by Sandy Tolan
By early 1943, with wind of terrible stories from elsewhere in Europe drifting over the borders, Bulgarian Jews had become increasingly unsettled. Already the rights of the country's forty-seven thousand Jews had been stripped by sweeping measures built on Germany's Nuremberg laws.
Moshe, Solia, and their families could not have known it then, but even as the young couple rode east through Bulgaria's Valley of the Roses and into the mountains of Sliven, a drama was unfolding that would determine the destiny of the nation's Jews. In the early days of March 1943, the actions of ordinary citizens and a handful of political and religious leaders would change the course of Bulgaria's history. At the center of the drama would be families like the Eshkenazis, clustered in small Jewish communities throughout the country. The central players would come from Kyustendil, a rail town near the western border with Macedonia, and Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second-largest city, where the roundup of the town's Jews would begin early on a frigid morning in March.
A little after midnight on March 9, 1943, the daughter of the rabbi of Plovdiv was sitting in the family den, reading Jack London. Her parents were asleep, and the house was quiet.
The doorbell rang. Susannah Shemuel Behar looked up from her reading.
In high school, Susannah had planned to go to the university and study astronomy. That was before life had changed for Bulgaria's Jews; it was before her father, racing to beat a curfew one night after presiding at a funeral, was jailed briefly for coming home ten minutes late.
Now Susannah was part of Bulgaria's underground anti-Fascist movement. She had joined the illegal Union of Young Workers and had friends in the Partizan resistance: Communists, roaming the bitter cold Rhodope Mountains with their five-shot Austrian rifles. Susannah and her girlfriends were inclined toward missions of subterfuge and mischief. When comrades set about torching a leather factory or sabotaging an assembly line of canned vegetables bound for Germany, Susannah would stand lookout. At night around town, she posted anti-Fascist flyers—"Stop the War!"; "Germans Out!"; "We Want Jobs!" This work was usually undertaken in mixed pairs so that if a policeman passed by, the co-conspirators could embrace and begin kissing to disguise their mission. At home, Susannah stashed the literature in a perfect hiding place: her father's Bible.
On the doorstep Susannah found Totka, the stout neighborhood bread seller. Susannah was alarmed: Totka was also the wife of a Plovdiv policeman. "Go wake up your father," the woman said.
A moment later, the bearded, soft-faced rabbi appeared in his nightclothes. "They're going to arrest your family soon," said the policeman's wife. "Give me your gold. I will keep it and return it to you."
Her father replied, "If we had gold, it would burn with us." Susannah knew what this meant. Her father had been telling her stories about Nazi Germany.
Totka left. An hour later, just after 2:00 A.M., the bell rang again and Susannah opened the door to find a policeman in black boots and a blue cloth coat with shiny silver buttons. He gave the Behars thirty minutes to collect a few belongings and walk to the yard of the Jewish school. From there, they would await further instructions.
Susannah's mother went into shock. She was unable to pack anything but a few coats and a little bread.
Susannah, her brother, and her parents shuffled along a narrow road in the heart of Jewish Plovdiv, past Susannah's friend Estrella's house, past the Benvenisti home. They were flanked by the uniformed policeman and a plainclothes officer. It was quiet but for their footsteps on the gravel. Susannah looked up to see Big Bear and Little Bear—Ursa Major and Ursa Minor—suspended in the clear early-morning sky. Her mother worried aloud about Susannah's two sisters in the capital; she wouldn't be able to tell them what was happening. Susannah barely heard her mother. She was thinking of something her father had said before they left the house. "If you have a chance," the rabbi told his daughter, "escape."
The Behars came to a cobblestone road known as Russian Boulevard. There, by chance, they encountered the servant to the Orthodox bishop of Plovdiv, hurrying to the church to light the stove. It was just before 3:00 A.M. "Where are you taking the family at this hour?" the servant asked the rabbi.
"Please go wake up Bishop Kiril," B»enyamin Behar responded urgently. "Tell him Plovdiv's rabbi has been arrested along with his whole family and is being held at the Jewish school. I expect more Jewish families will soon be arriving."
The servant took off at a sprint, the flaps of his coat rising in his wake. It looked to Susannah as if he were flying.
