The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust

BOOK REVIEW

LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Compared with the fate of Jews in other European countries during the horrible years of Nazi conquest, a high percentage of the Jews of Bulgaria survived. The numbers of the Jewish population of Bulgaria in 1939 was 52,000. After expulsions, 48,000 remained. and 13,000 Jews were added from annexed territories.

Who deserves credit for the survival of the majority of Bulgarian Jews?

Various interested political interests have championed their favorite heroes in this story. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Bulgaria was a Communist state: school texts explained that the Communist Party had protected the Jews. When the Communists lost power in 1989, nationalists lauded the wartime King of Bulgaria, Boris III, as having saved his Jewish subjects by skillfully resisting German demands. Michael bar Zohar agreed, declaring the King a rescuer in his 1998 book, Beyond Hitlet’s Grasp.

In 2003, the U.S. Congress put forth a more diffuse answer, claiming that the parliament, the king, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and the Bulgarian people as a whole protected their Jewish neighbors. A veteran of the Bulgarian army, Professor Dimitar Nadikov, recently published The Bulgarian Army and the Rescue of Bulgarian Jews — 1931-44,” touting the Bulgarian army as the heroes of this story.

According to each variation of this heartwarming story, an Axis power scored a victory in saving its Jews. Everyone claims a part of the victory. As President John Kennedy said, “There is an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.”

Documentary filmmaker Jacky Comforty explores this heartwarming story in The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and Holocaust, which he wrote with Michigan writer Martha Jacky Comforty Aladjem Bloomfield. Comforty traveled the world to interview historians, political scientists, military analysts and other experts to develop an unvarnished picture of Bulgarian actions Martha Bloomfield during the war. Most significantly, Comforty, Israeli-born son of Bulgarian immigrants, interviewed his own parents and 150 Bulgarian Jews and non-Jews for their personal recollections of Jewish life in Bulgaria before and during the rise of Nazism. These interviews develop a darker portrait of Bulgaria.

IMAGE COURTESY COMFORTY COLLECTION.

BOOK REVIEW

LEFT TOP: The Jewish forced labor

LEFT BOTTOM: Ika (the author’s mom)

continued from page 57

At the start of the 20th century, Bulgaria contained a mix of religious and ethnic groups that had arrived as invaders, immigrants or refugees. The majority group, Eastern Orthodox Christians, lived in relative peace with Greeks, Turkish Muslims, Roma, Jews and others. The Jewish population also came from different waves of immigration: As Jewish life in other countries had deteriorated, the ancient Jewish community that spoke Yavanic (a Jewish language based on Greek) was joined by Ladino-speaking Jews from Spain and Portugal, and Yiddishspeaking Ashkenazi Jews from the north.

Located at a crossroads, Bulgaria, had some independent times but also was controlled over the centuries by the dominant Byzantine and Ottoman empires before it was liberated in 1878.

In the immediate pre-war period, the king wanted to regain control of Macedonia (from Yugoslavia), Thrace (from Greece) and Dobruja (from Romania), and any other territory that had belonged to Bulgaria in past centuries. A deal with Nazi Germany gave him that opportunity.

As the Nazi party grew and came to power in Germany, sympathizers in Bulgaria started their own National Socialist movement.

When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Bulgaria was officially neutral, but King Boris III had already committed to purchasing German arms and training its officers.

In March 1941, Bulgaria officially joined the Axis and allowed Germany to use its territory to attack Greece and Yugoslavia in April. The victorious Germans gave Bulgaria these territories, which were annexed in 1941.

The Jews in these territories were first counted as part of the Jewish population in the unified kingdom but were later denied the right to stay where they were born and were not granted Bulgarian citizenship — and were deported later.

Beginning in 1941, Bulgaria instituted the classical list of Nazi anti-Jewish legislation. The new laws successively denied Jews their rights as citizens, their occupations, their freedom of movement. They were assigned special taxes and required to wear the yellow star, and then confined to ghettos. All Jewish males ages 20-40 were sent to Bulgarian slave labor camps. The Bulgarian government and the 1942-established Commissariat for Jewish Affairs planned the next step: deportations to German death camps.

On Feb. 22, 1943, Bulgaria and Germany signed a (unique) agreement to ship 20,000 Jews from cities throughout Bulgaria. The deportations began on March 3. Between March 3-12, the Bulgarian army, Gendarmerie and special forces rounded up some 12,000 Jews from the newly annexed territories and deported them to Treblinka, where they were annihilated.

The other 8,000 Jews destined for deportation were spared due to frantic efforts of the Jewish community, who succeeded in getting help from politicians and the church to delay the deportation.

Comforty details the efforts that the Jewish community made to intervene. Somehow, these efforts resulted in postponing — but not cancelling — the transport of Jews from inside Bulgaria. They got off the death trains. Dimiter Peshev, vice president of the National Parliament in Sofia, apparently

succeeded in delaying the deportations. The king and prime minister retaliated — the parliament voted to remove him from his post on March 26.

Jews from the newly acquired territories were deported to death camps. The Bulgarian government would not listen to appeals for those Jews.

Comforty interviewed Nir Baruch, who reported that 11,363 were deported from Macedonia, Thrace and the city of Pirot. Only 12 survived.

In negotiations with Von Ribbentrop in early April, Boris III agreed to the deportations and agreed to deport half of the remaining Jewish population. The next month, Jews from Sofia were forced to self-deport themselves to provincial towns as first step toward deportations. The death of the king stopped that second part from happening.

Some credit also belongs to Bulgarians who opposed the antisemitic laws and actions. In addition to Dimiter Peshev, the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and its metropolitan bishops as well as hundreds of other individuals tried to delay or derail the murder of the Jews.

But, as Comforty’s informants made clear, a key part of the survival of nearly 50,000 Bulgarian Jews came from timing. On Aug. 28, 1943, Boris III died from heart failure. Bulgaria needed to organize a new government, which began to distance itself from the German war machine. During the next year, the Russian army approached and eventually took Bulgaria.

The experience of Jews of Bulgaria included all the steps of the horror of the Holocaust up to — but generally not including — the last one, getting murdered.

Survivors bear the scars of years of uncertainty, fear and deprivation. Historians, politicians and even the successor king of Bulgaria each get a few pages to explain their understanding of Bulgaria during the days of the Final Solution in Jacky Comforty and Martha Aladjem Bloomfield’s The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust.

To learn more about the book and the authors’ collaboration, go to www.the-stolen-narrative.org.

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