Julia Caswell was born in communist Bulgaria, but was able to escape with her family. Remarkably, years later in 1989, Julie was assigned to be the broadcaster for Voice of America radio, who would announce to the Bulgarian population, the end of communist rule.
“Legacies,” a podcast by Utah Women’s Walk
Season 1, Episode 8: Julia Caswell
For the complete interview, click here.
“Legacies,” a podcast by Utah Women’s Walk
Season 1, Episode 8: Julia Caswell
For the complete interview, click here.
MW: Julia Caswell arrived in Utah as a college freshman in the 1960s. Originally from Communist Bulgaria, she came alone, fleeing threats of kidnapping. She had just ten dollars in her pocket.
JC: I applied to two different universities: Brigham Young University and a university in Quebec in Montreal. And I said, “Okay, whoever offers me a scholarship first, that’s where I’m going.” And Brigham Young University offered me scholarship.
MW: I’m Michele Welch from Utah Women’s Walk, and this is “Legacies,” a podcast dedicated to preserving the inspiring stories and wisdom of Utah women. Julia has spent her life traveling the world, learning and teaching languages. In 1989 she was working as a broadcaster for the Voice of America when the Berlin all fell and she got to announce the news to the Bulgarian people. My colleague from Utah Valley University Diane Perkins and I interviewed her in 2014.
JC: I was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and I remember playing with other children [on] our block; we played princesses and queens and kings. However, since that was against the law, we would hide and play. Those are my earliest memories; maybe I was four or five. Started school when I was six, just like here, went to kindergarten. I remember that the elementary school was right across [from] our apartment house and my mom was waving goodbye as I crossed the street to go to school. We were packed in a two-bedroom apartment: my dad, my mom, my brother, younger brother, then me, myself, my grandparents, my aunt and uncle. We were on top of each other.
I was in first grade, and our regular teacher was sick. We had a substitute teacher, a young man just out of teaching school. And he brought different postcards, and on the postcards he had the statue of Lincoln from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. And because it was something that came from the United States of America, all of the children were very interested. And he told us about his wonderful trip, and as a souvenir, he brought these postcards. He passed the postcards to all. I took mine, and I smelled it, and I hugged it, and it was a symbol of freedom to me, which we didn’t have at that time in Bulgaria under Communism. The next day, the teacher didn’t come back. The principal of the school came and said, “I heard that you have all received each a postcard. Your teacher is now sick, and he would like to have his postcards back.” And all the others gave the postcards back, but I hid mine in the pillowcase, and I kept it there for a long period of time. Whenever I was sad, I would look at the Lincoln Memorial picture and say, “One day, I will visit you. One day, I’ll be there.” So it sustained me through the dark days of Communism.
I was taught at home that we should never repeat anything we speak of at home because it could be sensitive thoughts or stories, and they could make my grandparents or my parents go to prison. I was very quiet at school; I did not share anything of the conversations we had together in our home. I was especially careful not to repeat anything to my friends. I was not allowed to have any sleepovers because in case we open up our hearts to each other and say something that was not right.
In Bulgaria, when I went to kindergarten, we studied—it was required for us to study two languages simultaneously, one was Russian and one was Bulgarian. And then, as I got older, seven and later eight, I started at the Alliance Française, which is an extra-curriculum course in French my parents paid for. And so I studied French from the time I was eight until I was sixteen—so for eight years at the Alliance Française. And I was taught by native speakers, French native speakers. And we studied culture, the language. It was very well done, and it was organized thanks to a grant from France to Bulgarian students. Then when I was thirteen, I competed in a contest to be selected as a small number of middle school children to go to an English-speaking high school. And, at that point, I was chosen. There were two different contests. There was a written one where you had to write Shakespearean sonnet in Bulgarian, and then translated what you have written in a language that you already knew, so I did it in French. That was the written [test]. And then there was an essay in a different language, which was in Russian. And then you had to have a psychological testing to see whether you would be good enough, whether you had the gift of languages, and whether you would not crack under the pressure because we needed to memorize Shakespearean plays and poetry, and it was hard, and you needed to concentrate, so they were testing the different abilities to absorb a new language.