The same day, several hours to the east in the hill country of Sliven, Moshe and Solia Eshkenazi were waiting in silence and fear. Moshe had hoped that the warning of the policeman he had befriended in Sofia would help him find safe haven with Solia's family. These hopes had died when the family received a letter from the Bulgarian authorities: Solia's family was to pack twenty kilograms of food and clothing and be prepared for a journey. To where, it wasn't clear; but Solia, who had heard of atrocities elsewhere in Europe, had no illusions. Years later, recounting the events to her daughter, Dalia, she would vividly recall the feeling: This is the end.
Hundreds of other Jewish families across Sliven, Plovdiv, and other Bulgarian cities had received similar orders. On March 9, 1943, it appeared that the fate of the Eshkenazis, of the Behars—of all of Bulgaria's Jews—was to be identical to that of the rest of European Jewry. Indeed, the path had seemed clear for at least two years, since the imposition of the anti-Jewish laws and Bulgaria's alliance with Hitler.
In 1941, King Boris, after struggling to remain neutral in World War II, had finally joined the Axis powers. This averted a German occupation but led to a pro-Fascist government. The Bulgarians who despised Jews the most were put directly in charge of their fate. The key figure was Aleksander Belev, former member of the Fascist Guardians of the Advancement of the Bulgarian National Spirit, or Ratnitsi. Belev was to be the principal authority on the "Jewish question" in Bulgaria. It was Belev who had traveled to Berlin to study the 1935 Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, and the other Nuremberg racial laws, which would result in Bulgaria's 1941 Law for the Defense of the Nation.
With this law and others like it, the persecution of Bulgaria's Jews would formally begin, as their legal rights would be reduced to those of the Jews of Germany. "Jewish Residence" signs were required on every Jewish home. Jews were subject to strict curfews and were no longer permitted to be members of political parties or professional associations. Jews could not marry Gentiles, enter air raid shelters, or own cars, telephones, or radios. They were required to wear the yellow star.
Solia Eshkenazi's cousin Yitzhak Yitzhaki, a strong, good-looking twenty-year-old, was sent to a work camp on the Serbian border. He ate daily rations of bean soup, with occasional supplements of sausages, bread, and kashkavel (Bulgarian yellow cheese) smuggled in by visiting family members, or brought by local villagers in exchange for medical treatment by Jewish doctor prisoners. The prisoners and the villagers, Yitzhaki recalled, shared the food with the guards. The prisoners spent their days crushing rocks and at night wrote letters home by the light of gas lanterns. In colder months, they had little warm clothing; under the primitive conditions, with limited access to medicines, sickness often spread quickly. Once, during a malaria outbreak, the prisoners tried a home cure: drinking the blood of turtles caught near the camp, after which the animals were roasted over a fire. "Under those circumstances, the roasted turtles were a delicacy!" Yitzhaki remarked. In the spring the prisoners put on a show: Offenbach's operetta The Beautiful Helena. "The veteran Bulgarian commander, proud of the talent in his camp, invited many other officers for the show," Yitzhaki remembered. "In comparison with what was happening in Europe, we were very lucky indeed."
Treatment in the camps was sometimes harsh—Yitzhaki once was threatened with a firing squad after his comrades inadvertently set a tent on fire—but Bulgaria was in fact different from the rest of Europe. With all the momentum pushing Bulgarian Jews toward
annihilation, there was something pushing back. To many patriots across the fatherland, the pro-Fascist laws required a strong response; the laws were at odds with Bulgaria's history and identity.
In 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul sent ships to the Spanish port of Cadiz to welcome thousands of Jews into his empire. "They say that Ferdinand of Spain is a wise man, but he is a fool," declared Bayezid II. "For he takes his treasure and sends it all to me." Jews would soon spread across the Ottoman Empire, including in Bulgaria. There, in modest communities of horse-drawn carriages and quiet village squares, they would encounter less anti-Semitism, and in a milder form, than did Jews elsewhere in Europe. When Bulgaria struggled for its independence in the 1870s, Jews fought alongside their countrymen to shed the Ottoman "yoke"; Jews of Plovdiv gave shelter to the hero of the Bulgarian revolution, Vasil Levski. Levski, a kind of Bulgarian George Washington, outlined his own vision for a democratic Bulgaria: "brotherhood and absolute equality among all nationalities. Bulgarians, Turks, Jews, etc. will be equal in every respect. . . . " These words were later enshrined in the country's 1879 constitution, considered at the time to be one of the most progressive in Europe.
