Tsvetana was born on 20 March 1928 in the village of Leskovets, Pernik, and she had two siblings. Her father was an artisan. Tsvetana attended the primary school in the village of Leskovets and 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. In 1957 she completed a course of studies at the Mining Technical High School in Pernik. Afterwards she took up various administrative positions.

Tsvetana became interested in the ideas of anarchism in 1946. After the denial of her university application, together with Lyubomir Dzhermanov and Maria Doganova, she decided to organize a meeting of the anarchist youth from South-West Bulgaria in the Kitka site by the Gigin Monastery. Mostly youth from the villages of Leskovets and Kosacha attended the meeting held in 1946. The groups from Pernik, Radomir and Sofia were stopped by the police at the Batanovtsi train strain, while those from Begunovtsi village were stopped by the Breznitsa police.

On 16 December 1948 Tsvetana was arrested in a drive against the anarchists in Bulgaria, several days before the Fifth Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party. She was sent to the forced labor camp in Bosna, near Silistra. Tsvetana stayed there from January 1949 until December 1951. In December 1951 she was moved to the women’s section of the Belene camp (Shturcheto camp) where she remained until 20 April 1952.

Tsvetana married Lyubomir Dzhermanov (born in 1925, also an anarchist) in 1948. The two of them, along with their children, were resettled by the communist authorities multiple times.

In the years following her release from the camps, Tsvetana and her husband found work in the building quarries or the mining sector. Finding work in the mining sector was one of the few opportunities available because it involved unpopular and hard labor, and there was always a shortage of motivated good workers in this sector. On this occasion, Tsvetana says: “One would find people from all over Bulgaria working here and the authorities had branded most of them as unreliable and enemies of the people. They had come here because there were no jobs for them in the interior of the country.”

You can learn more about Tsvetana and her memories of the communist regime and the Belene camp by scrolling up and asking Tsvetana a question.

Sources: Wikipedia, State Archive - Pernik, Open dossiers, “Memories from the camps”, https://comdost.bg