DP: In 1963, your father was given an opportunity to relocate to North Africa for a period of two years. Would you share with me how that came about and how he was chosen?
JC: Yes, I had just turned sixteen, and in April, after my birthday, I remember my dad bringing a beautiful globe that he had just bought from a bookstore. He put the globe on our little round table, and he called my brother Peter and said, “You and Peter get to find where the country of Algeria is situated on the globe.” And we both said, We know exactly where it is; it’s between Morocco on the left and Tunisia on the right, and it’s a large Arabic country. Just got its freedom from France. It used to be a colony of France, a French colony; we had studied about that at school. We found it on the globe, showed it to my dad, and he was very happy, and he said, “Now that you have found the place, I’d like to tell you what happened today. As I went to work,”—to the place where he worked, which was the research institute—Scientific Research Institute of Bulgaria. He worked there as a dental technician; he was the youngest of seven. The other six dental technicians were waiting for him out in front of the outside door. At first he thought he was late, but the reason they were waiting was completely different. And they told him that all seven of them, as he had done also, had turned in an application to be chosen to work outside of Bulgaria as a dental technician in the country of Algeria. The country of Algeria needed new medical aid, medical assistants, nurses, doctors, dentists, dental technicians. And my dad turned in his application, as well as the other six of his colleagues. All seven were fighting each other for just one single space. And so they decided to make the decision in a more fair way, they called it. The oldest and the other five, other than my dad, decided to draw lots. So they took six, seven pieces of paper because there were seven of them. On six of them they wrote no; on one of them they wrote yes. They folded them; they put them in a hat. And they passed it around. And everybody drew, and my dad drew the yes. They said, Well you never draw once without drawing second and third time. Let’s just try for three times and see who gets to go. So they refolded the papers; they drew the second time. My dad drew the yes; the third time my dad drew the yes. And then there was dead silence when he drew the yes three times in a row. There was dead silence in the room, and the other people were unhappy, of course. At first they thought it was a fair way to decide who gets to go to Algeria, but now they all felt it was not such a good idea. So the oldest man stood up and said, “There’s seven of us here. We have drawn three times. If this man is meant to go to Algeria, we’re not going to stop him. But he has to prove it to us, and he needs to draw four more times in a row in order to make it seven times out of seven. There’s seven of us here, seven pieces of paper, and we’re making it a rule that he has to draw seven times in a row.” And they threw away the first papers; they took seven other small pieces of paper, refolded everything. This time they put them in a box; they passed the box around, and my dad drew seven times in a row—four more times. They blindfolded him. They asked him to leave; they appointed someone else to draw in his stead. He still drew the yes. So in the end they all agreed, Somebody’s helping this man; we’d better not stand in his way. He got to leave the first of May, and then a month later, the first of June, my mom, my brother, and I followed and joined my dad in Algeria.
DP: Do you remember about first arriving and what really impressed you about that land that was different from your homeland?
JC: Yes. Um, a lot of sunshine. Very, very white streets, almost bleached by the sun—beautiful, white sand beaches and a lot of fruits and vegetables. I had not seen a banana in Bulgaria; I didn’t know what a tangerine was or a pineapple. For the first time in my life, I stood in awe in front of these piles of fruits and vegetables. And one of the man, one of the local vendors looked at me and said, “What you looking at girl?” and I said, “You have so much. You have so many fruits and vegetables. Have you ever thought of sending them to other countries?” And he couldn’t understand that I came from a country where we were allowed only one orange per person for New Year’s.
We had a family council, and my dad and my mom said that we’re free to express our feelings. And I had a lot of friends, and the friends were always gathering in our apartment because it was very large with a huge living room and a wraparound balcony on the fourth floor; we could see the entire Mediterranean. (laughs) It was beautiful.
DP: So by 1965, you’re now seventeen, and all good things must come to an end, and your father’s two-year assignment is now up.
