JW subtitle extractor

So my mother was born
in the country of Bulgaria in 1922,
and in the early 1950’s,
my family emigrated
from Germany to the United States.
We settled in New York City,
and it was there that my mother
learned the truth.
That is the first time I opened a Bible.
I went and opened Revelation chapter 21.
But what hit me was the point
that there will not be sickness,
sorrow, and death anymore.
Anyone that comes into the truth
wants to share that with their family.
I had a desire,
really, to tell them the truth,
how they can get free
from oppression and sickness and death.
So she very much saw the need and desired
to have literature in the Bulgarian language.
She was able to ask the brothers in Brooklyn,
specifically offering if she could
translate some literature into Bulgarian.
The brothers approved for her to do that,
starting out with some of the tracts.
So Bulgaria was behind the Iron Curtain,
a Communist country.
Literature about God and the Bible
is not acceptable and banned,
so you can’t just mail it.
So as literature became available,
people have to take it in.
My family was one of those families
that volunteered to do that.
We traveled into Bulgaria by train.
We had a lot of luggage because every time
we would go to Bulgaria,
we stayed two and a half months.
That was the summer vacation.
In that luggage, in various places,
we put literature.
Traveling into a country
with banned literature
is not without its problems or dangers.
They knew that we had some literature,
and that was the tracts.
My mother realized
that we were going to be searched.
We had the ability
to take the literature
out of each luggage that we had hidden it in
and to put it into one small briefcase.
And what we couldn’t,
like unfolded tracts,
we put around our arm
with our overcoats over it.
I was only worrying about how I can
hide that literature so he cannot find it.
Because if he finds it,
then there really are consequences.
So as the guards would search
through the luggage,
they would rifle through it.
They didn’t straighten anything out,
so my mother quickly thought and asked them,
“Can I now go over there and straighten out
what you’ve messed up?”
And they said, “OK.”
I took my tracts,
which I had around my hand,
and I put them in the already
checked bag over there.
One of the guards gets to the point
that it’s my little briefcase.
He says,
“This is so small;
nothing could be in here!”
And he just takes it over there.
The man who was looking
was getting very nervous
because he knew we had something,
but he was not able to find it.
So in one trip years later,
my mother was on her own.
The officials at the border
of Bulgaria found literature.
They arrested her.
They put her in prison.
They interrogated her for two weeks
or more every day.
And in time,
the Bulgarian government changed their mind
and decided that as a foreign national,
they would just expel her from the country.
To this day,
my mother continues her spiritual routine
of worshipping Jehovah
—being at the meetings, preparing
for the meetings, reading her Bible,
and zealously sharing the truth with others.
It helps me practically
every minute in my life.
And I want to use my last bit of energy
to make his will known.

Maria Kaloyanoff: ‘Obeying God as Ruler’