The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (7 page)

By now, Kiril estimated, "between 1,500 and 1,600 Jews" had assembled in the Jewish school yard in Plovdiv. Other citizens of Plovdiv had learned of this and begun to gather outside the school in protest; now there were crowds on both sides of the fence. "There was widespread indignation among the public," Kiril reported.

One eyewitness would recall Kiril himself showing up at the Jewish school that morning, saying, "My children, I will not let this happen to you. I will lie on the railroad tracks and will not let you go."

Susannah does not recall this, but she does remember sneaking through a loose board in the back of the school yard outhouse to hatch a contingency plan with a friend: When the time came, she would be spirited away and taken to the Rhodope Mountains with the Partizans. She slipped back into the school yard to update her father on the plan. If the deportations seemed imminent, the rabbi and his daughter agreed, Susannah would escape to join the armed struggle against the pro-Fascist monarchy. Moshe's brother, Jacques, was already there.

In Kyustendil, meanwhile, the town's Jews anxiously waited for news from the delegation that had left for the capital to meet with Dimitur Peshev, vice president of the parliament.

Dimitur Peshev had a fondness for fine suits cut close to his sturdy frame; invariably, a clean white handkerchief poked out in a triangle from his breast pocket. He wore cuff links, and his hair was carefully combed back with oil.

Peshev lived alone in a third-floor room above his sister's Sofia apartment. He was partial to backgammon and Voltaire. Often he would come downstairs in his fedora and buttoned-up suit coat to call on his two young nieces. Standing at the door in their lace-bordered dresses and party shoes, they would take their uncle's hand and walk with him to the neighborhood sweet shop.

Dimitur Peshev had spent much time dreaming of "national ideals and universal human aspirations for something pure and sacred." He believed in parliamentary democracy. He considered the Bulgarian Nazi imitators, "spouting borrowed slogans" and marching about in their brown uniforms, as actors in "a grotesque and pathetic vaudeville."

Yet Peshev was vice president of the parliament in a pro-Fascist government put in place by King Boris III. The young lawyer had grown disillusioned with the Socialists after witnessing the harsh rule of a peasant regime. He saw his accommodation to the Fascists as part of the reality of European geopolitics. In tying his future to the king's, and to Bulgaria's alliance with the Nazis, Peshev sought to ensure a measure of national sovereignty for Bulgaria. The country's relations with Germany were precarious; somehow, the nation had managed to remain unoccupied and had even recovered old pieces of the fatherland.

Like the king, Peshev seemed to believe that in this dangerous balance, the nation's foreign policy required a nod to Hitler. Years later, he would recall his vote in favor of the Law for the Defense of the Nation, writing, "This sacrifice was made more palatable by the knowledge that the restrictions on the Jews, however painful, were nonetheless temporary and would not be taken to extremes." It was in this man's hands, more than anyone's, that the fate of the nation's Jews now rested.

On the morning of March 9, Asen Suichmezov stood at a hat shop on a Sofia street and rang up Dimitur Peshev at home. Suichmezov and his three companions had arrived from Kyustendil the night before. Peshev invited the men to his house, where Suichmezov made Kyustendil's case, speaking through tears about the long lines of train cars at the railway station.

In several previous meetings over recent weeks, the vice president of Bulgaria's national assembly had spent considerable time and energy explaining that there was no plan to deport the Jews. If there were, Dimitur Peshev had assured his worried visitors, surely he would know about it. By the morning of March 9, however, when Suichmezov and the others appeared before him, Peshev had begun to investigate. He had heard the deportation rumors from a close Jewish friend from Kyustendil. He had listened to a fellow parliamentarian describe the wrenching stories from Macedonia: "old people, men, women, and children, carrying their belongings, defeated, desperate, powerless people begging for help, dragging themselves towards some unknown destination . . . that could only be surmised, to a fate that conjured up everyone's darkest fears."

In the days just before Suichmezov and the others arrived, Peshev had realized that the rumors he'd been hearing were true. At that point Dimitur Peshev—pro-royalist member of the assembly, leader of a parliament that endorsed the alliance with the Nazis, a man who had voted in favor of harsh restrictions against the nation's Jews—faced a choice. It was, perhaps, the most important moment in the complex and fragile narrative that would mark Bulgaria's history as forever distinct from the rest of Europe's.

