A truly inspiring true tale
Written: Aug 04 '03 (Updated Aug 04 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Riveting and thrilling non-fiction.
Cons: Sometimes minimizes the bad behavior of some Bulgarians.
The Bottom Line: How some brave Bulgarians stood up to the Holocaust's death machine.
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| lilburne's Full Review: Beyond Hitler's Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgar... |
I don’t know any Bulgarians, but I do know that the Bulgarian nation has gotten a raw deal in Western public opinion. If Americans think of Bulgaria at all, they probably think of the crimes of that country’s Soviet-imposed Communist government. Evangelical Protestants think of Bulgaria as mission territory-which is probably one of the reasons that the Bulgarian Parliament, in response, has proclaimed the Orthodox Church to be the country’s traditional religion. Most insulting of all, the French word for Bulgarian, Bougre, is the root of a naughty English word which refers to that which the U. S. Supreme Court recently made a Constitutional right.
The Bulgarians deserve better than this. I therefore welcome this book about Bulgaria’s role in the Holocaust. Many brave Bulgarians protected Jews from Hitler’s satanic scheme of extermination. The story deserves to be told. The author, Michael Bar-Zohar, is just the person to tell the story. The author’s parents lived in Bulgaria during the Holocaust, and Bar-Zohar credits the Bulgarians for his parents’ survival. The author’s personal connection to this story means that he has family photos of his parents hanging out with friendly Bulgarians. Not that this book is a personal memoir-it is based on extensive interviews and documentary research.
The least persuasive part of the book is the background portion which discusses the Jews of Bulgaria before World War II. Although I defer to the author as to the friendly reception his family got from gentile Bulgarians, the author seems a bit too sanguine about anti-Semitic incidents in Bulgarian history, such as the exclusion of Jews from the Parliament. Nevertheless, Bulgarian Jews were in general part of the national life, living in peace among their gentile neighbors and fighting in the Bulgarian army.
As Europe moved into World War II, Bulgaria allied itself with Germany. One of the losers of World War One, Bulgaria had lost territory to its neighbors and wanted to get that territory back. The king, the nice-but-weak Boris III, appointed a fascist-leaning government to lead the country, backed up with a Parliament dominated by right-wing authoritarian folks. Bar-Zohar portrays Boris III as a sly and clever guy. Hitler called King Boris a “fox,” and not in the Elle McPherson sense, either.
In the early years of the war, Bulgaria grabbed slices of land from Romania, Greece and Yugoslavia. The Greek and Yugoslav territories were a gift from the Germans, who permitted Bulgaria to occupy the territories without prejudice to a postwar settlement. Jumping the gun, the Bulgarian Parliament voted to annex the Greek and Yugoslav territories, conferring Bulgarian citizenship on the gentile inhabitants but denying citizenship to the members of the large Jewish community in those lands. At the same time, Parliament passed a law to restrict the rights of Jews in Bulgaria as a whole. These Jews were deprived of many of their rights and conscripted into the army to work in labor battalions.
The government, without Parliamentary approval, started work on an even more insidious plan-deporting the Jews out of Bulgaria into German-occupied Poland, where they would be exterminated. The German government was bombarding the Bulgarian government with demands for a handover of the Jews. King Boris was uncomfortable at the idea, but he dared not make a direct refusal. In fact, he acquiesced in the deportation of the Jews of the recently-occupied Greek and Yugoslavian territories. These Jews were sent to Poland and almost all of them were murdered.
This only whetted the Nazi lust for Jewish blood. They wanted to get their hands on the Jews who lived within the boundaries of prewar Bulgaria. The Bulgarian government decided to expel these Jews and put them in German hands. Fortunately, word of the plan got out, and the Jews persuaded sympathetic Bulgarian gentiles to speak against the murderous scheme.
Those Bulgarians who stood up for the Jews included intellectuals, members of Parliament, and some other leading figures in the national life. There was an unsuccessful attempt to get Parliament to oppose the deportations. Although some members of the ruling party tried to get legislative action, there was no success. The government was also petitioned. King Boris adopted deliberate delays in order to deflect German demands for Jews.
Most significantly, the leaders of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church rose up against the monstrous German Final Solution. The bishops of the church voted to protest. The Patriarch denounced the planned deportations in a sermon delivered on Bulgaria’s national day, a commemoration of Saints Cyril and Methodius. The Patriarch said that murdering Jews was a sin. In the audience as the Patriarch spoke were members of the government, who were truly peeved at this example of clerical intervention in politics. These politicians probably wished that there were an organization called Bulgarians for the Separation of Church and State to warn the Patriarch not to mix religion and politics in such a blatant way.
As an additional measure to protect Jews, the Patriarch authorized the issuance of fake baptismal certificates to Jews, to help them confuse the police and avoid arrest. When the government threatened to close the churches if they didn’t stop issuing these certificates, the Patriarch defied the government, telling it, in effect, to “Bougre” off.
The Church’s public protests, and the efforts of other brave Bulgarians, helped prevent any more Jews from being deported. No Jew from within Bulgaria’s prewar boundaries was deported. King Boris made sure that German demands continued to be deflected.
In telling this story, including accounts of the efforts of Jews and their gentile allies to stop the deportations, Bar-Zohar gives the narrative an immediacy that is bound to hold the reader’s interest. The reader is with the Bulgarian politicians as they try to get Parliament on the side of justice. He is with the Patriarch speaking truth to power. He is with the members of the country’s Jew-persecuting agency as they try to cooperate with the Nazi Final Solution. It’s like a Frederick Forsyth thriller, only real.
Bar-Zohar’s great sympathy for the Bulgarian nation leads him to take what seems to be an almost indulgent attitude towards those Bulgarians who cooperate in the persecution of the Jews. It seems that Bar-Zohar is trying to portray Bulgarian anti-Semitism as a foreign import, an infection from Germany, from which true, patriotic Bulgarians are free. The fact that Parliament ended up not protesting the deportations, and that many Bulgarian officials tried to carry it out, seems to belie this rosy view, but Bar-Zohar clearly seeks to portray the Bulgarian persecutors as an unrepresentative minority, even if they regrettably happen to occupy government posts. Bar-Zohar doesn’t exonerate King Boris for the deportation of the “foreign” Jews in the recently-annexed territories, but he does give the king credit for saving the Jews of Bulgaria proper.
This book is well worth reading for the story it tells and the way the author tells it.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
lilburne
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Member: Maximilian Longley
Location: Durham, NC, USA
Reviews written: 84
Trusted by: 7 members
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