JC: Every Bulgarian citizen or the head of the family of Bulgarian citizens, had to go to the Bulgarian Embassy to receive “To Whom It May Concern,” which was a permission to leave Algeria by the Bulgarian Embassy. With that permission, you needed to go to the Algerian authorities, which was the Algerian prefecture, and they were going to stamp your individual passports with an exit visa, and then with that exit visa and the “To Whom It May Concern,” those two documents were presented to any consulate, whether it was the French consulate or the British consulate, or any other foreign country you wanted to visit. So we decided it would be nice to visit France because we learned—we went to a French school in Algeria the Bulgarian Embassy said, Yes, we will give you the document, but only if you pay for three seats on the Bulgarian plane. So my dad paid for me, my brother, and my mom to go back, and then they gave him the “To Whom It May Concern.” He came home, and my mom was very disappointed. She had hoped that they would at least let her go with her husband. And they talked all night, and they didn’t know what to do; they didn’t want to go back to Bulgaria. So I listened to their talk, and I said, “Could I see this document?” So they showed me just the simple sheet of paper, and it was a Xeroxed sheet of paper that you had to fill in the information: your name, your address. And it said, “To Whom It May Concern: This gives permission to Mr. Kiril Petrov Kiriakov living at—” and it gave the address where we were living, so that he can get an exit visa from the Algerian prefecture. And because the sheet of paper was intended for several people to be listed, there was space. So I said to my parents, “I can forge and put et sa famille,” which means “and his family.” So Kiril Petrov Kiriakov living at such and such address and his family. And my parents said, Can you really do that? And I said, “Yeah they taught us at school.” (laughs) The ink was purple, so we went and bought different types of inks—we mixed the inks, and got the same shade.
So then the next day, the four of us went to the Algerian prefecture. The woman who took our passports and the “To Whom It May Concern” paper said, “Now that’s odd that the Bulgarians would put only his name and then put ‘and his family.’ They usually list all the people whose passports we’re supposed to stamp with exit visas.” When my mom heard that, she fainted in my dad’s arms. But right at the moment the lady was asking us this question, the phone rang and she didn’t want to answer the phone. Someone else ran in and said, “Give these people their visas. Stamp their passports and let’s get out of here.” And we couldn’t understand what was going on, and they were exchanging words in Arabic. And so she gave back the “To Whom It May Concern” to my dad, took all four of our passports, and one of our passports got stamped on the wrong page. And she quickly gave them to us and left and locked the door. And then we found out that the president of Algeria, Ben Bella at the time, had been ousted and the president by the name of Boumédiène had replaced him. 1 And people were shooting on the streets. People were fighting because the two factions of the government were fighting each other. And so from getting our passports stamped, we went to the French consulate. They didn’t even question anything. We hid the “To Whom It May Concern” just in case, and we got the exit visas. That same afternoon, we went and bought tickets on the ship, which was going to stop in Spain. So we got on the ship in Oran, left absolutely everything we owned including our dog Terry. We sewed some money inside our coats, and took some food and paid for two cabins, one cabin for my mom and me, and one cabin for my dad and my brother, and went to France.
JC: We arrived in Marseille. We gathered our passports; we turned them in to the French—went to the French city hall, spoke with the mayor of Marseille, and told him we wanted to become political refugees. And the French government helped us, gave us a free brand new apartment, and money for furniture we could buy and my—they found a job for my dad and a job for my mom.
A year after we arrived in France, two Mormon missionaries came, knocked on our door, and we loved what we heard. We were converted to the LDS Church and became members, all four of us, and were very happy. And, as the end of the school year approached, one of the missionaries said, “Where will you be going to—what university will you be choosing?” And I said, “Well, my parents have been talking about going to Canada from here.” Because while we were in France, the Bulgarian Embassy in Paris found out where we were, and they knew that we had escaped. So we received three threatening letters where they said that they would actually kill my dad, and they would kidnap me and my brother to take us back to Bulgaria. And I applied to two different universities: Brigham Young University and a university in Quebec in Montreal. And I said, “Okay, whoever offers me a scholarship first, that’s where I’m going.” And Brigham Young University offered me scholarship. It was not a full-ride scholarship; it was just for tuition, but it was good enough for me, so I came to BYU.
