Book Review: Nadège Ragaru, “Et les Juifs bulgares furent sauvés”: Une histoire des saviors sur la Shoah en Bulgarie

Abstract

This presentation reviews a recent book by the French historian and political scientist Nadège Ragaru, analyzing how Bulgarian society has been dealing with the fate of the Bulgarian Jews during World War II. Pressurized by its Nazi German ally to send 20,000 Bulgarian Jews to extermination camps then located in the General Government, a part of the former Republic of Poland, the Bulgarian wartime government participated in the deportation of 11,343 Jews from the territories under Bulgarian administration in Greek Thrace and Yugoslav Macedonia, while withholding, after protests by some politicians and intellectuals, the Church and a part of the Bulgarian population, from completing the number of 20,000 by sending another 8,000 Jews from Bulgaria proper. In three consecutive chapters, Ragaru discusses how the People’s Courts dealt with the persecutors of the Jews, analyzes the ideological sensibilities raised by a film (a Bulgarian-DDR coproduction) about the deportation, and examines the use of three original short documentary shootings of the events. In the two final chapters, Ragaru deals with the relative pluralism of opinions that has been the case since the fall of the communist regime and the internationalization of the topic, especially as the tense relations with North Macedonia are concerned. Ragaru’s general conclusion is that in spite of the increased preparedness to admit Bulgaria’s involvement, the salvation continues to be overstated, while the complicity is smuggled away.

Keywords

• Bulgaria
• Jews
• Holocaust
• salvation
• deportation