Tag #126596 - Interview #78468 (Shimon Danon)

During the Holocaust we stayed in Pazardzhik. I would like to emphasize here that a wrong notion exists that the Bulgarian people saved its Jews. I have a slightly different opinion concerning this. I think that Jews in Bulgaria became more confident about their future not because of Bulgarian society as a whole. I cannot deny that there were quite a lot of Bulgarians who were helping Jews for different reasons. Actually, the ones who used to chase our people were rather shocked by the losses of the Germans on the East front. The more the Red Army approached our borders, the more some people felt ‘close’ to their Jewish compatriots. After the Stalingrad battle they began to fear that retribution would reach them for the things they had done. And they had done awful things.