The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East

by Sandy Tolan

  Mati was crying. "Vela," she said, "if I have the luck to come back, I'll take my album back. But if not, please keep it as a memory for me." She looked strangely at her friend: "When you get bars of soap from Poland, please wash your face. Probably this will be soap made from me. And I will touch your face again."

  By March 6, the Jews of Kyustendil had mobilized. That day Samuel Barouh, the pharmacist, sent word of the deportations to his brother, Yako, in Sofia. Yako, politically well connected in the capital, began working his contacts in the ministries and the parliament. After a series of alarming and ultimately fruitless meetings, he called on an old high school classmate, Dimitur Peshev, vice president of the parliament. Peshev had grown up in Kyustendil, and though he had voted for the Law for the Defense of the Nation, his personal relations with Jews were good. He was friends with Yako's brother Samuel, the pharmacist, and had spent many hours with him in Kyustendil, drinking ouzo and eating baklava at local cafes, or relaxing in the mineral waters of the town's public baths. Peshev's sister was a "milk sister" to Yako's sister: They nursed each other's babies. Yako now felt he had to approach Peshev; he had run out of options. Yako also had a strategic reason to work with Peshev. He had learned that the law specified that only Jews from the "newly liberated territories" were targeted for this first round of deportations. Terrible as this was, there appeared to be a loophole in the law that might help save the Jews of "old Bulgaria."

  That same day, Vladimir Kurtev, the Macedonian leader, arrived in Kyustendil with chilling details culled from conversations in Sofia. He told his Jewish friends that the trains were coming and that all the Jews of Kyustendil were to be deported to Poland.

  The Jews of the town began pooling their money. Perhaps Liuben Miltenov, the district governor, would authorize a delegation to Sofia. Jews were not permitted to travel without special papers, and the delegation needed to reach the capital in order to meet with Peshev and others in the parliament. It would be tricky: Even though Miltenov had warned Samuel Barouh, the Jewish pharmacist, of the deportation plans, he also had a reputation as a corrupt politician. The district governor would have to be "persuaded" to grant the travel permits.

  Across town, Jews emptied their pockets. The contributions were brought to a Jewish home in the city center, where an ad hoc group had assembled. The group chose Violeta Conforty, a young woman recently arrived with her three-year-old daughter from Sofia, to take the money to Miltenov. They saved some money for other bribes and for transport for the delegation.

  The bills, unfolded, smoothed, and stacked, were placed in a large cloth bag. Violeta had never seen so much cash before, much less carried it in a shopping bag. She walked on that cold, clear morning the short distance to Miltenov's office and thought of her husband in a far-off labor camp. When she arrived at Miltenov's office, "I gave him the bag," Violeta recalled. "And I was told that he was supposed to give me the documents. I said, 'Where are the documents?'"

  "I cannot give you the documents," Miltenov said.

  "Then give me my money back," Violeta told the governor.

  "No, I'm not giving you the money back," he replied. "Please leave the room."

  The young woman with the yellow star stood up and left the office. She returned to the house shaken, with no money and no documents. There would be no Jewish delegation traveling to the capital. It was then, she recalls, that many Jews in Kyustendil began to lose hope; it was then that other citizens of Kyustendil crafted their own plan.

  Asen Suichmezov had grown up around Jews. A large man, perhaps six feet five, with a big appetite, he liked to eat kebab and lamb soup at a Jewish cafe across the street from his Kyustendil leather and coat shop. He even spoke Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish legacy of the Sephardic Jews from Spain and, 450 years later, still the mother tongue for many Balkan Jews.

  Early in the war, Suichmezov had traveled to Macedonia on business. There, in Skopje, he had seen Jewish property being sold off. The owners had been deported to Poland; Suichmezov was aghast. In early March, Suichmezov heard the story of the tobacco warehouse that was to store the Jews of Kyustendil. Fifteen or twenty times a day, anxious Jewish friends would ask him about rumors of huge soup pots arriving in the town to feed the corraled Jews before they boarded the trains. Suichmezov could provide no reassurance.

