***** 3. Q: How many Jews were murdered in each country, and what percentages did they constitute of that country's pre-War Jewish population?
A: Austria 40,000 20% Hungary 200,000 50% Belgium 40,000 67% Italy 8,000 16% Bulgaria --- --- Latvia 80,000 84% Czechoslovakia 315,000 88% Lithuania 135,000 87% Denmark 500 08% Luxembourg 700 23% Estonia 1,500 33% Norway 760 42% Finland 8 01% Poland 2,850,000 88% France 90,000 30% Rumania 425,000 50% Germany 170,000 32% USSR 1,252,000 44% Greece 60,000 80% Yugoslavia 60,000 80% Holland 105,000 75%
<http://www.holocaustcenterbuff.com/questions.html> *****
Do the above proportions correlate with the degrees of anti-Jewish legislations, social practices, and cultural institutions of the respective nations before WW2?
Also, what about Bulgaria, a nation outside of Western Europe that did better than Denmark?
***** Author recounts how Bulgaria defied Nazis Balkan nation saved 50,000 Jews Tuesday, March 21, 2000 By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer
. . . It was at Emory in 1993 that he [Michael Bar-Zohar] read a New York Times article about the wartime rescue of about 7,200 Jews in Denmark. He wrote to the newspaper about the much bigger rescue in Bulgaria, and, only after much checking, did the newspaper publish it. The flood of positive reaction to this little-known tale, and colleagues at the university, convinced Bar-Zohar to write the book [_Beyond Hitler's Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria's Jews_].
In it, he points out that Bulgaria was different from most of Europe, in that anti-Semitism was almost non-existent. Jews were just one of many minorities that had lived together for centuries. And whereas the Nazis played on people's negative stereotypes of rich Jews, Bulgaria's Jews tended to be poor, non-religious commoners who blended in rather than stood out.
More than anything else, this overall attitude of tolerance -- built into the Bulgarian constitution -- is probably what saved Jews there.
The Bulgarian story wasn't without its ugly aspects. One of the reasons King Boris III had sided with Germany was that he wanted to reclaim lands, including neighboring Thrace and Macedonia.
In fact, early in 1943, 12,000 Jews from these two territories were shipped in railroad boxcars to death camps in Poland -- something the king did nothing to stop. He also didn't stop laws that discriminated against Jews in Bulgaria.
But he and the Royal Court twice helped thwart plans to deport all 50,000 of Bulgaria's Jews.
The other two big factors that helped were the pro-fascist majority in the Parliament, and the Orthodox Christian Church. Members of both "fought like lions," as Bar-Zohar puts it, to protect these Jewish citizens from government officials who cooperated with the Nazis, such as Prime Minister Bogdan Filov and the even more anti-Semitic Commissar for Jewish Questions, Alexander Belev.
So fearful were Filov and Belev of causing an uprising that they'd planned their deportation schemes in secrecy.
But Belev's secretary and secret lover, Liliana Panitza, tipped off the Jews and their supporters -- an act Bar-Zohar attributes, at least in part, to "pangs of conscience."
Whatever the case, the ensuing protests, backed by Parliament members, clergy, intellectuals and other Bulgarians, caused King Boris to cancel deportations just hours before the first Jews were to be rounded up -- in March 1943, and again in May.
The first time, Bar-Zohar, then 5, and his family were in the town of Kyustendil, living under curfews. They were among the 8,000 that Belev had slated to be deported first.
Bar-Zohar didn't include first-person accounts in his book, but says, "I remember everything," including how everybody was sewing bags out of sheets and pillow cases as they waited to be deported, supposedly to be resettled elsewhere. "Nobody believed they were going to be resettled," he says. "They knew they were going to die."
King Boris, the author argues, didn't want that to happen. And so, despite pressure from Adolf Hitler himself, he kept stalling. One tactic was to place all Jewish men in forced labor camps that he claimed were crucial for rail and road construction.
Bar-Zohar's father served in those camps, which he says weren't so bad: The men were treated well, furloughed on weekends, and released during the winters -- conditions that did not escape notice of the Nazis. But they were confounded by the Bulgarian mentality that, as one Nazi wrote, "lacks the ideological enlightenment that we have ... [and] doesn't see in the Jews any flaws justifying taking special measures against them."
Only after the war ended and the scope of the Holocaust (6 million killed) became known did the Bulgarians realize how lucky they'd been. As Bar-Zohar puts it, "Most of the European Jews would be delighted to have [had] just curfews and labor camps."
There were well-documented rescues in other places -- Bar-Zohar has taught a class about them that included German industrialist Schindler, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and their Japanese diplomat counterpart, Chinue Sugihara. But, Bar-Zohar points out that Bulgaria's was the only Jewish population in the Nazi sphere of influence whose number increased during that time.
Nonetheless, the story remained unknown outside Israel, where most of Bulgaria's Jews immigrated after 1948.
The true story was long suppressed, he says, in great part because the Communists, who came to power after the war, saw those who'd helped the Jews as enemies. After the fall of Communism in 1989, researchers could get to more materials. But because the little country remained unknown to most Americans, the story wasn't widely disseminated.
Bar-Zohar is hoping that will soon change: A crew is working on a documentary, for which he has written a script. It should be completed this fall. After that, he hopes it'll be turned into a motion picture, one that could reach as many millions as "Schindler's List."
The author of more than 20 works of fiction and non-fiction, Bar-Zohar knows this story has the right ingredients in the heroes -- from peasants to a king -- who risked everything to take a moral stand.
<http://www.post-gazette.com/magazine/20000321bulgaria1.asp> *****
Is Bar-Zohar's explanation true? -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>