Re Bulgaria: A Refutation - The Jewish Standard

Posted in 2007-on Bulgarians & Jews–from the World Affairs Board

This piece is completely revisionist and ignores the basic fact that the worst place in Axis-occupied Europe for Jews was in fact the Bulgarian-annexed and -occupied zones of Greek Thrace and (then)

Yugoslav Macedonia. These areas had the highest proportion of Jewish arrests and deaths in all of Europe.

My grandmother came from the Greek town of Xanthi. The Bulgarian occupation was so terrible that Jews were going to the German zone where conditions were better! Bulgarian troops beat, burned

business, and raped and murdered Jews, Greeks and Turks there endlessly. The Greek deacon (subpriest) was killed after he helped my grandmother (who lost her entire family and was one of two

Jews to survive from the entire town) and a young Turkish girl escape.

I was at a conference about five years ago where someone went over the numbers of our people killed in each Balkan country and tied proportionally to to antisemitism. This is a perversion of logic,

history and the memory of the dead.

The population of the Jews in Yugoslavia and Greece were annihilated precisely because the Yugoslavia and Greek people in those countries fought against the Axis (delivering the first real victories

against the Axis at a time when the USSR was neutral!), and their ability to resist or have any say was destroyed.

A group of descendants of survivors recently was able to reverse the nomination of certain World War Two Bulgarian officials by Israel as “righteous” by showing they were active perpetrators of the

Holocaust in areas they occupied.

But the half truth portrayed in the original post here persist.

Moshe Dayan never went to the Bulgarian military academy and never was in Bulgaria. He was born on a Kibbutz in Israel, his family were very early immigrants (1915) from Ukraine.

Many Greeks and Yugoslavs died fighting Hitler’s war machine–in fact huge numbers. Many died saving Jews. The Turkish government and people were also sympathetic. The Bulgarian government

took huge bribes, confiscated and kept massive amounts of property and monies, and in the areas they occupied ruthlessly deported the entire Jewish population and handed them over to the Nazis for

extermination.

I have nothing against the Bulgarian people, but this bogus happy face rewrite of history, which largely comes from communist sources writing when all the Bulgarian government sources were sealed,

is a complete perversion of history.

Boroson's Anecdotage

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