"I could not remain passive," Dimitur Peshev decided. "My conscience and understanding of the grave consequences both for the people involved and for my country did not allow it. It was then I made the decision to do everything in my power to prevent the execution of a plan that was going to compromise Bulgaria in the eyes of the world and brand it with a mark of shame that it did not deserve."

Peshev told the men to meet him at his office in the parliament that afternoon at 3:00 P.M. It was imperative to try to meet with the prime minister.

The men met again that afternoon in the parliament building. The prime minister, however, refused to see Peshev and the Kyustendil delegation. The deportation order remained in place. It was now late on the afternoon of March 9; the hour for the deportations was growing closer. With few options left, Peshev played his strongest remaining card. He demanded a meeting with the interior minister, Petur Gabrovski.

Within minutes, Peshev, Suichmezov, and eight other men—including fellow members of Parliament and, according to some accounts, several Jewish leaders in Sofia—strode into Gabrovski's office. The men confronted the minister with the scenes from Kyustendil. Gabrovski denied knowledge of what they knew to be true. Peshev, however, would recall that the interior minister seemed tense and nervous. The men pressed him, and again Gabrovski denied any knowledge of the deportations. At that point, someone in the delegation asked about the Dannecker-Belev Agreement—the German-Bulgarian document that laid out the secret plans in detail, down to the train wagons and deportation centers. How, the men wanted to know, could the interior minister not know about that?

Gabrovski lay trapped by his own denials. Either he didn't know what was happening in his own ministry or, far more likely, he was lying. Or, Peshev would charitably recount, "he was speaking in the kinds of platitudes one might use to extricate oneself from an awkward situation. . . ."

It was late afternoon. In just over an hour, the parliament would convene an evening session. Peshev and his fellow MPs in the meeting had made it clear they were prepared to use the session to denounce the secret deportations; if that happened, a national scandal would erupt. This was a crucial difference between Nazi-occupied countries elsewhere in Europe and the quasi-sovereign Axis nation of Bulgaria: There was still some room to maneuver. Dissenters in Bulgaria would not be shot on sight.

Peshev and the others waited for a response from the interior minister. Finally, Gabrovski stood up and left the room—perhaps to speak to the prime minister. When he returned he announced that the deportation order could not be revoked but that its execution could be suspended—temporarily. Peshev called Miltenov, the Kyustendil governor, and told him of the suspension. Other representatives began calling their home districts to repeat the news, while pressing Gabrovski to make his own official calls. The interior minister ordered his secretary to telegram each Bulgarian city where the deportation orders were active.

Evidence would later suggest that King Boris approved the suspensions. A document from the Gestapo official in Sofia to German authorities in Berlin attributed the decision to suspend the deportations to "the highest level." Yet Gabrovski—and therefore, perhaps, Boris—insisted the suspension would be only temporary. Boris was adamant that the orders for the 11,300 Jews of the "new lands" of Macedonia and Thrace would not be affected. Their deportation would continue. While the king apparently agreed, at least temporarily, to give Bulgaria's 47,000 Jews a chance to live, the Jews from Macedonia and Thrace perished under his watch.

Moments after the meeting with Gabrovski, in the hallway outside the interior ministry, Peshev turned to the leather shop owner and coat maker from Kyustendil. "Suichmezov, shake my hand," Peshev said. "The deportation of the Jews has been stopped. You can phone Kyustendil immediately and tell them the news."

Suichmezov left the assembly building with the rest of the Kyustendil delegation. At the back door they encountered a group of Jews crowded around the entrance. "God bless you, Asen!" exclaimed a young man from Kyustendil. Moments later, as they walked toward a liquor store to phone Kyustendil, another man approached. His name was Colonel Avram Tadger, a Jewish veteran of two Bulgarian wars who was forced out of the Union of Reserve Officers by the Law for the Defense of the Nation. "Which one of you is Asen Suichmezov?" the colonel asked. Suichmezov spoke up; Colonel Tadger seized the coat maker's hand and began to cry. "I have come to shake your hand," the veteran exclaimed. "Bravo for your courage!"