  Jewish friends would pass by Suichmezov's shop, calling out, "Goodbye, Asen! We're never going to see you again!" Other Jews, resisting this fate, pressed the sympathetic businessman to travel to Sofia and meet with Dimitur Peshev in the parliament on their behalf. Suichmezov agreed. "I had given my word to the Jews that I would defend them," the shop owner wrote years later. "And I would not back out."

  On the early evening of March 8, Suichmezov and three other men began their journey toward Sofia. What had started out as a delegation of forty had now shrunk to four; this would be the entire ad hoc Kyustendil delegation to the parliament and its vice president, Dimitur Peshev.

  When the four men arrived at the Kyustendil railway station, a yellow brick building with a broad cobblestone platform, they could see the long lines of freight cars ready to deport the Jews. The final destination, they would learn later, was to be the Treblinka death camp.

  As they approached the platform, the men noticed police milling about; it occurred to them that someone had alerted the authorities of their trip to the parliament and that they could be blocked from boarding the train to Sofia. Quickly, they climbed onto a horse-drawn carriage and traveled to Kopelovsky, the next station down the line. From there, the four men got on the train and rode north, toward the capital and their meeting with Dimitur Peshev.

  At about the same time, perhaps on that very same March evening in 1943, Moshe and Solia sat waiting with her parents at their home in the hills of Sliven. No one knew what to pack, what to talk about, how to wait, how even to wonder where they were going. Moshe and Solia had been married three years earlier, in a simple ceremony in the Balkan synagogue in Sofia. Solia had stood with her raven black hair flowing over her shoulders; Moshe, nervous, serious, standing stiffly in his suit, held the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. The young couple had faced the rabbi and the holy ark. Their wedding had taken place just weeks before the anti-Jewish measures went into effect and Moshe was sent away to the labor camps. Now, on that March 1943 evening in Sliven, just beyond the Valley of the Roses, the family sat in silence.

  Sixty miles to the southwest, just before 3:00 A.M., Rabbi Behar led his family across Russian Boulevard and toward the Jewish school in Plovdiv. The streets were empty. Presently the school, and its black iron fence surrounding an empty courtyard, came into view. Rabbi Behar and his wife walked through the gate, followed by Susannah, her brother, and the two policemen. The family passed the first cold hour alone in the courtyard. Then, just as the rabbi had predicted, other Jewish families shuffled in, their arms filled with clothing, blankets, yellow cheese, and round loaves of black Bulgarian bread.

  Just after sunrise, Bishop Kiril's servant came back to tell the rabbi that the bishop was taking action. Kiril had sent a telegram to King Boris, "begging him in God's name to have pity on these unfortunate people." The bishop had also sent a message to the chief of police "that I, who until now had always been loyal towards the government, now reserved the right to act with a free hand on this matter and heed only the dictates of my conscience."

  By now, Kiril estimated, "between 1,500 and 1,600 Jews" had assembled in the Jewish school yard in Plovdiv. Other citizens of Plovdiv had learned of this and begun to gather outside the school in protest; now there were crowds on both sides of the fence. "There was widespread indignation among the public," Kiril reported.

  One eyewitness would recall Kiril himself showing up at the Jewish school that morning, saying, "My children, I will not let this happen to you. I will lie on the railroad tracks and will not let you go."

  Susannah does not recall this, but she does remember sneaking through a loose board in the back of the school yard outh
ouse to hatch a contingency plan with a friend: When the time came, she would be spirited away and taken to the Rhodope Mountains with the Partizans. She slipped back into the school yard to update her father on the plan. If the deportations seemed imminent, the rabbi and his daughter agreed, Susannah would escape to join the armed struggle against the pro-Fascist monarchy. Moshe's brother, Jacques, was already there.

  In Kyustendil, meanwhile, the town's Jews anxiously waited for news from the delegation that had left for the capital to meet with Dimitur Peshev, vice president of the parliament.

  Dimitur Peshev had a fondness for fine suits cut close to his sturdy frame; invariably, a clean white handkerchief poked out in a triangle from his breast pocket. He wore cuff links, and his hair was carefully combed back with oil.

