Bulgaria as Rescuer? Film Footage of the March 1943 Deportation and Its Reception across the Iron Curtain

Abstract

in the form of several minutes of silent film footage, with poorly edited rushes. 2 What did the anonymous camera capture? Rows of exhausted human beings, their bodies weighed down by heavy bundles; faces emerging from behind the barred windows of sealed railway wagons; figures waiting in an unidentified internment camp, and then boarding a steamboat. The extraordinary nature of this visual document, along with the mystery surrounding its making -the identity of those who commissioned it, the camera operator(s) involved, the time and location of the shooting, and even the intention behind the filming -all account for the persistent efforts of historians, archivists, museum curators and political actors since the end of World War II to make these images "speak." During the Cold War period, the initially silent footage was set to a soundtrack; several moving images were subsequently frozen as stills. Variously quoted, appropriated and transformed, the footage took multiple trips to the editing room -crossing the East European border during the Cold War and traversing the historical watershed of 1989. All the while, the range of possible interpretations of the film continued to expand. This article aims, first, at reconstructing the social lives of this visual archive in order to explore the social, political, and geopolitical circumstances that conditioned the production of knowledge about the Holocaust in territories occupied by Bulgaria during World War II. In recent years, a growing body of literature has endeavored to address the visual history of the Holocaust. Long hampered by questions pertaining to the legitimacy of visual sources in representing and coming to terms with the Congress [WJC]). Private archives and oral history provided additional contributions to the text.Ultimately, the story revealed by these journeys is that of a spectacular reversal of the footage's significance. In what follows, I show how film sequences most likely shot at the request of the Bulgarian bureaucracy in charge of anti-Jewish policies, depicting convoys of deported Jews escorted chiefly by Bulgarians, came to buttress a narrative centered around those Jews who were not deported, one that would champion the Bulgarian state as the driving force behind the "rescue of the Bulgarian Jews." As a result, the image of the crimes became blurred: the initial range of Bulgarian anti-Jewish measures (including discriminatory fiscal policies, Aryanization of Jewish properties, and forced labor) was condensed into the Law for the Defense of the Nation (promulgated in January 1941), on the one hand, and the expulsion of Bulgarian Jews from Sofia and other Bulgarian cities in May 1943, on the other -while Jewish deportations from the occupied territories gradually faded out of focus. Meanwhile, the theme of the Communist Party's leadership and, more particularly, that of the head of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov, in the "rescue of the Bulgarian Jews" took on unprecedented prominence during the late socialist era. Whereas Zhiv...