The Jewish school yard in Plovdiv and the adjacent high-walled gymnasium were packed with hundreds of Jews, surrounded by their flimsy suitcases and cloth sacks jammed with clothes. It was the late morning of March 10; the order to suspend the deportation had still not been delivered to the authorities. Throngs of people were standing outside the fence, shouting, pledging not to let the Jews go.

Susannah Behar would recall the terror she experienced when the police demanded quiet to make an announcement. They ordered all the Jews to line up. Susannah believed it was almost time to escape to join the Partizans; the deportations would now begin.

Instead, the police told everyone to go home.

The physical sensation of relief at that moment—for the Behars in the school yard and the Barouhs and the Confortys in Kyustendil and the Eshkenazis waiting for news in Sliven—would be recalled, sixty years later, as something beyond description.

By afternoon, the Jews of Plovdiv were home. Many found that their houses, left unlocked in the rush to leave, were untouched—watched over by worried neighbors.

In the late afternoon, Bishop Kiril paid a visit to the rabbi's house. Susannah would remember him in his bishop's cap and silver-topped cane, embracing each one in the family before joining the rabbi for a private meeting in her father's study. As he walked toward the study, the bishop stopped and gazed at the rabbi's children. "The whole Bulgarian Orthodox Church," he promised, "will stand up for the Jews."

And so it did in the months to come. Metropolitan Stefan, the nation's top religious official, applied moral pressure on Boris, imploring the king "to demonstrate the compassion and lucidity incumbent" on his position "by defending the right to the freedom and human dignity that the Bulgarian people have always upheld by tradition and by temperament. . . . The wails and tears of these Bulgarian citizens of Jewish origin whose rights are being denied them," Bishop Stefan insisted, "are a legitimate protest against the injustice being done to them."

Dimitur Peshev, for his part, realized the authorities still intended to carry out the deportations. Perhaps, he reasoned, public exposure could shame the government. By March 17, Peshev had gathered forty-three signatures for a letter to the prime minister protesting the plan. "We cannot believe that the deportation of these people outside Bulgaria, as suggested by some evil-intentioned rumor, was planned by the Bulgarian government," the letter declared. "Such measure is unacceptable not only because these people of Bulgarian citizenship cannot be expelled outside Bulgaria, but because it would be disastrous and bring ominous consequences upon the country. It would inflict an undeserved stain on Bulgaria's honor. . . ."

Peshev's public rebuke of his own government's plan was unprecedented. He was a member of the pro-Fascist majority and supporter of the king and prime minister; yet in the midst of war, he defended a minority against the government's plan to deport them. Peshev would pay for his actions: Within days, the prime minister had him removed from his post as vice president of the parliament. Dimitur Peshev would never again hold public office.

Throughout the late spring of 1943, as the Nazis applied their own pressure on the king, Belev drew up new deportation plans—this time, Jews were to be shipped in barges along the Danube, on the country's northern border. Yet in the end the king, seeing a Germany weakened by its defeat in the battle of Stalingrad and speculating on the possible arrival of Russia or the Western allies in Bulgaria, wavered on the deportations. Instead, in late May he expelled all Jews from Sofia, dispersing them throughout the country, and stepped up the work of the labor camps. If this strategy was an attempt to placate the Nazis, it worked; soon, the Third Reich would be too distracted to worry about forty-seven thousand Bulgarian Jews.

On June 7, 1943, months after the Bulgarian drama played out in the school yard, the railway station, the parliament, and the streets, Germany's ambassador in Sofia sent a report to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. "I am firmly convinced that the Prime Minister and the government wish and strive for a final and radical solution to the Jewish problem," Adolf Beckerle wrote. "However, they are hindered by the mentality of the Bulgarian people, who lack the ideological enlightenment that we have."

In fact, King Boris's capitulation to such "ideological enlightenment" had cost the lives of more than 11,300 Jews from Bulgaria's annexed "new lands" of Macedonia and Thrace. Almost without exception, they were exterminated.

Yet it is also true that at the critical time, ordinary people—in Kyustendil, in Plovdiv, in Sofia, across the country—stood by the Jews of Bulgaria. As a result, the Jewish population of an entire nation did not perish in the gas chambers at Treblinka.