A Report on the Banality of Integrity

Tosho Donchev

A Report on the Banality of Integrity

An effort to explain a unique Bulgarian conduct

in the midst of the Holocaust

Impressum

Napkút Publishers

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Translated by Patricia Austin

Proofread by John Barefield

Copy editor: Bence Szondi

On the cover: Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

(photo: Bahget Iskander)

© Tosho Donchev, 2020

© Bahget Iskander (cover photo), 2020

© Napkút Publishers, 2020

ISBN 978 963 263 915 4

Support

Special thanks to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)

for their support in publishing this study.

In memory of my father,

who taught me tolerance

Preface – Rescuing Jews in Bulgaria

Back in March of 2015, as part of the usual March 15 Hungarian diplomatic road show (connected to Hungary’s commemoration of its 1848 War of Independence), I was travelling from the city of Vidin to the smaller town of Chiprovtsi together with Toso Doncsev, who was director of the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Sofia. We were on a wreath-laying mission; planning to lay a wreath at a statue of Colonel Stefan (István) Dunjov (Dunyov), a Bulgarian soldier from the Banat region who served in Hungary in Lajos Kossuth’s 1848 military. We were early, so we stopped for a cup of coffee in Belogradchik, which is at the foothills of the Balkan Mountains near the Serbian border. That’s when our conversation shifted to 1943–1944 and the story of the Jews of Bulgaria. This was the first time I heard Doncsev’s thoughts on the matter. I remember saying one thing: It would be really good if you wrote all this down. Luckily, with support from the Hungarian chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA), he has written it down, for which special thanks is due to state secretary Szabolcs Takács and deputy state secretary Vince Szalay-Bobrovniczky.

The events of the time are general knowledge in Bulgaria and among experts in the field. However, Bulgaria tends to be traditionally weak in advocating its own interests, so it is pretty much unknown to the public at large, in contrast with, for instance, events in Denmark or even the story of Oskar Schindler. For this reason I’d like to very briefly run through the events in chronological order.

First I’d like to clarify that rescuing Jews in Bulgaria refers to the fact that during World War II in a Bulgaria allied with Nazi Germany there were two occasions when the nearly 50,000 Bulgarian-citizen Jews averted deportation at the last minute in a near-miraculous way. The outcome was that Bulgaria became the only European country whose Jewish population was larger at the end of the war than at the beginning. But I need to underscore that the story is limited exclusively to Jews who were Bulgarian citizens, because the other part of this history is of Macedonia, and Trakya (Thrace), in the Aegean Sea. These regions were turned over to Bulgaria administratively but not annexed, and with the aid of the Bulgarian authorities the nearly 12,000 Jews who lacked Bulgarian citizenship were deported in 1943. Since this occurred in an early stage of the Holocaust, hardly anyone survived. The Bulgarian historians and the country’s official policy deserve kudos in accepting responsibility for the events in the territories they were occupying militarily, and today, in 2015 they are increasingly sincere in facing up to their actions. Indirectly, this makes the actions of the heroes in Old Bulgaria, in other words, present-day Bulgaria, which rescued the Jews, even more praiseworthy.

On the eve of World War II, after a measure of hesitation, Bulgaria chose to ally itself with Hitler’s Germany. This was the logical outcome of their demand to revise European borders after what Bulgarians considered unfair peace terms ending World War I. Another fact that must not be forgotten is that Bulgaria at the time was a predominantly agrarian country, and 80 percent of its produce, which defined the life of the country, was exported to Germany. The reward for its decision was quick to arrive. First, Bulgaria got back Southern Dobruja and its majority Bulgarian population from Romania, and annexed it. (Tsar Boris III managed to get the Soviet Union and Great Britain to recognize this development, and so Southern Dobruja remained part of Bulgaria after the war ended.) At the same time, following Germany’s military success in the Balkans, it was granted a strip of land along the Bulgarian–Serbian border, currently part of Serbia, and called the Western Outlands, Macedonia, and the southern portion of Thrace from Greece. However, it was not allowed to annex these areas. The Germans intended to defer that decision until the end of a successful war. (As already mentioned, this administrative situation proved fatal to the Jewish residents of those regions.) At that time there was complete euphoria among the Bulgarians and a strong sense of gratitude