Nadège Ragaru has written a remarkable book on Holocaust remembrance in Bulgaria, inscribing the origins and evolution of a heroic narrative of rescue in wider European and global processes of dealing with the past while adding important nuance to long-standing interpretations of Holocaust narratives in eastern Europe. Published in French in 2020, the book caused heated discussions in Bulgaria when translated in 2022 on the eve of the eightieth anniversary of the Bulgarian Jews’ rescue from deportation. Kudos to Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe for a superb English translation. Ragaru’s focus is to explain how and why the nondeportation of Bulgaria’s 48,000 Jewish citizens in March 1943, recast as a rescue, became the focus of Bulgarian narrations of the Holocaust, while obscuring the reality of deportation of 11,343 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Greece and Yugoslavia to Treblinka. While relying on Bulgarian, North Macedonian, Serbian, and partially Greek sources and case studies, the book also includes materials from Israel, the United States, Germany, and Italy and incorporates rich methodological discussions on knowledge-making that expose the reader to French historiographical debates on memory and history-writing. Never forgetting the global context, with a keen eye on the microhistorical, Ragaru also brings the reader into courtrooms, production studios, archival collections, and parliamentary chambers. The result is a masterful, breathtaking at times analysis of judicial, cinematic, museum, diasporic, political, and commemorative turning points in the interpretation of the Holocaust in Bulgaria, covering the period from 1944 to 2018.

As Ragaru shows in Chapter 1, the Communist-dominated coalition government after September 1944 started confronting the wartime persecution of Bulgarian Jews as World War II was still progressing and exterminations camp being liberated elsewhere in Europe. The Seventh Chamber of the People’s Court, beginning its work in November 1944, exclusively focused on anti-Jewish crimes as part of a process of retribution that meant to propel a communist revolution, advance purges in bourgeois political circles, and demonstrate commitment to the Allies. Handing down a verdict in April 1945, Bulgaria was one of the first European states to convict perpetrators of crimes against Jews. Yet, the verdicts failed to produce a statement of their exceptional nature—rather, drawing an equivalence between fascism and anti-Semitism while portraying the alleged absence of anti-Semitism in Bulgaria as a virtue of the Bulgarian people. These trials created “a trope of collective innocence” (31) that remained the cornerstone of Bulgarian takes on the Holocaust until today.

The next two chapters—which for this reviewer are the most exciting and innovative both in the excavation of historical evidence and methodology of analysis—explain the embellishment of that narrative during socialism. The book first shifts to the late 1950s, as the country experienced cultural liberalization following de-Stalinization, zooming in on a Bulgarian-East German film coproduction, Zvezdi/Sterne (dir. Konrad Wolf, GDR; script. Angel Wagenstein, Bulgaria) that portrayed the arrival of Jews from Northern Greece to Bulgaria. The film was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. Following the evolution of the film from the script to the storybook to the final cut, Ragaru reminds us that in addition to divergent state policies vis-à-vis the Holocaust, the personal backgrounds and professional stakes of cultural producers shaped narratives in important ways. Using film as an instrument of education and diplomacy, Bulgaria and GDR each tried to produce “self-promoting national narratives” (82): Bulgaria to prove the existence of communist resistance to Nazi “occupation,” while GDR to depict “another Germany” opposed to Nazi crimes. Inscribing her analysis in the larger field of visual history of the Holocaust, Ragaru analyzes the film as a part of global symbolic repertoires of Jewish suffering portrayed via gendered Christian iconography. She thus reminds us of the diverse modes of transmission of ideas that are best understood as a layering of national and international scales. The book then shifts to a documentary footage from 1943 whose exact origins is unclear, and which only reappeared in the mid-1960 on occasion of the West German lawsuit against Adolf-Heinz Beckerle, the Nazi plenipotentiary in Sofia. Analyzing the various uses of this footage in archives, trials, and museum collections, Ragaru engages with a series of exciting questions of knowledge-making, interrogating the “relationship between movement and the evolving meaning of images (138).” Questioning “the capacity of visual artifacts to authenticate facts,” she documents “a spectacular reversal of meaning” (139): the use of visuals likely filmed by Bulgarian officials in charge of anti-Jewish policies of deportation to support an interpretation centering the role of the Bulgarian state in the “rescue” of those not deported. By the late 1980s, through émigré activism, cultural diplomacy, and the work of global museum networks, the “rescue of Bulgarian Jews” entered global discourses of the Holocaust.

The last two chapters engage with the post-socialist period. Methodologically, Ragaru uses the medium of controversy as an “instrument for exploration” (214) while reminding us that “with each new present a new past emerges” (215). Here, we are exposed to a polyphony of interpretations through meticulous analysis of the post-1989 reorganization of the Organization of the Jews in Bulgaria, Šalom; the retelling of the history of World War II by professional and lay historians as well as émigrés keen on rehabilitating King Boris III; monument-building in Israel and the Balkans spearheaded by descendants of Balkan Jews as well as parliamentary debates between political actors representing opposing agendas. Importantly, Ragaru shows that Bulgarian public engagements with the Holocaust in the 2010s differed from those of Poland, Hungary, or the Baltic states, where memories of the Holocaust and memories of communism were pitted against each other. In Bulgaria, the same political actors advocated for the recognition of communist crimes and for the remembrance of the Holocaust as “the rescue,” a convergence reified in European institutions in the context of EU accession in 2007. Finishing the book with analysis of the Bulgarian-Macedonian controversies over Holocaust remembrance, Ragaru reminds us of the importance of museums and memorials as sites of contestation over historical memory, entangled with global commemorative shifts in the United States, Israel, and the rest of Europe.

Within a global context, the dominant narrative of rescue, well-entrenched in Bulgaria, continues to evolve thanks to competing memorial initiatives that challenge the universal heroic portrayal of the Bulgarian people and state. Ragaru thus ends on a moderately hopeful note that the current “institutionalization of dissent” (312) over Holocaust memory in Bulgaria may eventually trigger new reformulations of the dominant narrative. One might only hope so.