Attempts to distort the account of the Holocaust and whitewash history are not peculiar to Bulgaria, as the vast literature on the interplay of Holocaust legacy and postwar agendas both in the eastern and western halves of divided Europe demonstrate. The book under review, a translation of the French original from 2020, is peculiar in its comprehensiveness and attention to agency, context, and almost every detail of Holocaust knowledge and discourse production in Bulgaria. Uniquely in Europe, Bulgaria was neither occupied nor did it hand over its roughly forty-eight thousand Jews to its wartime ally Nazi Germany. This fact became foundational for the post-war identity and state- building led by the ruling Communist Party, perpetuating a version of history in which Bulgaria was a Nazi victim that heroically saved its entire Jewish community and blatantly ignoring the deportations from the lands it acquired with the help of Germany.
Bulgaria joined the Axis powers in March 1941 but introduced its anti-Jewish legislation as early as 1939. The Law for the Protection of the Nation, enacted in January 1941, turned antisemitism into a state policy of harassment, privation, ghettoization, forced labor, and property confiscations imposed on Bulgarian Jews for four years. Participating in the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941, the Bulgarian Army occupied Aegean Thrace and Macedonia (in Greece), Vardar Macedonia, and the Pirot region in Yugoslavia, with the Bulgarian state and its institutions directly if not solely responsible for policing the occupied territories and rounding up the Jews living there, sending 11,343 Jews to their deaths in Treblinka, including the entire communities of Kavala, Serres, Drama, Alexandroupolis, Komotini, Xanthi and few smaller ones in Greece, as well as Skopje, Bitola/Monastir, Štip, and Pirot in Yugoslavia). The raison d’être for Nadège Ragaru’s book was made painfully obvious in recent 80th-year anniversaries of the war’s end, which entrenched and further formally institutionalized the narrative that the Bulgarian state, its institutions, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and people were unique in Nazi-dominated Europe for their empathy and courage to save their Jewish fellow citizens.
Ragaru explores the origins and perpetuation of the official heroic narrative from 1944 up to today and how it dealt with the deportations. Distinguishing its important milestones such as immediate post-war trials (the so-called People’s Courts) of Bulgarian fascists and collaborators, Cold War ideological and cinematic production, all the way to the post-1989 transition and Bulgaria’s EU accession in the context of rehabilitation of pre-communist monarchy, Ragaru illuminates how Bulgaria’s King Boris came to symbolize the national “rescue” role, first among the diaspora and now more generally. Already during the People’s Courts of the pro-Nazi officials responsible for anti-Jewish persecutions, the narrative was established that glorified the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews and attributed it to the people. Unlike its later foreign policy use, it was initially primarily a nation-building tool, disassociating the people led by the Communist Party from Nazi and collaborationist involvement. In the 1980s, the role of Bulgaria’s authoritarian leader Todor Zhivkov was celebrated as pivotal in demonstrations opposing deportations. Beyond propaganda, Ragaru painstakingly discusses the notions of citizenship, power, and authority in newly acquired lands, and the very link between the deportations of some Jews with the rescue of the others.
Covering legal and political spheres, historiography, artistic production, and commemoration, Ragaru demonstrates how from early on individual efforts to prevent or stop deportations of Bulgarian Jews were transformed into collective, national achievements, whereas blame for deportations from new lands was planted squarely on Nazi Germany. Most notably the last two decades saw an emerging consensus in the official public domain, including the anti-communist parties and former communists all denying the Bulgarian state’s responsibility. Ragaru’s detective-style investigation, especially brilliant in the case of a single film recording of deportations and its subsequent adages and transformations, show how the deportations yielded to rescue. As Ragaru stressed, the centrality of anti-Jewish persecutions in Bulgarian public debates resulted precisely from their incessant reformulations.
Importantly, Ragaru eludes the role of the Jews in their own survival and in her research involves the remnants of Bulgarian Jewish community, analyzing their activities and memorialization, often sidelined by the grand narratives that she so succinctly dismantles. Ragaru’s research on Bulgarian relation to Holocaust makes a great contribution to mnemonic studies displaying what, why, and how we remember and commemorate as a key feature of contemporary society. It is hugely important for scholars of Bulgaria’s recent troublesome transition where the myth of “the Jewish rescue” could be seen as a litmus test for various populist and nationalist forces vying for power.
