Tsvetana was born on March 20, 1928, in the village of Leskovets, Pernik, in the family of artisans. She attended the primary school in her home village and then the middle school in the village of Batanovtsi.

During 1942-1946 she studied at the high school for girls in Pernik and after graduation she applied to study Agronomy at Sofia University, but she was not admitted as she didn’t have the approval of the communist authorities. It was during that period that Tsvetana became interested in the ideas of anarchism. After the authorities denied her entry into university, Tsvetana, her future husband Lyubomir Dzhermanov and her friend Maria Doganova decided to organize a meeting of young anarchists from Southwestern Bulgaria near the Gigin monastery. Participating groups from Pernik, Radomir and Sofia were stopped by the police.

This event became the reason for Tsvetana’s arrest on December 16, 1948, during an action against anarchists in Bulgaria. Without a trial and a sentence, Tsvetana was sent to the forced labor camp in the village of Bosna, near Silistra. She remained there for three years from January 1949 until December 1951, when she was moved to the women’s section of the Belene camp – Shturcheto camp. Tsvetana remained there until April 20, 1952, when she was released following the death of Stalin. According to the State Security archive, Tsvetana signed a declaration for cooperation while in the Belene camp, however, there is no documental evidence that she ever provided any information.

A few months before she was arrested in 1948, Tsvetana married Lyubomir Dzhermanov (born in 1925, also an anarchist). The two of them, along with their children, were resettled by the communist authorities multiple times and had to frequently change their jobs.

In the years following her release from the camps, Tsvetana and her husband found work in the mines, which was one of few employment opportunities open for them. Since work in the mines weas unattractive and work was hard. The communist authorities always had difficulties in ensuring a steady work force for the mining sector. In 1957 Tsvetana completed a vocational course at the Mining Technical School in Pernik.

In later years Tsvetana was engaged in different administrative roles. After the fall of the regime in 1989, she was an active participant in the efforts to preserve the memory of victims of the communist regime and she often talked in public about her time in the Bosna and Belene labor camps. Her memoirs, Memories from the camps, are available from Farago Publishing House.

Sources: Dzhermanova, Tsvetana, Memories from the Camps; comdos.bg; State Archives Agency - Pernik; Bulgarian National Television Open Files series; witness testimonies; Histories from Belene photostory available at https://www.dnevnik.bg/bigpicture/2015/05/30/2542627_istorii_ot_belene/, In Focus with Lora Krumova available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXyqd3d6jL8