The Stood Up to Hitler and Saved 50,000 Jews

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Professor of genocide studies Omer Bartov has penned a chilling and brilliant essay concluding that Israel is committing genocide. In November, he’d said that while there was evidence of war crimes they didn’t amount to his definition of genocide. But recently, he went to Israel.

After disturbing encounters with students and even friends with similar political leanings—after observing that Israeli TV shows nothing of Palestinian suffering, and that the vast populace won’t even consider the soldiers can do anything wrong—he’s concluded that a genocide is underway.

In the long read he draws parallels between the psychological state and belief system of the the WW2 German army and the IDF (an unpopular opinion you can imagine). He bluntly states that Israel’s end game is the brutalize the population of Gaza until they’re killed off or leave.

He ends on a hopeful note (well, not exactly “hope” but rather “prayer.”)

Will it ever be possible for Israel to discard the violent, exclusionary, militant and increasingly racist aspects of its vision as it is embraced there now by so many of its Jewish citizens? Will it ever be able to reimagine itself as its founders had so eloquently envisioned it – as a nation based on freedom, justice and peace?

It is difficult to indulge in such fantasies at the moment. But perhaps precisely because of the nadir in which Israelis, and much more so Palestinians, now find themselves, and the trajectory of regional destruction their leaders have set them on, I pray that alternative voices will finally be raised. For, in the words of the poet Eldan, “there is a time when darkness roars but there is dawn and radiance”.

I decided to re-up this story about a group of Bulgarian Orthodox priests, now largely forgotten, who saved 8,500 Bulgarian Jews from the Nazis, including by literally putting their bodies on the train-tracks.

They Stood Up to Hitler and Saved 8,500 Jews

In March of 1943, Bulgarian police stormed into the homes of Jewish Bulgarians and dragged them to train stations. The trains came. 8,500 people were loaded into boxcars.

***

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Bulgaria had joined the Axis powers in 1940, even though King Boris had no particular affinity for fascism. He was a mild mannered ruler that opposed the death penalty and, in his off time, enjoyed playing drums in a jazz band with his sister. But the Bulgarian regime had its eye on the surrounding territories of Macedonia and Thrace and Germany agreed to cede them the land.

In the early 1940s, following Germany’s lead, the regime severely restricted the rights of Bulgarian Jews. Jews and non-Jews could no longer marry. Jews were banned from most occupations and forced to wear yellow stars. These policies were deeply unpopular and sparked widespread protests by regular people, the Church and government officials. They resisted the idea that their Jewish neighbors posed an existential threat. A letter to the government by former parliament members mocked fascist rhetoric by, well, calling the fascists snowflakes.

“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,” they wrote.

The Bulgarian Orthodox Church vigorously lobbied on behalf of the country’s Jewish people. Top leaders regularly reminded Tsar Boris about the likely fate of his immortal soul if he bended to the Nazis on “the Jewish question.”

Stefan I, a charismatic Church leader, wondered about Hitler’s rise. “Only madmen can fall under the hysteria that has taken over this miserable Führer,” he wrote in a journal in 1942. “What has happened to the great German civilization, if the people allow themselves be commanded by a crazed Führer?” Over the course of WW2 Stefan infuriated the German Nazis by lobbying for the rights of Jews and pleading with Bulgarians to view them as brothers.

“If we, the church, allow the Jews to be deported, we will betray our most sacred obligations,” the Reverend Boris Haralampiev, stated. “We must help!^”

“The whole Bulgarian Orthodox Church will stand up for the Jews,” Bishop Metropolitan Kiril, the Orthodox Christian bishop of Plovdiv, said. Priests and civilians risked their lives to issue fake baptismal certificates to Jewish people.

“Whether it is one or 1,000 Jews, the Nazis can only shoot me once,” one priest later said.

Despite protests, Jews in Macedonia and Thrace—11,000—were sent to the death camps.

The Germans weren’t satisfied. In the winter of 1943, Adolf Eichmann ordered the regime to deport the 50,000 Jewish people in Bulgaria to Poland and Germany.