DP: All by yourself?
JC: All by myself.
DP: And how was that different—
JC: Well, the reason I came by myself, with ten dollars in my pocket, is because my dad became very sick. And he had to be hospitalized, and he was in the hospital for six months. And my mom and my brother stayed behind to take care of him and only I could leave.
I worked and paid for my rent and for my food because while everybody else was buying their books either secondhand or from the BYU Bookstore, I checked them out of the library. And I didn’t pay a cent.
I stayed two years at BYU, and I was in my last semester. I was graduating when I met my husband, my future husband, Tom. And I met him at a French party. We were both French majors; we actually both had double majors. Mine was French and Russian, and his was international relations and French. We were married the twenty-fifth of April that same year. It was quite a romance, and it still is.
It worked out that my brother came a year after I came, and then my parents followed exactly twenty-five days before our wedding. So they were able to be there.
DP: After you both graduated, Tom takes a job with the State Department, and his work takes you to several other countries. So what were the most effective strategies you had to learn to help you adapt, especially with a growing family?.
JC: Well, the first thing I believe in is learn the language of the country. So our first assignment was Germany, Dusseldorf. And I proceeded to learn German [and] also make friends.
DP: I was looking to see if I could remember—I got Dusseldorf, Germany; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Lisbon, Portugal; and Brussels—are those the only countries.
JC: Okay, so—
DP: —or were there others I missed?
JC: —Dusseldorf, Lisbon—
DP: Which is Portuguese?
JC: —Lisbon, Portugal; Dusseldorf, Sao Paulo, the islands of the Azores, Ponta Delgata, Lisbon, Portugal; and Brussels, Belgium.
DP: That’s amazing.
JC: Beautiful assignments.
DP: You were also a broadcaster in the Bulgarian service for Voice of America. What were the goals of that organization?
JC: Well, the Voice of America is part of U.S. Information Agency, and the Voice of America supplies true news to countries, at the time, behind the iron curtain. So we would get the news directly from the American news agency, and then we would translate the news. Then we would voice them so that the Bulgarian people would get the news the same time American people would get them.
DP: And so what was a typical day like for you?
JC: Very rushed. I would arrive at seven in the morning, we would be going to—we’d be looking at the news coming and getting them on tape, and then—well, on tape until 1985, in 1985, no—1987, 1987 we came back from Belgium, and we were in Washington, D.C. and this is when I started working for Voice of America. And we were the first agency to get computers. We got everything on our screen. So we were the first agency to have computers, and the first agency to have the software to do the translation in Bulgarian.
And so November tenth, the Berlin Wall fell. And the day after the Berlin Wall [fell], on the eleventh, which will be tomorrow, in 1989, we received word on our computers that the Bulgarian communist dictator, Todor Zhivkov, of thirty-five years, was put under house arrest and that the Bulgarian people were free. And they were—some people—but nobody had gotten the news. And the people at the Voice of America, all of my colleagues, were drinking Bulgarian plum brandy, and they were all really drunk. And they couldn’t go and tell the Bulgarian people what was happening, that the communist dictator had been put under house arrest, and the people were free, and a new dawn of freedom was coming. And so they—and usually this—for such hard piece of news, such wonderful piece of news, you need my husband’s voice. He has a wonderful male voice, and there were a lot of other wonderful male voices, but they were all drunk, (laughter) and so they said, Well Julie will have to announce it. And so I stood in front of the mic and for the first time in many years—because I had been working on and off for the Voice of America from the time I was nineteen years old—my voice cracked, for the first time, because it was such an emotional, wonderful opportunity to announce such a great piece of news.
I went to—for the first time—back to Bulgaria. I went back at age forty-two, after I had left at age sixteen. And my dad wanted me to talk to university students’ groups, high school groups, and just tell them about my experience at the Voice of America. And I remember one student group at the University of Sofia—it was in a large auditorium, and I said, “Well, my name is such and such, and I have been away from Bulgaria for twenty-six years, and I am back, and I’ll tell you more about my life, and then I can open it for questions and I’ll answer.” And there was dead silence. Nobody said a word, and then the one small girl in the very back showed her hand and said, “You’re the one!” and everybody started clapping, “She’s the one,” and I couldn’t understand what they were talking about, but they had all been listening to the Voice of America when it happened.
