More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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. . .
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.
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.
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."
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.
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 n...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
"the fragility of goodness": the intricate, delicate, unforeseeable weave of human action and historical events.
If Liliana Panitsa and the others had not leaked the news of the deportations to their Jewish friends; if Asen Suichmezov and the Kyustendil delegation had not boarded the train for Sofia on the night of March 8; if Metropolitan Stefan and Bishop Kiril had followed Europe's Catholic Church and declined to speak out; if one hundred things had not happened, or had happened differently, it is possible that the deportation plan would have picked up momentum, that forty-seven thousand Bulgarian Jews, including Moshe and Solia Eshkenazi, would have perished at Treblinka, and that Dalia would have
...more
On the other side, Zionist forces had been preparing themselves for months, mobilizing to secure arms and to recruit young Jewish men, many of whom were Holocaust survivors fresh from the DP camps in Europe. These battered refugees-turned-soldiers were highly motivated to defend their new homeland and joined an organized infrastructure that had been decades in the making. The Haganah would soon develop detailed battle plans, including the control of Jewish areas beyond the UN partition line, in an area designated as part of an Arab state. The future shape of Palestine, it was increasingly
...more
Abdullah's secret agreement with the Jews did not envision this fighting: It was designed to accept a Jewish state within the UN partition boundaries while the king took over the West Bank and most of the state designated for the Arabs, including al-Ramla and Lydda. Now fighting on the ground made all of this uncertain. Yet Arab Legion forces did not cross into territory allotted by the UN partition resolution to the Jewish state.
Moshe and Solia were part of a history unlike any other in Europe. They knew that, like nearly everyone else in the railway station, they were lucky just to be alive. Solia believed that were it not for the decency of so many Gentiles in Bulgaria—and particularly of a handful of people who chose to act in early 1943—she and Moshe could have been on a train to Treblinka, not waiting to board a ship with their infant daughter for a new life in the Jewish state. The Pan York would sail on October 28, 1948—three days hence, and after years of deliberation that had brought them to this moment of
...more
Zionism, the political movement devoted to the emigration of European Jews to the Holy Land, had taken hold in Bulgaria in the early 1880s, just as the nation freed itself from the Ottoman "yoke."
Metropolitan Stefan, the Bulgarian Orthodox bishop, who at substantial personal risk had stood up for the nation's Jews during the
More significant, the JDC had strong ties with the Jewish Agency and with the Mossad, which was organizing the illegal transport of Jews to Palestine in defiance of the British blockades. The JDC's ultimate goal was to help finance the aliyah to the Holy Land.
Many Bulgarian Jews, especially supporters of the Fatherland Front, preferred to rebuild the Jewish community at home. Jewish Communists therefore saw the Zionists as a threat. The political differences often became personal, creating fissures within families: If Ben-Gurion's words stirred something in Moshe, a budding Zionist, they were less appealing to his brother, Jacques, a committed Communist and member of the Fatherland Front.
In Sofia, joyous Jews took to the streets to wave flags, sing songs of Israel, and brandish placards bearing the names of the heroes of the day: Theodor Herzl, Georgi Dimitrov, David Ben-Gurion, and Joseph Stalin.
In the end, however, World War I would bring about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Britain's entry into Palestine, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration, with its promise to help establish a "Jewish national home."
The binational idea had taken root in the 1920s with the formation of Brit Shalom, or Covenant for Peace, which advocated "understanding between Jews and Arabs . . . on the basis of the absolute political equality of two culturally autonomous peoples. .
One day Bashir's father told Zakia in frustration that he didn't even have enough to buy his friends a cup of Arabic coffee. For an Arab man, Bashir knew, inviting friends for coffee was an elementary gesture of hospitality—a fundamental expression of the meaning of being at home—and the inability to do so represented a profound humiliation. Bashir would remember this shame for the rest of his life.
The UN considered the situation in Palestine a "large scale human disaster." By this time, the UN estimated, more than 250,000 Arabs had "fled or have been forcibly expelled from the territories occupied by the Jews in Palestine." (Later figures would be three times the early UN estimate.)
Glubb knew that a redeployment toward al-Ramla and Lydda would have thinned Arab Legion positions in Latrun, which were holding the line against an Israeli advance. "And then these scenes would have been enacted—not only in Lydda and Ramie, but twenty times magnified over the whole of Palestine. I could not see that I could have taken any other course."
Glubb's superiors in London were more to blame. British efforts to enforce the UN arms embargo—in particular, the refusal to resupply the Arab Legion with weapons and ammunition—would contribute, more than Glubb, to the fall of al-Ramla and Lydda and the inability of Arab forces to recapture the towns. Most important of all, from Glubb's perspective, was that the Arab Legion was made up of only 4,500 troops—insufficient to wage battle in Jerusalem and at Latrun while simultaneously protecting Lydda and al-Ramla.
Aharon Cizling, warned in a cabinet meeting. "Our enemies, the Arab states, are a mere nothing compared with those hundreds of thousands of Arabs [that is, Palestinian refugees] who will be moved by hatred and hopelessness and infinite hostility to wage war on us, regardless of any agreement that might be reached.
