Tsvetana Dzhermanova

Tsvetana Draganova Jermanova (, née Mileva; 20 March 1928 – 19 February 2024) was a Bulgarian anarchist who, during the 1940s and 1950s, was incarcerated in a number of forced labour camps in Communist Bulgaria. As a living survivor of the labour camps, her experiences were documented in her memoirs, published in 2011, and were the subject of a television documentary in 2017.

Biography Early life and education Tsvetana was born on 20 March 1928 in the village of Leskovets into a family of five: her parents, Raina and Dragan Milev, and two brothers, Maxim and Vasil. She graduated from the Leskovets Primary School and the Batanovtsi Secondary School. From 1942 to 1946, she studied at the Pernik Girls' High School and after graduation she applied for a degree in Agronomy at Sofia University, but she was denied permission to enroll by the Fatherland Front. Instead, she enrolled at the Pernik's Mining Technical School, where she graduated in 1957, and later Pernik's Economic Technical School, where she graduated in 1966.

Anarchist activism and incarceration She was first drawn to the ideas of anarchism in 1946, when she started meeting with young anarchists at the Mining Technical School. After she was refused enrollment at Sofia University, she organised a meeting of young anarchists from Southwestern Bulgaria in Kitka, near the . Young people from the villages of Leskovets and Kosacha gathered for the meeting; but the groups from Pernik, Radomir, and Sofia were stopped by policemen at Batanovtsi, and those from Begunovtsi by Breznik police. In December 1951, she was transferred to the "Shchurcheto" camp on Persin Island, where she was incarcerated until 20 April 1952. In 2011, Tsvetana Jermanova's autobiography Memories of the Camps was published; To documentarian Katerina Vassileva, the documentary series was an important historical document, as "through Tsvetana's ... personal story, it seems to me that we can understand more about socialism, for example, than from a textbook. I think this is very valuable. That's my answer to why these stories are important."

Selected works