As I write this at breakfast we are alone in a dining room proportionate to the size of the hotel. Half a dozen large men with correspondingly large muscles enter and start to consume vast amounts of foodstuff. Either it’s the local wrestling/weightlifting team or this is our first encounter with ‘thick necks’. Some breakfast alone. The rest in twos. After breakfast we wait for M at the entrance to the hotel and see that right next to the door there are two black Mercedes and a black Hummer parked in a half circle, all with dark windows, all spotless, steadfastly ignoring the no parking sign which will be gone when we return later in the day. When he arrives M confirms our conjectures and tells us that he had a room on the same floor as the gentlemen in question and that they were the night shift, having breakfast before getting some sleep. The day shift has already taken over, walking up and down the corridor…

Research and reading yesterday night on the Jewish issue here before World War II turned up some interesting information and confirmed the basic outline of what we’d learned in the synagogue. After two right-wing coups in the 1920s and 1930s Bulgaria was a monarchy with a parliament at the outbreak of the Second World War. Originally King Boris, under pressure from both sides (axis and allies) to enter into an alliance, maintained an armed neutrality, putting Bulgaria on a war footing but postponing any decision on commitment despite the fact that Germany was Bulgaria’s biggest market. (In World War I Bulgaria had joined—along with Turkey—the Austro-German alliance in an effort to recoup the territorial losses in the Balkan Wars of 1908—13, a strategy which failed.) By the end of 1940 the king was also under pressure from the Russians who wished to declare Bulgaria a ‘Soviet security zone’ a terminology used by Stalin just prior to swallowing up the Baltic states, protected in doing so by the German-Soviet pact. In February 1941, unconvinced that the allies would win the war, Bulgaria officially consented to allow a pontoon bridge to be constructed over the Danube to give passage to German soldiers heading south to Greece, Serbia and Macedonia. The German-Bulgarian pact, signed one day previously in Vienna seemed to bear immediate fruit, restoring to Bulgaria much of the territory it had been denied in 1918 as well as some Greek islands and parts of Macedonia.

The Bulgarians ‘were not given full ownership of its new territories lest… (they)… pocket the gains and leave the axis’. (Crampton)

In their normal manner the Germans attempted to instigate the introduction of measures which would deprive Jews of social and economic support, isolating them from the rest of the body politic. It was at this time that parliament passed a law depriving Jews in the newly occupied territories of their Bulgarian citizenship, thus allowing the Germans—who were in de facto control—to begin deporting them. This took place at the beginning of 1943. In fact, it seems that the totals agreed on by parliament included Jews from the territory of pre-war Bulgaria as well. However, alarmed and informed by those Jews who knew what was in store for them, Dimiter Peshev—an MP who was also Deputy Chairman of the National Assembly—set in motion events which were to culminate in a petition to the king from 43 MPs. This was underscored by organised resistance on the part of the church—the Metropolitan of Plovdiv effectively declaring himself Jewish—as well as from almost every level of society. The result was that the entire Jewish population of 43,000 was saved from the extermination camps. Naturally such a showing of civil courage cannot remain politically ‘unclaimed’ so that during a history symposium in Sofia in 1995, there were still those who were prepared to argue that it was the Bulgarian Communist Party that organised that resistance. However, the symposium gave credit to the many people and bodies involved in the event. As Hannah Arendt recounts, Walter Schellenberg, Chief of Counter Intelligence in the Reich Security Main Office, reported to the Foreign Office in 1942 that the star the Bulgarian Jews were to wear was ‘very small’, that many did not wear it at all and that, in general, those who did received ‘so many manifestations of sympathy’ that they were proud of wearing it. She sums up the political position thus: ‘Bulgaria had more cause that any of the other Balkan countries to be grateful to Nazi Germany because of the considerable territorial aggrandizement she received at the expense of Rumania, Yugoslavia and Greece.