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| Tuesday, July 25 2000 07:58 22 Tammuz 5760 |
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'To be a Bulgarian is to be a mensch' By Leora Eren Frucht (July 11) - It is 1943, and thousands of European Jews have been rounded up and are being held for deportation to Auschwitz. What if you could freeze that moment, rewind the film and watch as the Jews simply returned home? It sounds like the stuff of dreams or movies. But that is just what happened to thousands of Jews in Bulgaria during World War II, among them Rachamim and Rachelle Comforty. "Because those Jews were saved ... on that day, I'm here to tell their story," explains their grandson, director Jacky Comforty, in his film The Optimists: The Story of the Rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from the Holocaust. The 90-minute documentary, which premieres at the Jerusalem Film Festival on Friday, tells one of the most remarkable and little-known episodes of the Holocaust: how the entire Jewish population of Bulgaria, some 50,000 people, was saved - despite Bulgaria's pact with Nazi Germany. Comforty, a Tel Aviv-born documentary filmmaker, who traces his family roots in Bulgaria back 500 years, meshes his own family's history with that of Bulgaria's to tell the larger story of the rescue. Through a collection of first-person testimony and historical film footage, he tries to explain what should need no explanation: why Bulgaria did not allow its Jewish citizens to be sent to their deaths. There are stories of individual human kindness, such as Christians who wore the yellow Star of David in solidarity with their Jewish friends. There are stories of political courage, like that of the vice president of the Bulgarian parliament, who mobilized other members of parliament to oppose a plan to deport Jews to death camps. And there is the role of the church. One Bulgarian Jew, quoted in the film, recalls hearing an influential bishop say in public that if the Jews were deported, he would join them. In the film, Rabbi Avraham Bechar, who now lives in Jaffa, recalls his harmonious ties with Christian leaders in Bulgaria and offers this simple explanation for the rescue of the Jews: "To be a Bulgarian is to be a mensch." BUT BULGARIA'S record is far from unblemished - as the film makes clear. The country had its share of virulent antisemites in government and Nuremburg-type laws were enacted during the war. One reason Bulgaria allied itself with Nazi Germany was a promise - which Germany kept - to transfer Greek and Yugoslavian territory to Bulgaria. Later, the Bulgarian king consented to deport Jews living in those occupied territories, resulting in the deaths of all but 12 of the 11,362 Jews there. Among the survivors was Niko Nissimov, a member of an American-style big-band jazz group called "The Optimists" - which lends the film its name. Nissimov, who worked as a pharmacist, was interned in a labor camp in Bulgarian-occupied Thrace when his Christian friends tracked him down and arranged to transfer him and 11 other pharmacists and doctors back to the relative safety of Bulgaria. The government had planned to deport the 50,000 Jews within Bulgaria itself as well, but was forced to delay implementation of that plan in the face of vigorous opposition from parliament, the church and grass roots. That delay ultimately saved the Jewish population. The director's father, Bitush Comforty, was interned in a forced labor camp in Bulgaria, but as a child Jacky Comforty was only vaguely aware of his family's story. "It was only when I was already a filmmaker that my parents said to me one day: 'You must do a film about how we were saved.'" Not long after that, Comforty discovered a treasure trove of historic photos in his grandmother's apartment in Jaffa, providing a rare glimpse into the life of Bulgarian Jewry. Two years later he arrived in Bulgaria just before the country's first democratic elections to examine the state archives which had just opened up. He watched nearly 80 hours of motion-picture newsreels - and chose to copy about three hours of footage. "The footage never said anything like 'forced labor camp.' It said: 'Minister of construction visits site where new trains are being built.' For just one second, you'd see a building where the laborers were housed. I managed to fish out things like that," explains Comforty, who wrote and produced the film together with his wife and partner Lisa Vogel Comforty. Comforty compiled 155 hours of interviews, 5,000 photos and 10 hours of archival footage from Germany and Bulgaria in order to tell the story of how his parents - and 50,000 other Jews - were saved. The film will be screened at the Jerusalem Cinematheque on Friday at
4:45, and at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque on July 18 at 6
p.m. Previous Next Culture: News |
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