The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (6 page)

The protests over the law would serve as a warning to the Bulgarian authorities, from the king to the pro-Fascist functionaries in charge of the "Jewish question": ill treatment of the nation's Jews would not go unnoticed. Consequently, Belev, the most ardent servant of the Nazi ideals in Bulgaria, worked as swiftly and as quietly as possible.

In October 1942, Nazi authorities in Berlin sent a message to their office in Sofia: "Please approach the Bulgarian government and discuss with them the question of evacuation of Jews stipulated by the new Bulgarian regulations. . . . We are ready to receive these Jews."

As commissar for Jewish questions, Belev now had the power to oversee the "expulsion of Jews into the provinces or outside the kingdom." Funds for the office were to come largely from frozen Jewish assets.

In January 1943, the Reich's man for Jewish issues in Paris, Theodor Dannecker, arrived in Sofia. He was there to work with Belev on the "evacuation" of twenty thousand Jews from the Bulgarian lands. This was to be the first of several mass expulsions. The next month, the two men signed the Dannecker-Belev Agreement, identifying railway stations ("in Skopje: 5,000 with 5 trains . . . in Dupnitsa: 3,000 with 3 trains . . ."), target dates ("the Jews concentrated in the cities Skopje and Bitola will be deported after 15 April 1943 . . ."), exceptions ("Jews with contagious diseases are not to be included . . ."), security, payment, schedules, and a pledge of no regrets: "In no case will the Bulgarian government ask for the return of the deported Jews."

The agreement stipulated that all 20,000 Jews were to come from the "newly liberated lands" of Macedonia and Thrace, which Germany had turned over to Bulgaria to occupy. Yet Belev and Dannecker realized that in all of those occupied territories there weren't that many Jews; at least 7,500 would have to come from "old Bulgaria," like the Eshkenazis, the Behars, and other Jews who would soon be waiting on instructions from the authorities.

On February 22, the same day Belev signed the agreement with Germany, his office sent a memorandum to twenty-one regional representatives of the Jewish commissariat. "Private. Extremely confidential," the memo began.

Within 24 hours of receipt of this message, please present to the Commissariat a list of all Jews from your town who are wealthy, well-known or are considered public figures. Please include in this list those Jews who have acted as leaders in their own community and are supporters of the Jewish spirit among the local Jewish community, or have expressed any anti-state ideas or feelings . . .

The next day, Belev traveled to the "new lands," apparently confident that the deportation of Jews from "old Bulgaria" was on track. The key, Belev believed, was secrecy. "The deportation," he had already stressed in a memo to Petur Gabrovski, the interior minister, "should be kept in strict confidence."

But even as Belev rode south to oversee the expulsion of the Jews of Macedonia and Thrace, his airtight plan had sprung leaks back home.

In late February, around the time the Sofia policeman revealed the deportation rumors to Moshe Eshkenazi, a young Bulgarian functionary decided that she, too, could no longer keep a disturbing secret. Liliana Panitsa contacted a Jewish friend and in a clandestine meeting told him of the plan to deport the Jews of Macedonia. Her information was reliable, and she disclosed it at considerable risk: Miss Panitsa was the secretary, and some believed the lover, of Aleksander Belev.

About the same time, at a chance meeting on the street with a Jewish acquaintance, a Sofia optician offered to disclose, for a price, another piece of vital information. The optician received his bribe and quickly revealed the government's plans to deport the Jews of Bulgaria. The optician also had reason to know: He was the brother-in-law of Petur Gabrovski, the interior minister and former member of the Ratnitsi, the Bulgarian Fascist organization.

The optician had grown up in Kyustendil, a tranquil hill town surrounded by orchards and wheat fields close to the mountainous border with Macedonia. For the next several days, this "fruit basket" of Bulgaria, with its lovely shaded streets, its street vendors with their sugared apples and cherries on a stick, its family cafes serving lamb soup and Bulgarian wine, would become the battleground upon which the future of Bulgaria's Jews would be decided.

Fears of a coming catastrophe gripped Kyustendil. The owner of a local glass factory passed along the deportation rumors; he often worked with Germans, so his information seemed good. A Macedonian leader had also learned the secret, apparently during a party at Aleksander Belev's house, and quickly warned his Jewish friends. Kyustendil's district governor, despite his official position and reputation for corruption, did not keep quiet, either: When he learned of the plans directly from Belev's office, he alerted a prominent Jewish pharmacist, Samuel Barouh.

