I thought I might share this with you all! It is from an article from "The Baltimore Sun" and I think its amazing that a local US paper is actually writing about it!
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Sixty years have passed since Bulgarians rose up to save their entire Jewish population from deportation to extermination camps during World War II.
Even though Bulgarians from every social and economic class joined the effort, and the country has a strong sense of national pride in its long history free of anti-Semitism, Bulgaria is celebrating the saving of its Jews for the first time.
The anniversary, observed this spring, includes a "Lesson in Dignity" taught in every school across the country, the first time schools here have ever taught about the Holocaust.
High-profile celebrations in the national theater, parliament and Sofia synagogue have helped keep the events at the top of the national news. A new postage stamp commemorates the 60th anniversary. And an unorthodox ceremony at a monastery featured a rabbi and priest conducting religious rites at the graves of religious leaders from World War II.
Before the celebration, most Bulgarians knew little about the widespread protests that stopped the planned deportation of 50,000 Bulgarian Jews.
Before 1989, the story could not be told because it gave credit to the enemies of the Communist regime: the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Czar Boris III (hmm...this is a bit problematic for me) and the average Bulgarian on the street who loudly voiced opposition to his government's policy. Communist partisans did little to help.
After that, the emotional debate over who should receive credit, fueled by the unsettled political scores left over from communism, prevented any national commemoration.
Lessons to celebrate
The passage of 60 years since the cattle trains, waiting in Plovdiv and Kyustendil, were scheduled to depart with the first 8,500 Jews, coincides with the regeneration of Bulgaria's democratic institutions. The country has chosen to celebrate the lesson offered by the moral actions of a broad range of individuals and institutions instead of bickering over who should get the political credit.
"So many people expressed the will to save the Jews, against the official policy of the government," says Albena Taneva, a professor at Sofia University and Holocaust educator and researcher who helped organize the national observation.
"It is very important for people to understand [that] no matter how authoritarian the circumstances or how severe the political situation, there is always a personal choice." (So, in a way I do understand those who criticise hierachs who did nothing during communism but then I do think that the Communism of the Soviet Block was extremely dangerous, in a way perhaps more so than Facist Germany.
On that winter day 60 years ago, police woke up several hundred Jewish families in Plovdiv at 4 a.m. and told them they had 30 minutes to pack their bags before deportation. They spent a cold March day in the gymnasium of the Jewish school, awaiting what they were sure would be certain death.But word of the secret deportations leaked out.
As the news spread, Bulgarians made phone calls and used personal and political connections to express their moral outrage. When the furious Metropolitan Kiril visited the police, shaking his staff at them, the authorities were persuaded to withdraw the order.
The Jewish people were released at the end of the day, when the police announced simply: "The order has been rescinded, you are free."
"Kiril was a great humanist," says Yvette Anavi, 82, wearing the same little yellow Jewish star on her lapel that she wore that day. She is among a crowd of about 500 gathered near a thank-you monument in the former Jewish quarter of Plovdiv, listening to emotional speeches by Bulgarian and Israeli officials.
"We didn't see anything, compared to our fellow Jews in Germany, Austria and Hungary," says Berti Levy, 77, standing next to her. "Everyone needs to know about this."
Another deportation of the Jews was planned for May 1943. But amid pressure from the church, the czar and a leak by the personal secretary of the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, these plans, too, were frustrated by popular opposition.
Bulgaria was successful in saving its Jews precisely because it was a Nazi ally. Bulgarians did not suffer occupation by the German army, or terror from the Gestapo secret police.
Many people in Europe saved Jews, says Sir Martin Gilbert, historian and author of several books on the Holocaust. What was unusual about Bulgaria, he says, was the speed of the public reaction.
There was no time for forming committees or discussions; the time between the issuing of the deportation order and when the trains were to leave was just 16 days. Nazi Germany had the resources and organization to deport Jews secretly and quickly, but only if there were no resistance.
What was also extraordinary were the numbers saved, he says, and that the Jewish community survived intact.
"Why are we always so surprised by goodness and the fact that people don't want to murder each other?" he asks.
Bulgarians are also just starting to consider the nation's responsibility for the collection and deportation of 11,343 Jews to extermination camps from the areas of northern Greece and Macedonia under Bulgarian "administration." This part of Bulgaria's role in the Holocaust is not mentioned nearly as often in the national celebration. And it is being addressed.
Patriarch Stefan (Its actually Exarch), traveling the countryside, coincidentally came across the trains transporting these Jews across Bulgaria from the territories under its control during the war.
"Do not persecute in order to not be persecuted," the patriarch wrote to Bulgaria's head of state, Czar Boris III. "Measure for measure, remember Boris, that God watches your deeds."
This Holocaust history lesson is being taught in every school across the country, but there is no centralized lesson plan. Some classes are having Jewish speakers, ethics discussions or history lectures.
At Alexander Pushkin High School, Yanislava Andreeva's 10th-grade ethics class discusses big issues: personal responsibility in a society committing genocide, justification for killing, personal morality and others. Most students knew little about the Holocaust at the beginning of the class.
"I've provoked the students into thinking about these issues for themselves," says Andreeva. Many teachers educated themselves, using materials produced by Jewish organizations or found on the Internet. One group of young children came to parliament, learned about Anne Frank and painted pictures with Holocaust themes.
Bulgarian attitude
The first evidence of Jewish settlements in Bulgaria dates to the second century B.C. Most Bulgarian Jews are Sephardic, descendants of those expelled during the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. The Turkish Ottoman Empire invited the Jews to the Balkan Peninsula, where they mixed with and dominated the smaller populations of Ashkenazic, Yiddish-speaking Jews.
The historical record speaks clearly about Bulgaria's lack of anti-Semitism, particularly notable in Eastern Europe. Jews have always been integrated in Bulgaria: They never lived in separate villages, or ghettos, as in Poland and Russia. Bulgaria is a multiethnic country with a tradition of accepting persecuted minorities, such as Armenians from Turkey.
After the two failed deportations of Jews in 1943, the German ambassador in Sofia, Adolph Bekerle, explained in a letter to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin the Bulgarian attitude:
"Having grown up together with Armenians, Greeks and Gypsies, the Bulgarian cannot see any faults in the Jews which warrant the special measures being taken against them." The rulers' difficulties, he explained, "are closely connected with the Bulgarian national mentality which lacks the ideological clarity we have."
The Kingdom of Denmark also managed to preserve its Jewish population intact as well!
Anton
