Tag #123508 - Interview #78516 (Eshua Aron Almalech)

I want to clarify something at this point. The Bulgarian government at that time, which was an ally to fascist Germany, signed an agreement with Germany to send 20,000 Jewish families to the death camps. After Germany occupied Yugoslavia and Greece, their governments ‘returned’ Macedonia (which was part of Yugoslavia) and parts of Greek Macedonia to Bulgaria – territories, which Bulgaria lost under the Neuilly treaty after World War I. 12,000 Jews from these territories were deported to the Treblinka death camp, of whom no more than ten survived. But in order to make them 20,000 the fascist government decided to add 8,000 more families from the country, choosing the most elite and distinguished Jewish families. In accordance with that decision around a hundred Jewish families were locked in the Jewish school to prepare themselves for the road to Death. Just when I went there, the local Bishop Kiril [7] also came and declared that the Bulgarian Orthodox Church led by the Holy Synod would not allow the Bulgarian Jews to be deported. He added that he would shelter the Plovdiv Jews in the Bishop’s Residence (the town residence of the Orthodox Church in Plovdiv), but that he would never allow the trains of death to leave.

I returned to the college intending to go back to Stara Zagora the next day. Then my class teacher Père Gotie Damper, who was a French Catholic priest, called me to his room. He told me that the college director Père Ozon and he would not allow the Jewish students in the college to be sent to death. He offered me to stay in the college and said that I should not worry about food, accommodation and clothes. But there was one condition: I had to adopt the Catholic faith. He said that they had spoken with our parents and that they would issue us a document that this had happened when I enrolled in the school in 1937 so that the authorities would not be suspicious. I do not know what would have happened if I had accepted their proposal or if I would have accepted it at all. But the same day shortly before leaving for Stara Zagora the message came that the deportation of the Jews was postponed and they could go back to their homes. The Jews in Bulgaria were defended by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, large groups of Bulgarian intellectuals, Macedonian organizations, including deputies from the ruling party in parliament.