Soon virtually every Jew in Kyustendil knew of Belev's secret plans. Terrifying rumors began to circulate: The Fernandes tobacco warehouse was being swept out to store Jews near the train station. A list of Jews had been drawn up by Belev's office, and families began to speculate about whose names were on it. Long chains of boxcars, it was said, had already been assembled in neighboring towns.

In early March, residents caught sight of the trains from Thrace passing near Kyustendil. They were packed with Jews, crying out and begging for food. Shocked local residents and Jews interned in nearby work camps raced alongside the tracks, throwing bread into the cars as the trains rolled by. Similar scenes were recorded by Metropolitan Stefan, the Orthodox bishop and top religious official in the nation. "What I saw exceeded my notions of horror and my conception of inhumanity," the bishop wrote. "In the freight wagons, there were old and young, sick and well, mothers with their nursing babies, pregnant women, packed like sardines and weak from standing; they cried out desperately for help, for pity, for water, for air, for a scrap of humanity." Stefan had sent a telegram to the prime minister, pleading with him not to send those Jews to Poland, "a name that had a sinister ring, even to the ears of babies."

In Kyustendil, as word of the fate of Macedonian and Thracian Jews spread and rumors of new deportations surfaced, Jews began to panic. A young woman named Mati brought her family photo album to the home of a close Gentile friend, Vela. Vela was a fellow resister in the anti-Fascist movement; like Susannah Behar, the rabbi's daughter in Plovdiv, the two friends worked underground in support of the Partizans fighting in the southern mountains near Greece. Mati wore a small black pouch made of silk around her neck. Inside it she had placed lockets of hair from her mother, father, and sister, tokens in case the family became separated.

Mati was crying. "Vela," she said, "if I have the luck to come back, I'll take my album back. But if not, please keep it as a memory for me." She looked strangely at her friend: "When you get bars of soap from Poland, please wash your face. Probably this will be soap made from me. And I will touch your face again."

By March 6, the Jews of Kyustendil had mobilized. That day Samuel Barouh, the pharmacist, sent word of the deportations to his brother, Yako, in Sofia. Yako, politically well connected in the capital, began working his contacts in the ministries and the parliament. After a series of alarming and ultimately fruitless meetings, he called on an old high school classmate, Dimitur Peshev, vice president of the parliament. Peshev had grown up in Kyustendil, and though he had voted for the Law for the Defense of the Nation, his personal relations with Jews were good. He was friends with Yako's brother Samuel, the pharmacist, and had spent many hours with him in Kyustendil, drinking ouzo and eating baklava at local cafes, or relaxing in the mineral waters of the town's public baths. Peshev's sister was a "milk sister" to Yako's sister: They nursed each other's babies. Yako now felt he had to approach Peshev; he had run out of options. Yako also had a strategic reason to work with Peshev. He had learned that the law specified that only Jews from the "newly liberated territories" were targeted for this first round of deportations. Terrible as this was, there appeared to be a loophole in the law that might help save the Jews of "old Bulgaria."

That same day, Vladimir Kurtev, the Macedonian leader, arrived in Kyustendil with chilling details culled from conversations in Sofia. He told his Jewish friends that the trains were coming and that all the Jews of Kyustendil were to be deported to Poland.

The Jews of the town began pooling their money. Perhaps Liuben Miltenov, the district governor, would authorize a delegation to Sofia. Jews were not permitted to travel without special papers, and the delegation needed to reach the capital in order to meet with Peshev and others in the parliament. It would be tricky: Even though Miltenov had warned Samuel Barouh, the Jewish pharmacist, of the deportation plans, he also had a reputation as a corrupt politician. The district governor would have to be "persuaded" to grant the travel permits.

Across town, Jews emptied their pockets. The contributions were brought to a Jewish home in the city center, where an ad hoc group had assembled. The group chose Violeta Conforty, a young woman recently arrived with her three-year-old daughter from Sofia, to take the money to Miltenov. They saved some money for other bribes and for transport for the delegation.

