Tag #125891 - Interview #98885 (Bitoush Behar)

There was a decision to deport us on 10th March 1943. [Plan for deportation of Jews in Bulgaria] [33] They woke us at 3.15 in the morning and told us to take up to 10 kg luggage. And together with my six-year-old sister and ninety-year-old grandmother we went to the Jewish school. We were pushed into the Maccabi gym. There were about 200 of us and we could hardly breathe. There is an interesting story with my father. Dr. Araf was crying and talking through tears; ‘Do you know where we’re going?’ And dad replied: ‘I know very well but you have to pull yourself together – we have to set the example for the young people’. But he went on crying and my father slapped him across the face to make him stop. ‘We have been to war, we have looked death into the face. We have to be brave because of the women and the children.’ And at these words the man became behaving normally again.


We stayed there for about ten hours. I didn’t actually realize what was going to happen but my brother was fully aware because he was trying to get in touch with the partisans. At a certain moment they started separating men from women. They were reading our names from a list. They were letting us enter the schoolyard. And some time around noon, I can’t say at what time exactly, protest demonstrations started down ‘Tsar Osvoboditel’ Blvd, which at that time was called ‘Adolf Hitler’, and down ‘Aleko Konstantinov’, with slogans ‘Liberate the people who have fought for the sacred lands of Bulgaria.’ Tobacco workers and craftsmen from Plovdiv took part in the demonstrations. The people had sent tens of telegrams to the government saying ‘Stop the violence over the Jews!’, ‘We have lived together and will live together again!’ The patriarch also came out with the stole and the scepter and said: ‘The trains cannot pass! Only over my dead body!’ I think that the greatest influence was exerted by the Jews from Kyustendil and the Bulgarian intelligentsia – the unions of the lawyers, of the journalists, of the writers…, but there was some influence from abroad as well. Boris was a cousin of the British queen so she got in touch with him and told him: ‘Do not forget that there is Doomsday.’ [There is no data about such a conversation but this is a popular proverb in Bulgaria meaning that there is justice in the end.] Of course, the events on the Eastern Front played an extremely important role. The fall of Stalingrad, the Kursk Duga [Kursk Arc] and so on. They let us go. We realized that they wouldn’t deport us and then Zhan Levi [an eminent Jewish lawyer in Plovidv] delivered a speech of gratitude for His Majesty but I think that he wasn’t the only one to contribute for this decision.