Beyond Hitler's Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria's Jews

What I found most interesting is the juxtaposition of the treatment of Bulgarian's own Jews with their abandonment of the Jews of Macedonia to the Nazis. While the Bulgarians, from the King down to common citizens stood up and placed their lives in jeopardy in order to save the Jewish citizens of Bulgaria, they hardly lent a hand to save from deportation to the death camps the Jews of the territories that they annexed. Bar-Zohar does not extensively discuss this dichotomy, even though it reenforces his central thesis that Bulgarians saw Bulgarian-Jews as Bulgarians and not as Jews.

The story of the rescue has a larger message beyond that of a single nation. It makes one question what might have happened had more leaders had the courage of King Boris III in standing up to Hitler. It is a pity that Bar-Zohar did not spend more time discussing the wider implications.

Finally, the book is worth reading if only to remind one that there were people when faced with the Nazi horror who did the right thing. That there were Christians who stood up, and based on their religious beliefs, rescued non-Christians because their faith compelled them to do so.


Righteous People Do Exist. They are in Bulgaria.   December 3, 1998
B. Kirzner (Encino, CA USA)
24 out of 24 found this review helpful

Michael Bar-Zochar has written a well researched detailed account of the Bulgarian resistance to shipping off the 50,000 Bulgarian Jews to certain death in Eastern Europe (Poland). The book has political, historical, religious, sociologic, personal and emotional layers of understanding of Bulgaria, its people, king, church, and even its fascists. As an example it teaches how Bulgaria became an ally of Germany (to recapture provinces lost to Greece, Yugoslovia and Romania after World War I) but never declared war on Russia (who had liberated Bulgaria from Turkish rule half a century before World War II)

An exciting part was the ability to hang the reader on the edge of the chair as the deportations approached and then were stopped at the last moment.

An emotional part was a Holocaust story in which the righteous Christian Bulgarians (with some help from communists and even some Bulgarian Fascists) stood up for decency, for democratic principles, for protection of the minorities, for behavior that wouldn't shame their country after it was done...I cried.


highly derivative, revisionist on Bulgarian pogroms   April 3, 2005
13 out of 17 found this review helpful

I really wonder about the expertise of the author and the rave reviews of this volume. first of all it is extremely derivativ of Groueff's work. but it leaves one important episode and glosses over another. Firstly Bulgaria's Jewish population was the victim of one of the worst pogroms in Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. Most Bulgarian Jews had fled to Greece and Turkey by the the 1920's. The Bulgarians considered us a foreign element, and Bulgria was convulsed by an exremely, and certainly for the Balkans, a uniquely, nasty anti-Semitism.

Jews from all over the countryside fled. Yes, a portion of the Jewish community in Sofia remained. They in turn survived the Holocaust in slighly higher numbers than the rest of Europe.

One of the reasons might have been that the Bulgrain military was gladly (and that is not subjective but from documents in much more serious studies) roudnign up the Jewish populations in neighboring territories they were hoping to claim during WWII.

My family was forced to flee Bulgaria to Salonica in Greece in 1914. The Greeks there had bias's but were never as anti-Semeitic as the Bulgarians. Thirty years later it was Bulgarian trooops who rounded up most of my family when they occupied northern Greece and sent them to the death camps.

This volume is a very strange revisionism, which out of a very narrow snpashot in time (1944), at a very narrow geographic place (Sofia only) attempts to draw a wider conclusion that simply isn't true.


A story of courage during the Holocaust   October 1, 2000
Robert Oliver (Salt Lake City, Utah)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful

There were acts of courage that took place during the course of the Holocaust that are not very well known. Many of those courageous acts occured in a surprising place: the nation of Bulgaria in Eastern Europe. During the war Bulgaria was an ally of Nazi Germany, and under intense pressure to surrender its' 50,000 Jewish citizens to Germany. The Jews would then be taken to their deaths in Poland. Early in 1943 plans for the deportation of the Bulgarian Jews were drawn up by Bulgarian and Nazi leaders, and the deadly process was well under way. Long empty trains began arriving at key stations in Bulgaria, ready to take the Jews to Poland. Everything was prepared for the purpose of death; meticulously planned. Within a few short hours, the Jews would be brutally herded to the trains and taken away. The Jews of Bulgaria would disappear forever in Poland, and it seemed that there was nothing that could be done to help them. But then, almost literally at the eleventh hour, the process of deportation was stopped and the Jews of Bulgaria were saved. The trains had to leave the stations, completely empty. The story of the Bulgarian leaders and citizens that moved to save the Jews at that final hour is tense and nerve-wracking. This book tells that story, and the constant battle of wits and wills between those that wished to destroy life; and those that wished to save it. This book reaches a very deep level, because it shows what can happen when people act on what they know is right. This is a book of great moral courage, at a time when it was most desperately needed.


Beyond Hitler's Grasp   January 17, 2004
Robert G. Walker (St. Petersburg, FL United States)
12 out of 14 found this review helpful

Serious errors in documentation and unnecessary repetition mar this otherwise interesting work. Bar-Zohar cited Groueff's Crown of Thorns repeatedly, yet even more often copies large sections from Groueff's work verbatim and without acknowledgement. This is extremely disturbing in a supposedly professional historical study. The only area in which Bar-Zohar seems to go out on his own is the period following King Boris' death, an area outside the scope of Groueff's study. For that time period the work is useful; otherwise, read Crown of Thorns instead, or at least, read it first.