Bulgarian Jews Saved in WWII

A great many Jews know the story of how the Danes rescued 8K Jews from the Nazi's by smuggling them to Sweden in fishing boats.

Very few Jews, know the story of how all 50K 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 & including the King & 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 & gave him the first Bulgarian language copy of a remarkable book, "Beyond Hitler's Grasp," written in 1998, by Michael Bar Oar, a professor at Emory University. (A Bulgarian Jew who had migrated to Israel & then the US). This book documents the rescue effort in detail. The ADL paid for & shipped 30K 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 opposed glorifying the King, Church, or Communist parliamentarians, who at great personal risk, stood up to the Germans. And the Bulgarian Jewish Community, 45K of -whom went to Israel after the War, were- busy building new lives, & somehow the story remained untold.

Bulgaria is a small country & 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 & 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.

In early 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 & were highly visible. As the date for the deportation got closer, the agitation got greater.

43 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 Krill, threatened to lie down on the railroad tracks. Finally, King Boris III forbade the deportation.

Since Bulgaria was an ally of Germany, & 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 & 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, & they lived in integrated neighborhoods. Additionally, the Bulgarians had many minorities, Armenians, Turks, Greeks, & 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 V. 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've 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.
What a great story to pass on....