October 18, 2002

BY HEDY WEISS STAFF REPORTER

In many ways, "The Optimists": The Story of the Rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from the Holocaust," is an all too horrifyingly familiar look at how the Jewish population of Europe was methodically robbed of its rights, isolated, terrorized, sent into desperate exile (the lucky ones), or packed onto trains and taken to such Nazi death camps as Treblinka, Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

What sets the film apart from this larger story, however, is the fact that the majority of Bulgarian Jews--of which there were about 50,000 in 1943--miraculously managed to elude the death camps even as their immediate neighbors in Yugoslavia, Greece and Romania--as well as the 11,500 Jews of Bulgarian-occupied Thrace and Macedonia--did not.

According to the decidedly optimistic intepretation put forth in this prize-winning documentary by the husband-and-wife team of Jacky and Lisa Comforty, the salvation of the Bulgarian Jews was possible primarily because a large enough number of their countrymen--intellectuals, teachers and tradesmen, Orthodox Christians and Muslims, and even a few Parliamentarians--had the courage and decency to protest their treatment. Even more crucially, a number of those with real influence managed to reach the highest levels of power and pressure those in charge to delay the mass deportations of the Jews that were just one order away from taking place.

THE OPTIMISTS / êêê The Story of the Rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from the Holocaust (Not rated) Comforty Media Concepts presents a documentary directed by Jacky Comforty. Written by the Jacky and Lisa Comforty. Running time: 82 minutes. No MPAA rating (no objectionable images or language). Opening today at the Wilmette Theatre.

Cynics in the audience may applaud the heroic actions of a bold minority but just as easily pick up on other decidedly less uplifting factors that clearly contributed to the anomaly of the Bulgarian Jews--a combination of factors, including luck, timing and, ironically, the Bulgarian government's early alliance with the Nazis, which gave its officials a certain level of autonomy.

To their credit, the Comfortys (he is the Israeli-born son of Bulgarian survivors whose story is central to the film; his wife was born in Chicago) do not downplay the easy alliance of the Bulgarian government with the Nazis, or the spirit of anti-Semitism that quickly swept the country.

But the film's reason for being is, as its title suggests, a more optimistic one. It is to show how even under the most repressive and dangerous conditions, the valiant efforts of individual people of conscience can have a powerful effect.

The film takes its title from the name of a popular, multicultural jazz band that thrived in Bulgaria in the years before the war, and exists to this day. Its music and its musicians--a Balkan stew with a touch of Greek, Arabic and klezmer seasoning--serves as a metaphor for the better nature of the region, and its "strange, beautiful harmonies." One of its original Jewish members, Niko Nissimov (a Jewish pharmacist and musician who is a vibrant presence in the documentary), was saved by Christian friends who tracked him down in Thrace and got him transferred to Bulgaria proper.

The Bulgarian Jewish community was comprised primarily of Sephardic Jews who had settled there nearly five centuries earlier after another major expulsion--the Spanish Inquisition. There was never a Jewish ghetto in the country. And in the years before the war, as several elderly people in the film explain, people participated in each other's religious holiday celebrations and many other aspects of daily life. Cultural pluralism was the rule rather than the exception.

Yet by 1936, the Bulgarian government had allied itself with Hitler's Germany, enticed by promises that it would regain previously lost territory. Within the next few years the Jews began feeling threatened with ever-escalating restrictions, and anti-Semitic propaganda was in full force. Jewish men were sent to forced labor camps by the early 1940s. And by 1942, when "The Final Solution" was devised in Germany, fear was palpable. By March 1943, when the Comfortys and other Jewish families heard a knock on their doors and were escorted to the playground of the local Jewish school, they were sure the end had come.

In the years leading up to that moment there had been laudable individual acts of courage. A school principal hired Jewish teachers for her kindergarten, even though this was not permitted. A baker hid Jews in, of all places, his oven. Anonymous Christians banded together to wash away Nazi slogans scrawled on buildings in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. An influential priest pledged that if the Jews were deported he would board the train to Treblinka along with them. And perhaps most crucially, a deputy speaker of the Bulgarian Parliament risked his life and sabotaged his career to mobilize fellow Parliament members to stop the deportations.

The plight of Jacky Comforty's Bulgarian Jewish family, which settled in Israel after the war, anchors the documentary, with extensive archival material and enthralling interviews collected after the changes in post-1990 Eastern Europe. This material is supplemented by a personal archive of 2,000 photos that was hidden away by Comforty's grandmother. Chicago-based musician-composer Stuart Rosenberg has supplied much of the film's score.

The Comfortys are keenly attuned to many of the ironies of the post-Holocaust fates of Bulgarian Jews. Those who did not leave the country endured a half-century of Soviet oppression. Those who fled to Israel have watched the inevitable loss of their specifically Bulgarian Jewish identity and, although it is never verbalized, ended up in yet another tumultuous situation.

In such a world, perhaps it is only the optimists who can prevail.