Beautiful! Like a guardian women!

During the Second World War, 4218 volunteer women joined the ranks of the Bulgarian army. Most of them are nurses, doctors, correspondents or assistants at headquarters. But others were directly involved in the battles at the front. Many of them arrived in the Austrian Alps, where news of the end of the war reached them.

27 volunteers were enrolled in the Guards Company of 24th Infantry Regiment. Among them were Anastasia Georgieva, Genka Zidarova, Stoyanka Yoveva, Siika Gerasimova, Zhelyazka Filcheva and others. Eight of them never returned. The rest of them have bequeathed to our memories information in books, in conversations and meetings, about the horror, about the love and about the life after the war.

„Beautiful! Like a guardian women!”

They were more than 170 in the military. Among the four thousand Bulgarians in overcoats. The freedom dressed them into uniforms. In their barracks they enlisted a combat weapon. These girls and women were the nucleus of the female platoons. These guard women could do everything! Be the most disciplined and the best fighters. They sang the best, we studied their songs. They were going to the hardest. The others followed. They were dying in battle with the enemy. They chased the Nazi hordes through Yugoslavia, Hungary ... to the foothills of the Austrian Alps. Posthumously awarded with orders, medals and titles; blond guards, mothers of officers, scientists, politicians, engineers, doctors ... Nice Bulgarian women! Not only the youth adorned them. That internal combustion with ideals made them wise not for their age, brave as Bulgarian soldiers, pretty as girls, sung in folk songs and poems. As if for them, the thoughts on A. Tolstoy in "Russian character" were dedicated ... it seems a simple man, and there will be severe trouble. And great power will rise in it - human beauty! ”

This human beauty can also be accepted physically, the regiment was bewildered when volunteer guard women marched in it. And the front men said, "Beautiful! Like a guard women! Like girls - fighters!”

Yana Ivanova - curator "Latest History" in RHM Burgas

Text from to Genka Zidarova's book "After the War ..."