March 10: Protesting the Holocaust in Bulgaria

Bulgaria declared this date “Day of the Holocaust and the Victims of Crimes against Humanity” in 2006 to commemorate the deportation of 20,000 Jews from the occupied territories of Thrace and Macedonia to Nazi concentration camps in 1943, only a dozen of whom survived. None of Bulgaria’s own 48,000 Jewish citizens were handed over to the Nazis, however, even though the country was an active member of the Axis Pact and fought alongside Germany (though it never went to war against the USSR). Anti-Semitic racial laws and other persecutions of Bulgarian Jews were met at each stage by widespread street protests and petitions from the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian Writers Union and other professional associations, and politicians within the government. Deportation plans were then canceled as the Nazi war effort began to fail on the Eastern front in 1943, and able-bodied Bulgarian Jewish men were instead sent to forced labor camps within the boundaries of the country. The Soviet Union took over in August, 1944. After the war, the great majority of Bulgarian Jews emigrated to Israel.

“When the police started rounding up thousands of Jews within Bulgaria’s prewar borders, the resulting public outcry and backlash stopped the . . . government in its tracks. When Archbishop Stefan learned that at least 800 Jews from Sofia were about to be ‘evacuated,’ he rushed to the royal palace and refused to leave until the king finally agreed to hear him out. Bishop Kyril of Plovdiv (a future head of the Orthodox Church) sent several telegrams to the monarch and, in a defiant act of civil disobedience, allowed local Jews to take refuge in his church and in his own home. He prevented the deportation of between 1,500 and 1,600 Jews from his diocese, who had been ordered to assemble at Plovdiv’s train station during the night of March 9, by vowing to lie across the rails in the path of the first train transport taking them out of the country.” —Rossen Vassilev, New Politics