by Sandy Tolan
In the late afternoon, Bishop Kiril paid a visit to the rabbi's house. Susannah would remember him in his bishop's cap and silver-topped cane, embracing each one in the family before joining the rabbi for a private meeting in her father's study. As he walked toward the study, the bishop stopped and gazed at the rabbi's children. "The whole Bulgarian Orthodox Church," he promised, "will stand up for the Jews."
And so it did in the months to come. Metropolitan Stefan, the nation's top religious official, applied moral pressure on Boris, imploring the king "to demonstrate the compassion and lucidity incumbent" on his position "by defending the right to the freedom and human dignity that the Bulgarian people have always upheld by tradition and by temperament. . . . The wails and tears of these Bulgarian citizens of Jewish origin whose rights are being denied them," Bishop Stefan insisted, "are a legitimate protest against the injustice being done to them."
Dimitur Peshev, for his part, realized the authorities still intended to carry out the deportations. Perhaps, he reasoned, public exposure could shame the government. By March 17, Peshev had gathered forty-three signatures for a letter to the prime minister protesting the plan. "We cannot believe that the deportation of these people outside Bulgaria, as suggested by some evil-intentioned rumor, was planned by the Bulgarian government," the letter declared. "Such measure is unacceptable not only because these people of Bulgarian citizenship cannot be expelled outside Bulgaria, but because it would be disastrous and bring ominous consequences upon the country. It would inflict an undeserved stain on Bulgaria's honor. . . ."
Peshev's public rebuke of his own government's plan was unprecedented. He was a member of the pro-Fascist majority and supporter of the king and prime minister; yet in the midst of war, he defended a minority against the government's plan to deport them. Peshev would pay for his actions: Within days, the prime minister had him removed from his post as vice president of the parliament. Dimitur Peshev would never again hold public office.
Throughout the late spring of 1943, as the Nazis applied their own pressure on the king, Belev drew up new deportation plans—this time, Jews were to be shipped in barges along the Danube, on the country's northern border. Yet in the end the king, seeing a Germany weakened by its defeat in the battle of Stalingrad and speculating on the possible arrival of Russia or the Western allies in Bulgaria, wavered on the deportations. Instead, in late May he expelled all Jews from Sofia, dispersing them throughout the country, and stepped up the work of the labor camps. If this strategy was an attempt to placate the Nazis, it worked; soon, the Third Reich would be too distracted to worry about forty-seven thousand Bulgarian Jews.
On June 7, 1943, months after the Bulgarian drama played out in the school yard, the railway station, the parliament, and the streets, Germany's ambassador in Sofia sent a report to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. "I am firmly convinced that the Prime Minister and the government wish and strive for a final and radical solution to the Jewish problem," Adolf Beckerle wrote. "However, they are hindered by the mentality of the Bulgarian people, who lack the ideological enlightenment that we have."
In fact, King Boris's capitulation to such "ideological enlightenment" had cost the lives of more than 11,300 Jews from Bulgaria's annexed "new lands" of Macedonia and Thrace. Almost without exception, they were exterminated.
Yet it is also true that at the critical time, ordinary people—in Kyustendil, in Plovdiv, in Sofia, across the country—stood by the Jews of Bulgaria. As a result, the Jewish population of an entire nation did not perish in the gas chambers at Treblinka.
And so it was that Moshe and Solia Eshkenazi, when the war finally ended, began to piece their lives back together. After seven years of marriage, Solia became pregnant, and a girl named Daizy was born in the Bulgarian capital on December 2, 1947. (She would later change her name to Dalia.)
None of this would have happened without what the Bulgarian-French intellectual Tzvetan Todorov calls "the fragility of goodness": the intricate, delicate, unforeseeable weave of human action and historical events. If Liliana Panitsa and the others had not leaked the news of the deportations to their Jewish friends; if Asen Suichmezov and the Kyustendil delegation had not boarded the train for Sofia on the night of March 8; if Metropolitan Stefan and Bishop Kiril had followed Europe's Catholic Church and declined to speak out; if one hundred things had not happened, or had happened differently, it is possible that the deportation plan would have picked up momentum, that forty-seven thousand Bulgarian Jews, including Moshe and Solia Eshkenazi, would have perished at Treblinka, and that Dalia would have never been born.
