Bulgaria, the Jews, and the Holocaust : On the Origins of a Heroic Narrative / Nadège Ragaru.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ragaru, Nadège, Author.

Contributor:

Baena, Victoria, Contributor.

Rich, David (David A.), Contributor.

Series:

Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe ; 32

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (406 p.) : 2 maps and 12 b/w illus.

Place of Publication:

Martlesham : Boydell and Brewer, [2023]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

<b>A profoundly original historical inquiry, this work offers a critical reflection on the silences of the past and the remembrance of the Holocaust.</b>During World War II, even though Bulgaria was an ally of the Third Reich, it never deported its Jewish community. Until recently, this image of Bulgaria as a European exception has prevailed—but at a cost. For it ignored the roundup of almost all the Jews living in the Yugoslav and Greek territories under Bulgarian occupation between 1941 and 1944, who were in fact deported to Poland, where they were murdered. In this new English translation of her work originally published in French, Nadge Ragaru presents a riveting, wide-ranging archival investigation encompassing 80 years and six countries (Bulgaria, Germany, the United States, Israel, North Macedonia and Serbia), in doing so exploring the origins and perpetuation of this heroic narrative of Bulgarias past. Moving between legal and political spheres, from artistic creations to museum exhibits, from the writing of history to transnational public controversies, she shows how the Holocaust north of the Danube became a rescue to the rivers south. She traces how individual merits were turned into national achievements, while blame for the deportations was planted squarely on Nazi Germany. And she illuminates how discussions on the Holocaust in Bulgaria were held hostage to Cold War dynamics before 1989, only to yield to political and memorial struggles afterwards. Ultimately, she restores Jewish voices to the story of their own wartime suffering. On publication this book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

1. The Judicial Production of an Account of Anti-Jewish Persecution: The Genesis of a Heroic Narrative

2. Deportation of the Jews, from Belomorie to the Screen: Negotiating a "Socialist" Reading of the War

3. The Deportation of Jews from Northern Greece: The Mysterious Journeys of a Film from 1943

4. Accounts of "Rescue" and Deportation in Dialogue: Memory Controversies after 1989

5. Fruitful Disputes? Transnational Mobilizations and the Institutionalization of a Space of Dissensus

Conclusion

Appendix: The March 1943 Deportations from Territories Occupied by Bulgaria

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/open-access-policy

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Jan 2024)

ISBN:

1-80543-105-6

OCLC:

1419789823