At the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp on January 27, Bulgarian Jewish leader Maxim Delchev will be in attendance remembering the horrors unleashed by the Nazis on Europe, but also the moral strength of his fellow Bulgarians.
Delchev, the chairman of Bulgaria's Jewish Religious Council, says for Jews in his country World War II "wasn't all white or all black. It's a complicated story."
In 1941 Bulgaria, under rising pressure from Berlin, allied itself with Nazi Germany. Sofia was swiftly rewarded by being handed control of Nazi-captured territory in today's Greece and North Macedonia that Bulgaria had lost after World War I.
As the Nazi war machine ramped up its persecution of Jews, Bulgaria followed suit, enacting a Nazi-inspired law targeting its Jewish minority, which made up less than 1 percent of the population.
For Bulgarians the "Law for Protection of the Nation" was as baffling as it was repellant. "There was no city [in Bulgaria] with a specific Jewish neighborhood or secluded ghetto before the war," Delchev explained to RFE/RL.
The average Bulgarian Jew lived side by side with his Christian neighbors, sharing in the struggles and celebrations of life. Nearly 1,000 Jews died fighting for Bulgaria during the Balkan Wars and World War I.
"This law and others like it are putting an end to our popular and constitutional freedoms, for which our forefathers shed their blood," read one open letter signed by hundreds of non-Jewish Bulgarians in Sofia.
Bulgaria's powerful Orthodox Church also denounced the anti-Jewish law. With words apparently targeting Bulgaria's alliance with Nazi Germany, church leaders called for government action instead against the "real dangers" to Bulgaria, "from whatever sources these dangers might come."
As the nightmare machinery of the Holocaust slid into operation in Nazi-occupied Europe, Germans found that in Bulgaria they had a problem. "The mentality of the Bulgarian people," wrote Adolf Heinz Beckerle, the Nazi ambassador to the Balkan country, "lacks the ideological enlightenment that we have."
Bulgarians who grew up alongside "Armenians, Greeks and Gypsies don't see in the Jews any flaws justifying any special laws against them," Beckerle complained.
For Bulgarians, the full savagery of their wartime ally's "final solution" became clear when trainloads of Jews, whom witnesses described as "wailing like caged birds," were transported from the Bulgarian-held regions of northern Greece and Macedonia through Bulgaria toward Nazi-occupied Poland. Nearly every one of the 11,343 Jews transported to Poland from the Bulgarian-held territories was killed in death camps.
When pro-Nazi bureaucrats in Sofia began compiling plans to round up the Jews of Bulgaria proper, details of the secret plan were leaked, sparking terror, and defiance.
Dimitar Peshev, the vice chairman of the Bulgarian Parliament, drafted a letter of protest against the deportation plans that he convinced 41 other members of parliament to co-sign. Peshev later recalled making the dangerous move in an effort to spare Bulgaria being marked by "a stain she didn't deserve."
When Jews in some regions of Bulgaria were rounded up ahead of their planned deportations, senior Orthodox clergy also defied the authorities. One church leader reportedly clambered over the fence of a temporary concentration facility to assure his Jewish compatriots inside "wherever you go, I will go."
Despite repeated attempts by pro-Nazi functionaries in Sofia, deportations of Bulgaria's Jews to Polish death camps never went ahead. More than 48,000 Jews targeted for destruction were spared thanks to the resistance of their fellow Bulgarians.
Delchev says there were several factors behind Bulgaria's rare example amid the upcoming commemoration of the Holocaust.
Unlike countries under hostile Nazi occupation, as an ally of Nazi Germany, Bulgarians had some autonomy compared to countries where anti-Nazi defiance would be met with summary executions. "It wasn't like Poland or Yugoslavia, that were run by the Nazis," Delchev told RFE/RL.
Additionally Delchev points to "a very strong and moral Orthodox Church," whose cultural power was virtually impossible to counter, even by an authoritarian government.
Following the war and the imposition of a Soviet-backed leftist government in 1946, almost the entire Jewish population of Bulgaria left for Israel. Today, only around 5,000 Jews remain.
On March 10, each year Bulgarian Jews mark the Day of Salvation of their people, and memorials to the events of 80 years ago have been erected in cities throughout Bulgaria and in Israel.
In Varna, tourists strolling past the seaside city's Archaeological Museum might notice a monument of a shofar, a Jewish horn inscribed with thanks to Bulgarians, "for our salvation during the Holocaust," which concludes, "We remember!"