But Dalia was born, on a cold December evening in Sofia. And like the tens of thousands of other Bulgarian Jews who later boarded ships to Palestine, and then Israel, she carried with her an extraordinary legacy.
Four
EXPULSION
ONE DAY IN late February 1942, as the drama surrounding Moshe and Solia Eshkenazi and the Bulgarian Jews began to play out a thousand miles to the north, a large contingent of the Khairi clan rode through the mountains of Palestine toward Hebron. It was ten days since the birth of the firstborn male child of Ahmad and Zakia and time for the aqiqa ceremony at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, named after the Prophet Abraham and known to the family as the Ibrahimi Mosque.
The baby, his parents, his six sisters, his great-uncle Sheikh Mustafa, and several dozen cousins, aunts, and uncles were packed into buses moving southeast on the narrow roads of Palestine. They rolled past the watermelon groves of Na'ani, just south of al-Ramla; past the village of Abu Shusha, with its tightly packed houses on the hill of Tall Jazar; past the cool, sweet springs of Imwas; past the stone minaret of Deir Aban, home of the finest wheat in all of Palestine; past the olive groves and sloping, rain-fed fields of Surif; and into al-Khalil, or Hebron, where the imam would be waiting at the mosque.
"A name should be prescribed for the child," the Prophet Mohammad had observed. "Its hair and all filth should be removed, and sacrifice should be performed on his behalf." At the ceremony inside the Mosque of Abraham, the patriarch of three great faiths, the imam spoke the baby's name: Bashir, Arabic for "good news" or "the bearer of good tidings."
His hair was cut and weighed; the family would give to the poor the value of that weight in gold. Sheep were slaughtered, and two-thirds of the meat would again be given to the poor. The clan had a feast with the rest.
"It was a big event," Bashir's sister Khanom remembered. She would turn six that year. "It was a great occasion."
Back in al-Ramla, the schoolteachers congratulated the Khairi girls on the arrival of their baby brother. At home, they doted on Bashir. As a toddler he would stand on a table, dressed in white trousers and white shoes, making impromptu speeches to his adoring older sisters. "He was handsome," his sister Nuha would recall. "Like King Farouk," the ruler of Egypt. "Hali snanekya Bashir, khalik la'imakya Bashirf the girls would sing when Zakia had prepared a dessert. "Sweeten your teeth, Bashir; oh, Bashir, may God keep you for your mother."
Bashir's great-uncle Sheikh Mustafa Khairi had been mayor for more than twenty years, and for him the tension of nationalist politics had given way to the headaches of rations and rising prices under the British wartime rule. The war economy had actually helped Palestine. The British used the territory as a massive staging area for the conflict in North Africa. Smooth asphalt roads began to replace the rutted dirt tracks of old Palestine. Work was plentiful, and Ahmad's furniture business was faring well.
In Africa and Europe, World War II had turned toward the Allies. Soviet troops had held out in the cold and defeated the Nazis in the battle of Stalingrad. Closer to Palestine, British troops, aided by many Jewish recruits, had driven Rommel out of North Africa and eliminated the prospect of a Nazi march toward Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
By the end of the war in 1945, Bashir had turned three and the battle for the future of Palestine had reawakened. A quarter million Jewish refugees flooded the Allied displaced persons camps in Europe, and tens of
thousands of Jews were smuggled out of the DP camps to Palestine by the Mossad, predecessor of the present-day Israeli spy agency. Most of this immigration was illegal under the British rule in Palestine. The authorities began to intercept boatloads of European Jews and intern them at Cyprus, off the coast of Lebanon. With its White Paper six years earlier, the British had imposed strict immigration limits in the face of the fears, demands, and rebellion of the Palestinian Arabs.