Six decades later, when Aleksander Belev helped draft the anti-Jewish laws for King Boris's pro-Fascist government, statements of protest and alarm came flooding in from nearly every sector of Bulgarian society. Letters and telegrams were sent to the king, the national parliament, and the prime minister's office from doctors, politicians, intellectuals, tailors, technicians, cobblers, tobacco workers, street vendors, and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.
We, the food workers from Plovdiv, are shocked by the existence of such reactionary laws, which will only divide the nation. . . .
We the textile workers, who work side by side with the Jewish workers, making goods for the Bulgarian people, and going through the injustices of life, we raise our voices in protest against the Law for the Defense of the Nation, which stands against the interests and ideals of the Bulgarian workers' society. . . .
We cannot understand who is going to win from the implementation of the Law for the Defense of the Nation. Not the Bulgarian craftsmen, to be sure. We protest this smashing of tradition. . . .
We the pastry workers from Plovdiv express our deep indignation . . . this bill sharply opposes all democratic understanding, which has always been part of the soul of the Bulgarian people.
The Bulgarian Communist Party, through its clandestine newspapers and underground radio station, issued repeated denunciations. "The fate of 50,000 Jews," declared an illegal Communist flyer, "is indissolubly connected with that of our people."
Former government ministers wrote to the parliament as well:
Poor Bulgaria! We are seven million people, yet we so fear the treachery of 45,000 Jews who hold no positions of responsibility at the national level that we need to pass exceptional laws to protect ourselves from them. And then what? . . . Gentlemen. Decide now! Will you stand behind the Constitution and the Bulgarian people in defense of freedom, or will you march in step with the political mercenaries and bring shame on yourselves as you undermine our country's life and future along the way? In the cities and in the countryside, they are all saying the same thing: "If only Levski. . . were here today . . . [he] would chase us down and flog us to make us understand [his] ideas and just what is this liberty in the name of which [he] died for Bulgaria. . . ."
The protests over the law would serve as a warning to the Bulgarian authorities, from the king to the pro-Fascist functionaries in charge of the "Jewish question": ill treatment of the nation's Jews would not go unnoticed. Consequently, Belev, the most ardent servant of the Nazi ideals in Bulgaria, worked as swiftly and as quietly as possible.
In October 1942, Nazi authorities in Berlin sent a message to their office in Sofia: "Please approach the Bulgarian government and discuss with them the question of evacuation of Jews stipulated by the new Bulgarian regulations. . . . We are ready to receive these Jews."
As commissar for Jewish questions, Belev now had the power to oversee the "expulsion of Jews into the provinces or outside the kingdom." Funds for the office were to come largely from frozen Jewish assets.
In January 1943, the Reich's man for Jewish issues in Paris, Theodor Dannecker, arrived in Sofia. He was there to work with Belev on the "evacuation" of twenty thousand Jews from the Bulgarian lands. This was to be the first of several mass expulsions. The next month, the two men signed the Dannecker-Belev Agreement, identifying railway stations ("in Skopje: 5,000 with 5 trains . . . in Dupnitsa: 3,000 with 3 trains . . ."), target dates ("the Jews concentrated in the cities Skopje and Bitola will be deported after 15 April 1943 . . ."), exceptions ("Jews with contagious diseases are not to be included . . ."), security, payment, schedules, and a pledge of no regrets: "In no case will the Bulgarian government ask for the return of the deported Jews."
The agreement stipulated that all 20,000 Jews were to come from the "newly liberated lands" of Macedonia and Thrace, which Germany had turned over to Bulgaria to occupy. Yet Belev and Dannecker realized that in all of those occupied territories there weren't that many Jews; at least 7,500 would have to come from "old Bulgaria," like the Eshkenazis, the Behars, and other Jews who would soon be waiting on instructions from the authorities.