  Peshev lived alone in a third-floor room above his sister's Sofia apartment. He was partial to backgammon and Voltaire. Often he would come downstairs in his fedora and buttoned-up suit coat to call on his two young nieces. Standing at the door in their lace-bordered dresses and party shoes, they would take their uncle's hand and walk with him to the neighborhood sweet shop.

  Dimitur Peshev had spent much time dreaming of "national ideals and universal human aspirations for something pure and sacred." He believed in parliamentary democracy. He considered the Bulgarian Nazi imitators, "spouting borrowed slogans" and marching about in their brown uniforms, as actors in "a grotesque and pathetic vaudeville."

  Yet Peshev was vice president of the parliament in a pro-Fascist government put in place by King Boris III. The young lawyer had grown disillusioned with the Socialists after witnessing the harsh rule of a peasant regime. He saw his accommodation to the Fascists as part of the reality of European geopolitics. In tying his future to the king's, and to Bulgaria's alliance with the Nazis, Peshev sought to ensure a measure of national sovereignty for Bulgaria. The country's relations with Germany were precarious; somehow, the nation had managed to remain unoccupied and had even recovered old pieces of the fatherland.

  Like the king, Peshev seemed to believe that in this dangerous balance, the nation's foreign policy required a nod to Hitler. Years later, he would recall his vote in favor of the Law for the Defense of the Nation, writing, "This sacrifice was made more palatable by the knowledge that the restrictions on the Jews, however painful, were nonetheless temporary and would not be taken to extremes." It was in this man's hands, more than anyone's, that the fate of the nation's Jews now rested.

  On the morning of March 9, Asen Suichmezov stood at a hat shop on a Sofia street and rang up Dimitur Peshev at home. Suichmezov and his three companions had arrived from Kyustendil the night before. Peshev invited the men to his house, where Suichmezov made Kyustendil's case, speaking through tears about the long lines of train cars at the railway station.

  In several previous meetings over recent weeks, the vice president of Bulgaria's national assembly had spent considerable time and energy explaining that there was no plan to deport the Jews. If there were, Dimitur Peshev had assured his worried visitors, surely he would know about it. By the morning of March 9, however, when Suichmezov and the others appeared before him, Peshev had begun to investigate. He had heard the deportation rumors from a close Jewish friend from Kyustendil. He had listened to a fellow parliamentarian describe the wrenching stories from Macedonia: "old people, men, women, and children, carrying their belongings, defeated, desperate, powerless people begging for help, dragging themselves towards some unknown destination . . . that could only be surmised, to a fate that conjured up everyone's darkest fears."

  In the days just before Suichmezov and the others arrived, Peshev had realized that the rumors he'd been hearing were true. At that point Dimitur Peshev—pro-royalist member of the assembly, leader of a parliament that endorsed the alliance with the Nazis, a man who had voted in favor of harsh restrictions against the nation's Jews—faced a choice. It was, perhaps, the most important moment in the complex and fragile narrative that would mark Bulgaria's history as forever distinct from the rest of Europe's.

  "I could not remain passive," Dimitur Peshev decided. "My conscience and understanding of the grave consequences both for the people involved and for my country did not allow it. It was then I made the decision to do everything in my power to prevent the execution of a plan that was going to compromise Bulgaria in the eyes of the world and brand it with a mark of shame that it did not deserve."

  Peshev told the men to meet him at his office in the parliament that afternoon at 3:00 P.M. It was imperative to try to meet with the prime minister.

  The men met again that afternoon in the parliament building. The prime minister, however, refused to see Peshev and the Kyustendil delegation. The deportation order remained in place. It was now late on the afternoon of March 9; the hour for the deportations was growing closer. With few options left, Peshev played his strongest remaining card. He demanded a meeting with the interior minister, Petur Gabrovski.