"The right of innocent people, uprooted by the present terror and ravage of war, to return to their homes, should be affirmed and made effective, with assurance of adequate compensation for the property of those who may choose not to return."
The next day, Count Folke Bernadotte was killed in the Katamon quarter of Jerusalem. An assassin walked up to Bernadotte's UN vehicle, thrust an automatic pistol through the window, and shot him at close range. Six bullets penetrated, one to his heart. A statement from the extremist Jewish militia group the Stern Gang claimed responsibility, calling UN observers "members of foreign occupation forces." David Ben-Gurion, Israel's prime minister, detained two hundred members of the Stern Gang, including one of its leaders, future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, and ordered the other extremist
...more
As the fighting in the desert continued, Count Bernadotte's proposal, like countless other "peace plans" that would follow, dissolved into history.
for ten thousand tents and one hundred thousand
For the refugees—the destitute in the camps or the more well-off like the Khairis—the central trauma was not in selling off gold or finding enough to eat. Rather, it lay in the longing for home and, conversely, in the indignity of dispossession. At all economic levels, the disruption of normal family life was having profound effects on the children.
The next April, King Abdullah completed his annexation of the West Bank, infuriating Palestinian nationalists. A year later, he would pay for this prize with his life when a nationalist linked to Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the ex-mufti of Jerusalem, shot the king in the Old City as his teenaged grandson, Hussein, watched in horror.
In the aftermath of the Arab loss of Palestine, leaders in Egypt and Syria also fell to assassins' bullets. In Gaza, the Egyptians responded by repressing all forms of political expression, and Palestinian nationalism was forced underground.
"Palestine is our country," the refugee children would recite at the beginning of each school day: Our aim is to return Death does not frighten us, Palestine is ours, We shall never forget her. Another homeland we shall never accept! Our Palestine, witness, O God and History We promise to shed our blood for you!
Generally, it can be said that any Arab house that survived the impact of the war . . . now shelters a Jewish family."
In the summer of 1953, Palestinian guerrillas crossed the armistice lines and attacked a family in the new Israeli city of Ashkelon, which was built on the ruins of a Palestinian village. The attack killed a restaurant owner and his daughter. Two weeks later, an IDF soldier named Ariel Sharon led his unit on a nighttime reprisal. Nineteen people died in the el-Bureij refugee camp.
These new arrivals, many of whom were survivors of the concentration camps in Europe, asked few questions. Most found empty houses to live in, then went looking for work.
perhaps most famously, the Law of Return, whereby citizenship "shall be granted to every Jew who expressed his desire to settle in Israel." This law would become an endless source of bitterness between Israel and the Arab world for the next half century and beyond. For the Palestinian Arabs in exile, the law, and each wave of Jews admitted to the new state, denied their own dreams of return; for the Israelis, the law went to the core of their identity: to provide a safe haven for every Jew who wished to make aliyah, the Jewish migration to Israel.
Of the entire community of Bulgarian Jews who had collectively escaped the Holocaust, at most 5,000 would remain in the fatherland.
Omar Ibn Khattab was Jabotinsky, named after the founder of Revisionist Zionism, the ardent right wing of the new Jewish state.
"They still have not gotten used to reality and have become apathetic about the future," wrote an official named S. Zamir in a status report on the Arab community of Ramla. "The government's declaration of equality and freedom is like a voice calling out in the desert unless we prove it by actions. Their economic situation is very bad. They have enough provisions for the time being, but soon the question will arise: 'What will we eat?'"
For several years, the Arabs of Israel would live under martial law. Arab residents wishing to leave their neighborhood or village were required to apply to the military authorities for special permits.
As she grew older, she learned about the atrocities in Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary. She found this truth indigestible. For God to allow this to happen, she would recall thinking, is utterly unconscionable. She was furious. "You have created human beings!" she would shout to her Creator. "You have to take responsibility for Your creation! You have to be more active in preventing such things!"
In school she learned of other atrocities. Burned into her mind was a pogrom in the Ukraine, where Jews were slaughtered by sword-wielding Christians after Good Friday mass. She was taught of the silence of European Christians during the Holocaust, especially that of Pope Pius XII, who did not show the courage of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.
Decades later, she would remember this moment as the beginning of a life of discernment: of being able to see the whole and not judge someone or something based simply on a single observation or teaching.
As for the Arabs, Dalia's textbooks would report that they ran away, deserting their lands and abandoning their homes, fleeing before the conquering Israeli army. The Arabs, one textbook of the day declared, "preferred to leave" once the Jews had taken their towns. Dalia accepted the history she was taught. Still, she was confused. Why, she wondered, would anyone leave so willingly?
In 1958, Avraham Shmil, the director of Ramla's office of the Israeli national labor federation, organized a mass demonstration against the Labor Department of his own ruling party.
The Sabra, by definition Ashkenazi, from a generation that had come to Palestine before the Holocaust, had shed the shameful baggage of the old country.
For the older generation of immigrants, the Sabra image was often impossible to attain. For Holocaust survivors, it was absurd.
For the Sabra, the Holocaust survivors often represented the shame of Jews going like sheep to the slaughter.
Thus, Dalia would recall years later, the phrase Never again was not only a promise by Jews not to repeat the past; it indicated a desire, rooted in shame, to dist...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
