Starting the Journey

The flight is booked.  The leave taken from work and the intention is set.  As a friend said to me last night - the worst that can happen is that I sit in a hotel room watching TV for 9 days and come back.  

What? Well as Odyssey once sang I'm 'going back to my roots' man.  Well sort of, it's my parents' roots.  But if it wasn't for what happened to them, or rather what didn't happen, well I wouldn't be here, and my little world wouldn't exist.

So I'm off to brave the stags and hens, the eastern european mafiosos, and the collapsed economy and enter the pastel world I shook hands with in my youth fed to me in bite size chunks by my mother at bedtimes, rose tinted.  

In amongst it all was the experience of a grand salvation that is one of the most heartwarming but surprisingly little known secrets of the second world war.  The fact that 50,000 jews were saved from the Nazi death camps and the worst excesses of fascism by a combination of heroic men and women, history, a willing populace, a compassionate priesthood, and an incredible, amazing degree of luck.

I'm going to find out more.  Here goes.  Let's see what I find.  I'm nervous, scared and excited.  This is my record.

Douglas Fairbanks Junior

Hey, if my Grandfather was this age now, whose to say what I'd do in a loose moment. He's the one on the far right standing with his hands in his pockets, like he owns the mountains. The spitting image of Douglas Fairbanks Junior I think. When I was growing up they family kept saying 'Switzerland of the Balkans' and I kept smiling. They also say that greens taste good, but they were wrong.

Here he is again on the left standing next to his mother, brother and brother's wife.
Grandmama Rosa was quite a character. Waster of a husband who used to fool around, married beneath her to a good looking teacher from Yugoslavia. Had to bring up four boys on her own.

Being Lucky

Beyond Hitler's Grasp is a fantastic book about how and why the Bulgarian Jews were saved. It's written in that punchy, page turning style like Stephen E Ambrose....Gosh, brings back the memories. Hours sat at a wobbly pine desk imagining world war two, or the berlin blockade in technicolour, through the words of a gifted historian. This book is the same, vibrant, telling, emotional. I thoroughly recommend it for a good read, let alone an introduction to this chapter in bulgarian history.

I've just read the chapters on the massacre of the jews from Thrace and Macedonia. there but for the grace of g-d.... I could have been so close. I could have been one of those puffs of spoke that refused to get up and become real because someone cut her down a long long time ago.

Whatever I moan about, thank you. I'm still here.

A Diet of Tales

You know how you lap up family stories when you're young. It's almost an obsession - what did your parents do, your grandparents...etc etc. I seemed to crave these stories when I grew up, because it really was such a different world. Far far away from our little suburb in London, there was a place with mountains, cobbled villages, communal bakeries, foreign languages. It was something I had almost no contact with and could almost have been a fairy tale. Bulgaria was enchanting as a child. Where Laura and Sinto met just like the old James Stewart movies. How Grandmama Rosa ruled her four sons with a rod of iron and hard slog. How Nina and Albert used to hide in the blanket box and steal sweets from their 9 older siblings, and Nina's father was a grand old patriarch with a fez and a turkish name.

The real story though, was a little different, and nothing my parents ever liked to mention. My parents lived in Bulgaria during the second world war in a country which was an ally of Hitler. They did suffer, but in comparison to others they had a relatively normal, even happy childhoods. Yes, yes, there was the grandfather who made them eat raw garlic to keep healthy, the running from bomb shelter to bomb shelter before there was one that would accept jews.

But I never heard about the day they were all gathered in the schoolhouse, with their suitcases, to be sent on the trucks to Treblinka. And the fact that they were snatched from the jaws of death to return to their homes. Or about the flat above the jewish agency office where jewish refugees used to sleep on the stairs in their rags, waiting to be transported to Palestine. There's so much of the jigsaw missing.

Alot of this is well documented in some marvellous books and a film, though still not widely known. But I want to know more about the personal story, see the story through their eyes, and document exactly what happened to my own family during these years. My mother was born in Sofia in 1937 to a couple of bookkeepers. My father was born in Plovdiv, to a woman who very quickly became a single mother, but who was from a large and influential family. He left Bulgaria in 1947 in a rickety old boat that was captured by the british and transported to a cyprus holding camp. And my mother emigrated to Israel at the age of 12 with her whole family, after declaration of independence. She's thankfully still alive to tell some of the story. It's my journey to find the rest.