The bills, unfolded, smoothed, and stacked, were placed in a large cloth bag. Violeta had never seen so much cash before, much less carried it in a shopping bag. She walked on that cold, clear morning the short distance to Miltenov's office and thought of her husband in a far-off labor camp. When she arrived at Miltenov's office, "I gave him the bag," Violeta recalled. "And I was told that he was supposed to give me the documents. I said, 'Where are the documents?'"

"I cannot give you the documents," Miltenov said.

"Then give me my money back," Violeta told the governor.

"No, I'm not giving you the money back," he replied. "Please leave the room."

The young woman with the yellow star stood up and left the office. She returned to the house shaken, with no money and no documents. There would be no Jewish delegation traveling to the capital. It was then, she recalls, that many Jews in Kyustendil began to lose hope; it was then that other citizens of Kyustendil crafted their own plan.

Asen Suichmezov had grown up around Jews. A large man, perhaps six feet five, with a big appetite, he liked to eat kebab and lamb soup at a Jewish cafe across the street from his Kyustendil leather and coat shop. He even spoke Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish legacy of the Sephardic Jews from Spain and, 450 years later, still the mother tongue for many Balkan Jews.

Early in the war, Suichmezov had traveled to Macedonia on business. There, in Skopje, he had seen Jewish property being sold off. The owners had been deported to Poland; Suichmezov was aghast. In early March, Suichmezov heard the story of the tobacco warehouse that was to store the Jews of Kyustendil. Fifteen or twenty times a day, anxious Jewish friends would ask him about rumors of huge soup pots arriving in the town to feed the corraled Jews before they boarded the trains. Suichmezov could provide no reassurance.

Jewish friends would pass by Suichmezov's shop, calling out, "Goodbye, Asen! We're never going to see you again!" Other Jews, resisting this fate, pressed the sympathetic businessman to travel to Sofia and meet with Dimitur Peshev in the parliament on their behalf. Suichmezov agreed. "I had given my word to the Jews that I would defend them," the shop owner wrote years later. "And I would not back out."

On the early evening of March 8, Suichmezov and three other men began their journey toward Sofia. What had started out as a delegation of forty had now shrunk to four; this would be the entire ad hoc Kyustendil delegation to the parliament and its vice president, Dimitur Peshev.

When the four men arrived at the Kyustendil railway station, a yellow brick building with a broad cobblestone platform, they could see the long lines of freight cars ready to deport the Jews. The final destination, they would learn later, was to be the Treblinka death camp.

As they approached the platform, the men noticed police milling about; it occurred to them that someone had alerted the authorities of their trip to the parliament and that they could be blocked from boarding the train to Sofia. Quickly, they climbed onto a horse-drawn carriage and traveled to Kopelovsky, the next station down the line. From there, the four men got on the train and rode north, toward the capital and their meeting with Dimitur Peshev.

At about the same time, perhaps on that very same March evening in 1943, Moshe and Solia sat waiting with her parents at their home in the hills of Sliven. No one knew what to pack, what to talk about, how to wait, how even to wonder where they were going. Moshe and Solia had been married three years earlier, in a simple ceremony in the Balkan synagogue in Sofia. Solia had stood with her raven black hair flowing over her shoulders; Moshe, nervous, serious, standing stiffly in his suit, held the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. The young couple had faced the rabbi and the holy ark. Their wedding had taken place just weeks before the anti-Jewish measures went into effect and Moshe was sent away to the labor camps. Now, on that March 1943 evening in Sliven, just beyond the Valley of the Roses, the family sat in silence.

Sixty miles to the southwest, just before 3:00 A.M., Rabbi Behar led his family across Russian Boulevard and toward the Jewish school in Plovdiv. The streets were empty. Presently the school, and its black iron fence surrounding an empty courtyard, came into view. Rabbi Behar and his wife walked through the gate, followed by Susannah, her brother, and the two policemen. The family passed the first cold hour alone in the courtyard. Then, just as the rabbi had predicted, other Jewish families shuffled in, their arms filled with clothing, blankets, yellow cheese, and round loaves of black Bulgarian bread.

Just after sunrise, Bishop Kiril's servant came back to tell the rabbi that the bishop was taking action. Kiril had sent a telegram to King Boris, "begging him in God's name to have pity on these unfortunate people." The bishop had also sent a message to the chief of police "that I, who until now had always been loyal towards the government, now reserved the right to act with a free hand on this matter and heed only the dictates of my conscience."