[yshavurah] Bulgaria
- From: "Elliot Gaines, Ph.D." <elliot.gaines@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Abi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 14:32:34 -0400
Jews of Bulgaria
-----A great many Jews know the story of how the Danes rescued 8,000
Jews from the Nazi's by smuggling them to Sweden in fishing boats. Very
few Jews, including me, until yesterday, know the story of how all
50,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved. Not a single Bulgarian
Jew was deported to the death camps, due to the heroism of many
Bulgarians of every walk of
life, up to and including the King and the Patriarch of the Bulgarian
Orthodox Church.
In 1999, Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti Defamation
League flew with a delegation to Sophia to meet the Bulgarian Prime
Minister. He gave the Prime Minister the first
Bulgarian language copy of a remarkable book, "Beyond Hitler's Grasp,"
written in 1998, by
Michael Bar Zohar, a professor at Emory University. (A Bulgarian Jew
who had migrated to Israel and then to the USA).
This book documents the rescue effort in detail. The ADL paid for and
shipped 30,000 copies to Bulgaria, so that the population could partake
in the joy of learning about this heroic facet of
their history.
This story is clearly the last great secret of the Holocaust era. The
story was buried by the Bulgarian Communists, until their downfall in
1991. All records were sealed, since they didn't
wish to glorify the King, or the Church, or the non Communist
parliamentarians, who at
great personal risk stood up to the Germans. And the Bulgarian Jewish
Community, 45,000 of whom went to Israel after the War, were busy
building new lives, and somehow the story remained untold.
Bulgaria is a small country and at the outset of the War they had 8
million people. They aligned themselves with the Nazi's in hopes of
recapturing Macedonia from Yugoslavia and Thrace from Greece. Both
provinces were stripped from them, after W.W.I.
In late 1942 the Jews of Selonica were shipped north through Bulgaria,
on the way to the death camps, in sealed box cars. The news of this
inhumanity was a hot topic of conversation. Then, at the beginning of
1943, the pro Nazi Bulgarian government was informed that all 50,000
Bulgarian Jews would be deported in March. The Jews had been made to
wear yellow stars and were highly visible.
As the date for the deportation got closer, the agitation got greater.
Forty-three ruling party members of Parliament walked out in protest.
Newspapers denounced what was about to
happen. In addition, the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church,
Archbishop Kirili,
threatened to lie down on the railroad tracks. Finally, King Boris III
forbid the deportation.
Since Bulgaria was an ally of Germany, and the Germans were stretched
militarily, they had to wrestle with the problem of how much pressure
they could afford to apply. They decided to pass.
Several points are noteworthy. The Bulgarian Jews were relatively
unreligious and did not stand apart from the local populace by virtue of
garb, or rites. They were relatively poor by comparison to Jews in other
countries, and they lived in integrated neighborhoods. Additionally, the
Bulgarians had many minorities, Armenians, Turks, Greeks, and Gypsies,
in addition to Jews. There was no concept of racism in that culture. The
bottom line here is that Bulgarians saw
Bulgarian-Jews as Bulgarians, and not as Jews. And being a small
country, like Denmark, where there was a closeness of community, that is
often missing in larger countries.
So, here was a bright spot that we can point to as example of what
should have been. The most famous of those saved was a young graduate of
the Bulgarian Military Academy When he arrived in Israel, he changed his
name to Moshe Dayan.
Other related posts:
