The Netherlands where I worked in the International Patents Office, which later became the European Patent Office. Since 2001, I have been retired and have returned to Brive-la-Gaillarde. I got married for the second time, in 1981, to Marie-Noël Licour. We have one boy and one daughter, who carry the name Behmo, a name we are authorized to have since my father was granted French citizenship in 1958.