And then, after staying for four years in Washington D.C., the LDS Church missionary department called me to come and teach the Bulgarian missionaries who were getting ready to go to Bulgaria. And they needed a language teacher, and they wanted me to come by myself and just do it for a few months. But then as I was talking with the Missionary Training Center and the missionary department in Salt Lake, my husband Tom took the phone and said, “Well, if you’re going to take my wife, do you also want the six children?” (laughter) And so they were all—they didn’t know what to say and so he said, “Don’t worry, the whole family is going to move.” So my husband really gave up his wonderful career to come follow me.
I’ve taught 450 Bulgarian missionaries, and I’ve taught about fifty Russian missionaries. I’ve taught twelve Latvian missionaries; I’ve taught twenty-five French-speaking missionaries. I’ve also taught—I think twelve Portuguese speaking missionaries, and many other languages at the MTC. When they couldn’t find someone who spoke the language, I would say, “Okay, just give me a manual and twenty-four hours. I will learn, and I will teach them.”
As soon as we moved into this area, I contacted BYU and also UVU, and I wanted to be an instructor. And I really liked Del Shumway because he opened up to me and told me that I would do well to start French classes. I started with 101, then 102, and then started the Russian department.
DP: And were your children grown by this time?
JC: No, no, we came here in 1991. We came here with children ages five through nineteen. So we had one BYU freshman, and then I had children in high school, in middle school, and in elementary school, and kindergarten.
DP: The other event that I thought was very interesting is you were one of six Freedom Award winners honored during the July 1995 Freedom Festival, and you share that honor with Malcolm Forbes, Jr., Alan Osmond, Igor Tamaravich Gator, who is second only to Boris [Yelstin] as a Russian political figure.
JC: Yes, it was Yelstin, I remember.
DP: What was that experience like for you?
JC: It was a great experience because before that, I had received second place for my autobiography, and we were invited by Governor [Michael] Leavitt at the governor’s mansion.
And I was thinking—Tom was there; my husband, Tom, was there—and he was very enthusiastically clapping when I spoke. (laughs) It was a special experience.
DP: Well what do you think has been the most significant trial in your life?
JC: Well, my biggest trial was when my husband quit the Foreign Service. He knows that because I’m so well cut to be a Foreign Service wife. I was myself a Foreign Service officer before he became a Foreign Service officer. And I love going from country to country; I love studying different languages. And I love the fact that all of our children speak foreign languages, and they all love foreign foods, and they can—they feel at home in every country and with anyone. I love that. We’ve given them that particular education.
DP: Did you have to re-identify yourself in order to figure out who you were in the sense that there would be other things that would be identifying you from that day forward?
JC: It was hard when we first came to Utah. Utah was not as international as it is now, but I poured my heart to Del Shumway here at UVU, and his secretary was also my friend. And a lot of people at UVU were very international—very, very international. I would say even more international than BYU at the time, in 1991 when I started my career here at UVU.
DP: You’ve always been a working woman it seems. There was not—
JC: I love working.
MW: What would you advise Utah women today?
JC: I feel that the women in Utah try too hard to be perfect. They should consider themselves human, and as a human person, you can achieve only a certain amount, and be happy with what you’re achieving! Celebrate your achievement. Don’t immediately jump to a conclusion that you’re not good enough. Yes, you are good enough, but maybe not at this point. Maybe a little later you will be better. And so always remember, “Good, better, best. Let us never rest, till our good is better, and our better best.” But, you don’t jump from good to best; you have to go through different steps. So I feel that a woman should first be fulfilled herself before she fulfills the dreams of her children and of her husband, and that they should work together with their partners, with their husbands, and come to an understanding, and achieve together what they have set out to achieve. Have common goals; literally celebrate your achievement, I would say.