***

The first surprise deportation happened on March 10th. 8,500 Jews were rounded up and forced into boxcars. Kiril rushed to the train station with 300 church members. As he shoved past the SS guards, he reportedly shouted a text from the Book of Ruth: "Wherever you go, I will go! Wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people, and your God, my God!" Kiril rushed in front of the train and declared that he’d lay down on the tracks to stop the deportations. The SS soldiers didn’t know what to do with this high-powered pontiff in his religious regalia. The deportations were halted.

Later, the King summoned the leadership of the Church to convince them to stop their resistance. "After all," he said, "other countries have dealt the same way with the 'Jewish Problem'."

They refused.

In April, the leadership of the Church met to discuss how to proceed. “When we ask the State authorities what the Jews of this country are guilty of, they have nothing to say,” Stefan reportedly said. “They have taken everything from the Jews, but when they tried to take their lives, the Jews asked the Church to defend them. We cannot refuse. They are being subjected to inhuman suffering.”

In May, Bulgaria’s Jews once again received deportation orders. The community's two chief rabbis appealed to Stefan. He and others inundated parliament with protests. It worked.

The authoritative intervention of the Church came on top of the decisive initiative of the deputy president of parliament, Dimitar Peshev, who first obtained the suspension of the trains leaving for Auschwitz and then, with a letter of protest signed by 42 deputies, the definitive cancellation of the deportation plans. Bulgaria’s 48 thousand Jews were safe.

The King rescinded the deportation order and Bulgarian Jews were allowed to return to their homes.

***

The German ambassador to Bulgaria had bad news for the Führer. “I am firmly convinced that the Prime Minister and the government wish and strive for a final and radical solution to the Jewish problem,” he wrote to his superiors. “However, they are hindered by the mentality of the Bulgarian people, who lack the ideological enlightenment we have.”

Hitler summoned Boris to Germany and demanded he proceed with the deportations. The King refused.

“Hitler went into a rage when I refused his demands,” the King recalled. “Screaming like a madman, he attacked me, and Bulgaria, in a torrent of accusations and threats. It was horrible. But I did not surrender one inch!”

He died weeks later. It’s widely believed that he was poisoned by the Third Reich.

***

“Do you remember Becky?” I asked my Grandmother yesterday.

“Of course I remember Becky. Why?”

Becky was a vivacious woman with coiffed blonde-dyed hair, about 10 years older than my grandmother. I remember her mostly for her vigorous attempts to set me up with her grandson. She’d been friends with my grandparents for decades.

In the 1970s, my grandparents had been waiting at a stoplight in Fairfax, California, when they smelled Bulgarian guyvetch: a spicy stew with okra, potatoes, eggplant, tomatoes, any other vegetables that happen to be around, and slow-cooked beef. They peeled the car to the curb and walked into a small restaurant.

After illegally escaping Communist Bulgaria and reaching their dreamland of Los Angeles, they ached for a taste from home, and there it was, tubs of traditional Bulgarian food: Soupa sus topcheta (egg-drop/meatball soup), pulmeni chushki (stuffed peppers), kofteta (spiced meatballs), and moussaka.

“We sat down and ate and ate and ate,” Grandma recalls. They asked Becky, the cook and proprietor, how she came to cook Bulgarian food in Fairfax, California. When they realized they were all from Bulgaria, they became fast friends. “Becky was so much fun!” my grandmother recalls. “We took walks on the ocean. Becky was a beautiful woman, and her husband was handsome.” Becky got into the restaurant business by cooking stuffed peppers—spiced rice and vegetables enveloped in slow-cooked peppers—for … well, sex workers who lived on the above floor and got out of work at noon, around the time Becky was taking out her Bulgarian stuffed peppers.

Becky had been one of the Bulgarian Jews who were rounded up and almost sent to Poland or Germany.

When my grandfather died in 2011, Becky showed up to the house with a tub of guyvetch.

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