Excerpts
“I was the bishop in the town of Pazardjick. Among the Jews I had many friends. There were no disagreements between Bulgarians and Jews. The Jews had a school, a large synagogue. No one disturbed them in the practice of their beliefs. Because it is criminal to impose your spiritual beliefs on your fellow man. It’s criminal!”
“Jews were our friends, our close brothers, our soul mates. My best friend, who has remained my most cherished friend all my life, is Rachelle Alkalai. She is Jewish.”
“What was happening in Germany and the German influence over us was an imminent danger that we felt rather than realized wide-scale. So, we felt thickening clouds associated with the beginning of the war and subsequently with more drastic laws called the Law for Defense of the Nation, which was a series of lawless laws against the Jewish population.”
“We couldn’t go out in the street after 9:00 in the evening, ’til 6 next morning, which made us virtually prisoners. And then they introduced the Jewish star—yellow star— which we were forced to wear all the time. In our band there were four Jewish fellows, out of 10, giving concerts. Every Sunday we gave concerts. And this, for the morale of the Jews, was unbelievable . . .. . . to give them a little bit spirit.”
“After our radio was confiscated, I read in the newspaper about a degree program for kindergarten teachers. I thought I’d apply. My father said, ‘What a pity. They won’t admit you. . . Jews are not allowed in any university level programs.’ I said, ‘I’ll go anyway. If they don’t admit me, they don’t admit me.'”
“The interrogation was in Bulgarian. First, he used his hands. He hit me with his hands. Later, he showed me a stick, half-wood and half-rubber, and on the wood was engraved, ‘As vsichko Znam’ (I know everything), and when he started beating me with this rubber stick, this was terrible. Later, he asked me to take my shoes off and this was the worst. He put me between two chairs, face down, and started beating my feet. …. Later, he told me to put my shoes on. I could not put my shoes on. They were all bleeding and swollen and… it was terrible. Anyway, this happened a few times.”
“At the end of 1941, in Bulgaria there was the Nazi regime. Jewish pharmacists, doctors, and lawyers, were not allowed to work. They took me to serve in forced labor as a pharmacist in the town of Xanti in occupied Thrace. And I received from them all the respect I deserved as a pharmacist of the hospital. I was in Xanti until March 3, 1943.At 3 in the morning, they pounded on the door and said, ‘Come down immediately. Bring 40 kilos of luggage. ‘And they took us, along with all the Jews of Greece, on the way to Auschwitz.”
“In Kaylaka, was a young man who was the representative of the ‘Bulgarian Gestapo.’ His name was Lubcho Zimriliev. He was a sadist. He couldn’t sleep at night and would force young men and women to dance in front of him while he watched. He brought the record player. He used to come with the letters that we were allowed to get once a month. He used to call the name of the person on the envelopes and as he handed it to them, he would instead tear it apart.”
“During the riots of May 24, I saw Jews running from the police. One couldn’t sit idly by, arms crossed, doing nothing. A true human being is obliged to help. I had an idea that I could hide this group of 5 or 6 people. So, I opened the door of my bakery oven to hide these people. And what were these people guilty of? Their only guilt was that they were Jews, nothing else!”
“People make a great effort to show just the positive. And no doubt it is very positive that all 49,000 Bulgarian Jews survived. But some 11, 350 did not come back. Of 11,363 Jews who were deported to the camps in Poland–the residents of Macedonia, Thrace and the city of Pirot—only 12 people survived.”
