Students gathered Tuesday night in the McCord Auditorium of Dallas Hall to watch Jacky Comforty’s documentary “The Optimists: The Story of the Rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from the Holocaust.”
The event was sponsored by the SMU Office of the Chaplain and the American Jewish Congress, an 85-year-old institution dedicated to fighting prejudice.
Comforty is an Israeli born to Bulgarian survivors of the Holocaust. Historically, Bulgaria was the only country under the Nazi regime that did not deport its Jews, and no Jews were murdered as a result of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”
According to the film, the compassion and humanitarianism of the Bulgarian Christian and Muslim communities prevented Bulgarian Jewish genocide from occurring. When the Nazi regime took over and Jews were curfewed and forbidden to leave their houses after 9 p.m. or own radios, Christians and Muslims took to the streets to protect Jewish friends’ houses and businesses and also to burn Nazi flags and erase Nazi graffiti on walls.
The film portrayed that the Bulgarian Orthodox Church had a profound influence on preventing the deportation of Bulgaria’s 50,000 Jews in 1944.
Christian Orthodox Bishop Kiril of Bulgaria told authorities that if they deported Bulgarian Jews, they would have to deport him as well.
As one Orthodox priest said in the film, “If we, the Church, allowed the Jews to be deported, we would have betrayed our most sacred obligation. No one should violate the intimate, spiritual life of another.”
One Bulgarian baker who hid Jews in his bread oven summed it up best in his interview, saying, “At the last moment, common sense and humanism prevailed.”
After the movie, Edith Baker, a Bulgarian Holocaust survivor from Sofia who moved to Dallas in 1951, shared her experiences and feelings to the auditorium filled with students and community members.
Well known for her Dallas gallery, which she owned until 2000, Baker said the film brought back many memories for her.
“I was there,” she said. “I remember.”
Baker went on to say, “So little can be learned from this because the tragic events were so inexplicable.”
She shared that she felt Bulgarians did not know what anti-Semitism really was. Even though she and her family heard the derogatory names for Jews, there was no hateful connection with what they said.
For the most part, Baker said, Bulgaria’s countryside was filled with honest, simple people and the cities were populated with well-educated universalists, where it was common for the average citizen to speak two to four languages.
Baker said she has always been amazed at how little is known about the 50,000 Jews who were saved by Bulgaria citizens. This information was buried under the Bulgarian Communist regime that took over after WWII and did not fall until 1991.
It is in the past decade that concealed documents and information about the national rescue have been discovered.
Baker agreed with the film that the influence of the Christian Orthodox Church was the main reason Bulgarian Jews were saved from being deported to Poland under Hitler’s regime.
And, while Baker said the film brought back so many memories, she concluded by saying, “It all seems so far away.”
