Israel Matzav

Irony alert: Bulgaria saved its Jews from Hitler

Giulio Meotti points out a bitter irony behind Wednesday's terror attack on a bus full of Israelis in Burgas, Bulgaria: Bulgaria actually saved its Jews from extermination by the Nazis during World War II.

In Bulgaria, it's already becoming certain that Islamism is proving to be more efficient than the Nazis.

On March 9, 1942, an order arrived from Berlin to deport the 50,000 Bulgarian Jews. Adolf Eichmann's office was ready to "operate".

In the morning, Czar Boris II flew to Berchtesgaden to ask Adolf Hitler why he needed the Jews. Reluctant to admit the fact of the gas chambers, Hitler answered that the Jews must build roads. "Roads are also needed in Bulgaria," answered the king.

According to rumor, the Germans poisoned Boris II: the royal plane returned to Sofia with a dead king. His brother, Prince Cyril, a Germanophile, became regent, but Bulgaria arose, and the Parliament, the intellectuals, the ordinary people, everybody protested against the Jews' deportation.

In some Bulgarian towns, the Jews were assembled to be put on trains. But the trains couldn't be loaded until Czar Boris signed a proclamation authorizing the deportation.

In Plovdiv, the capital of South Bulgaria, the military governor was a sadistic anti-Semite. He assembled all the Jews and locked them up in the Jewish school. But not a single Jew could be deported.

There are stories of human kindness, such as Christians who wore the yellow Star of David in solidarity with their Jewish friends.

There are stories of courage, like that of the vice president of the Bulgarian parliament, who mobilized members of parliament to oppose the plan to deport Jews.

The salvation of the Bulgarian Jews was due to the refusal of Christian and Muslim Bulgarians to acquiesce in the killing of their Jewish brethen. It also raises the question of how many other Jews died because their fellow citizens stood silent.

At the end of World War II, the Jewish population of Bulgaria was larger than it had been in 1940. And 90 per cent of Bulgarian Jewry left for Israel in the early 1950s.

Read the whole thing. It is bitterly ironic that 70 years later, Bulgaria became a killing ground for Jews by Islamic terrorists.

Labels: Bulgaria, Holocaust, Islamic terrorism

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:05 AM