  Within minutes, Peshev, Suichmezov, and eight other men—including fellow members of Parliament and, according to some accounts, several Jewish leaders in Sofia—strode into Gabrovski's office. The men confronted the minister with the scenes from Kyustendil. Gabrovski denied knowledge of what they knew to be true. Peshev, however, would recall that the interior minister seemed tense and nervous. The men pressed him, and again Gabrovski denied any knowledge of the deportations. At that point, someone in the delegation asked about the Dannecker-Belev Agreement—the German-Bulgarian document that laid out the secret plans in detail, down to the train wagons and deportation centers. How, the men wanted to know, could the interior minister not know about that?

  Gabrovski lay trapped by his own denials. Either he didn't know what was happening in his own ministry or, far more likely, he was lying. Or, Peshev would charitably recount, "he was speaking in the kinds of platitudes one might use to extricate oneself from an awkward situation. . . ."

  It was late afternoon. In just over an hour, the parliament would convene an evening session. Peshev and his fellow MPs in the meeting had made it clear they were prepared to use the session to denounce the secret deportations; if that happened, a national scandal would erupt. This was a crucial difference between Nazi-occupied countries elsewhere in Europe and the quasi-sovereign Axis nation of Bulgaria: There was still some room to maneuver. Dissenters in Bulgaria would not be shot on sight.

  Peshev and the others waited for a response from the interior minister. Finally, Gabrovski stood up and left the room—perhaps to speak to the prime minister. When he returned he announced that the deportation order could not be revoked but that its execution could be suspended—temporarily. Peshev called Miltenov, the Kyustendil governor, and told him of the suspension. Other representatives began calling their home districts to repeat the news, while pressing Gabrovski to make his own official calls. The interior minister ordered his secretary to telegram each Bulgarian city where the deportation orders were active.

  Evidence would later suggest that King Boris approved the suspensions. A document from the Gestapo official in Sofia to German authorities in Berlin attributed the decision to suspend the deportations to "the highest level." Yet Gabrovski—and therefore, perhaps, Boris—insisted the suspension would be only temporary. Boris was adamant that the orders for the 11,300 Jews of the "new lands" of Macedonia and Thrace would not be affected. Their deportation would continue. While the king apparently agreed, at least temporarily, to give Bulgaria's 47,000 Jews a chance to live, the Jews from Macedonia and Thrace perished under his watch.

  Moments after the meeting with Gabrovski, in the hallway outside the interior ministry, Peshev turned to the leather shop owner and coat maker from Kyustendil. "Suichmezov, shake my hand," Peshev said. "The deportation of the Jews has been stopped. You can phone Kyustendil immediately and tell them the news."

  Suichmezov left the assembly building with the rest of the Kyustendil delegation. At the back door they encountered a group of Jews crowded around the entrance. "
God bless you, Asen!" exclaimed a young man from Kyustendil. Moments later, as they walked toward a liquor store to phone Kyustendil, another man approached. His name was Colonel Avram Tadger, a Jewish veteran of two Bulgarian wars who was forced out of the Union of Reserve Officers by the Law for the Defense of the Nation. "Which one of you is Asen Suichmezov?" the colonel asked. Suichmezov spoke up; Colonel Tadger seized the coat maker's hand and began to cry. "I have come to shake your hand," the veteran exclaimed. "Bravo for your courage!"

  The Jewish school yard in Plovdiv and the adjacent high-walled gymnasium were packed with hundreds of Jews, surrounded by their flimsy suitcases and cloth sacks jammed with clothes. It was the late morning of March 10; the order to suspend the deportation had still not been delivered to the authorities. Throngs of people were standing outside the fence, shouting, pledging not to let the Jews go.

  Susannah Behar would recall the terror she experienced when the police demanded quiet to make an announcement. They ordered all the Jews to line up. Susannah believed it was almost time to escape to join the Partizans; the deportations would now begin.

  Instead, the police told everyone to go home.

  The physical sensation of relief at that moment—for the Behars in the school yard and the Barouhs and the Confortys in Kyustendil and the Eshkenazis waiting for news in Sliven—would be recalled, sixty years later, as something beyond description.

  By afternoon, the Jews of Plovdiv were home. Many found that their houses, left unlocked in the rush to leave, were untouched—watched over by worried neighbors.