On February 22, the same day Belev signed the agreement with Germany, his office sent a memorandum to twenty-one regional representatives of the Jewish commissariat. "Private. Extremely confidential," the memo began.
Within 24 hours of receipt of this message, please present to the Commissariat a list of all Jews from your town who are wealthy, well-known or are considered public figures. Please include in this list those Jews who have acted as leaders in their own community and are supporters of the Jewish spirit among the local Jewish community, or have expressed any anti-state ideas or feelings . . .
The next day, Belev traveled to the "new lands," apparently confident that the deportation of Jews from "old Bulgaria" was on track. The key, Belev believed, was secrecy. "The deportation," he had already stressed in a memo to Petur Gabrovski, the interior minister, "should be kept in strict confidence."
But even as Belev rode south to oversee the expulsion of the Jews of Macedonia and Thrace, his airtight plan had sprung leaks back home.
In late February, around the time the Sofia policeman revealed the deportation rumors to Moshe Eshkenazi, a young Bulgarian functionary decided that she, too, could no longer keep a disturbing secret. Liliana Panitsa contacted a Jewish friend and in a clandestine meeting told him of the plan to deport the Jews of Macedonia. Her information was reliable, and she disclosed it at considerable risk: Miss Panitsa was the secretary, and some believed the lover, of Aleksander Belev.
About the same time, at a chance meeting on the street with a Jewish acquaintance, a Sofia optician offered to disclose, for a price, another piece of vital information. The optician received his bribe and quickly revealed the government's plans to deport the Jews of Bulgaria. The optician also had reason to know: He was the brother-in-law of Petur Gabrovski, the interior minister and former member of the Ratnitsi, the Bulgarian Fascist organization.
The optician had grown up in Kyustendil, a tranquil hill town surrounded by orchards and wheat fields close to the mountainous border with Macedonia. For the next several days, this "fruit basket" of Bulgaria, with its lovely shaded streets, its street vendors with their sugared apples and cherries on a stick, its family cafes serving lamb soup and Bulgarian wine, would become the battleground upon which the future of Bulgaria's Jews would be decided.
Fears of a coming catastrophe gripped Kyustendil. The owner of a local glass factory passed along the deportation rumors; he often worked with Germans, so his information seemed good. A Macedonian leader had also learned the secret, apparently during a party at Aleksander Belev's house, and quickly warned his Jewish friends. Kyustendil's district governor, despite his official position and reputation for corrupt
ion, did not keep quiet, either: When he learned of the plans directly from Belev's office, he alerted a prominent Jewish pharmacist, Samuel Barouh.
Soon virtually every Jew in Kyustendil knew of Belev's secret plans. Terrifying rumors began to circulate: The Fernandes tobacco warehouse was being swept out to store Jews near the train station. A list of Jews had been drawn up by Belev's office, and families began to speculate about whose names were on it. Long chains of boxcars, it was said, had already been assembled in neighboring towns.
In early March, residents caught sight of the trains from Thrace passing near Kyustendil. They were packed with Jews, crying out and begging for food. Shocked local residents and Jews interned in nearby work camps raced alongside the tracks, throwing bread into the cars as the trains rolled by. Similar scenes were recorded by Metropolitan Stefan, the Orthodox bishop and top religious official in the nation. "What I saw exceeded my notions of horror and my conception of inhumanity," the bishop wrote. "In the freight wagons, there were old and young, sick and well, mothers with their nursing babies, pregnant women, packed like sardines and weak from standing; they cried out desperately for help, for pity, for water, for air, for a scrap of humanity." Stefan had sent a telegram to the prime minister, pleading with him not to send those Jews to Poland, "a name that had a sinister ring, even to the ears of babies."
In Kyustendil, as word of the fate of Macedonian and Thracian Jews spread and rumors of new deportations surfaced, Jews began to panic. A young woman named Mati brought her family photo album to the home of a close Gentile friend, Vela. Vela was a fellow resister in the anti-Fascist movement; like Susannah Behar, the rabbi's daughter in Plovdiv, the two friends worked underground in support of the Partizans fighting in the southern mountains near Greece. Mati wore a small black pouch made of silk around her neck. Inside it she had placed lockets of hair from her mother, father, and sister, tokens in case the family became separated.