Bulgaria, the Jews, and the Holocaust

—Menachem Z. Rosensaft, adjunct professor of law, Cornell Law School; General Counsel Emeritus, World Jewish Congress:
Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Dr. Nadège Ragaru's Bulgaria, the Jews, and the Holocaust: On the Origins of a Heroic Narrative should put to rest once and for all the myth of the World War II Bulgarian government as the altruistic savior of Bulgarian Jewry. Using print, visual, and sound sources from numerous countries, Dr. Ragaru analyzes and demonstrates how the perceptions-some intentionally erroneous-of what happened during World War II have been created and transmitted over the course of the past 78 years. This includes the deliberate downplaying if not utter omission in the Bulgarian historical canon of the fact that Bulgarian troops and police proactively rounded up and deported 11,343 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied territories to their death in the Nazi Treblinka death camp.

—Ulf Brunnbauer, director of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg:
This powerful book traces Bulgaria's difficult path toward accounting for its contradictory implication in the Holocaust: while Bulgarian authorities helped the Germans to murder the Jews from its occupied territories, a diverse coalition managed to prevent the deportation of Jews from pre-1941 Bulgaria. Ragaru provides a nuanced, exhaustively researched analysis of the interplay between silencing and selectively articulating the memory of these events. A must-read that highlights the centrality of the Holocaust and its (non)memory for Bulgaria's twentieth-century history.

—Peter Black, historian and consultant:
The Bulgarian state both persecuted and rescued Jews during World War II. Neither narrative is complete without acknowledgement of the other.In a highly original volume, Nadège Ragaru traces the evolution of two divergent narratives across geographical, chronological and ideological space from the events in 1943 to the present. Using diverse venues, historical scholarship, criminal trials, contemporaneous deportation footage, fictional film, museum representation, and political debate, she reveals how regional, national, European, and global politics impacted the narratives within Cold War and post-communist frameworks and suggests guidance for responsibly integrating them without sacrificing awareness of individual agency in persecuted and persecutor.