As the details of the atrocities in Europe began to emerge, however, the image of stateless, bedraggled Holocaust survivors in the Cyprus internment camps was seared into the mind of the Western public, and Britain was pressured to loosen its policy. U.S. president Harry Truman pressed Britain to allow one hundred thousand DPs into Palestine as soon as possible, and to abandon restrictions on land sales to Jews—measures sure to increase tensions with the Arabs of Palestine. Arabs argued that the Holocaust survivors could be settled elsewhere, including in the United States, which had imposed its own limits on settlement of European Jews. The Zionists, too, were intent on settling the refugees in Palestine, not anywhere else. In February 1947, when the ship Exodus arrived in Palestine's Haifa port, British authorities refused to bend their immigration limits, denying entry to the 4,500 Jewish refugees and forcing them to board other ships and return to Germany. A French newspaper called the ships a "floating Auschwitz." The incident shocked the Western world and deepened support for the Zionist movement.
The earlier cooperation between the British Empire and the Zionists had all but vanished, and like the leaders of the Arab Rebellion of the 1930s, Jewish leaders in Palestine wanted the British out. The Jewish Agency had been authorized by the British to create a "national home for the Jewish people." Now, nearly three decades later, the Jewish community in Palestine had grown into a potent economic and political force in the midst of its Arab neighbors and British overseer. It had even developed its own militia, the Haganah, which, in addition to the extremist militia groups Irgun and the Stern Gang, fought to expel the former benefactors. In July 1946, operatives of Irgun planted bombs in Jerusalem's King David Hotel, where the British housed their military and intelligence headquarters. The explosion killed more than eighty people. Tensions between the Haganah, controlled by David Ben-Gurion and the Mapai Party, and Irgun and the Stern Gang, led by future prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, sharpened ideological and tactical differences; these would continue for decades. Meanwhile, thousands of Jewish immigrants continued to pour into Palestine, oblivious to such tensions.
Yitzhak Yitzhaki, Solia's cousin, had arrived in Jerusalem from Bulgaria on New Year's Day 1945. He had come overland via the Orient Express from Istanbul, traveling through Damascus, where he encountered exotic oranges and bananas in abundance and was fitted for a new suit and shoes, paid for by his sponsor, the Jewish Agency of Palestine. He wrote home of a troubling encounter in the Damascus market with an Arab who pointed a knife at his own chest and said, "This is what they will do to you in Palestine." Yitzhaki arrived in Jerusalem to the sound of church bells and the sight of drunken British soldiers roaming the streets of the Holy City. He found work in a leather tanning factory, on construction sites, and in plowing Jewish fields with a pair of mules, before joining the Haganah for basic military training.
By 1947, the British had eighty-four thousand troops in Palestine who, according to a report by the British Colonial Office, "received no cooperation from the Jewish community." Despite their numbers, the troops "had proved insufficient to maintain law and order in the face of a campaign of terrorism waged by highly organised Jewish forces equipped with all the weapons of the modern infantryman. Communications were attacked throughout the country; Government buildings, military trains and places of entertainment frequented by Britons were blown up; and numbers of Britons, Arabs and moderate Jews were kidnapped or murdered. This wholesale terrorism has continued ever since."
British officials were under pressure at home to convert factories and revive the postwar domestic economy. The nation was at the end of a colonial era. It was on the verge of quitting India, and in February, British officials announced they would hand over the problem of Palestine to the newly formed United Nations. A UN fact-finding team arrived to investigate the roots of the struggle for Palestine. It was the eleventh such fact-finding body to come to the area since 1919.
That same month, Bashir turned five. He was known as a shy boy, frightened of dogs and strangers, unlike the most recent addition to the Khairi family, his mischievous younger brother, Bhajat, who always seemed to be getting into trouble. Bashir was more quiet and reserved. He liked to sit inside with his sister Nuha, one year older, gazing out the window at the railroad tracks for hours at a time as they waited for the Jaffa-to-jerusalem train. Nuha would recall many days in the flower garden at an al-Ramla park, where the family would bring sandwiches for picnics.
On their way to school, looking crisp in their matching uniforms, the children would notice the British soldiers in their khaki shorts and soft brown hats. The older girls, like Khanom, now eleven, began to understand the political context of the soldiers' presence in Palestine. "I remember one of my teachers," Khanom recalled. "She used to read us nationalist poetry, and she told us—perhaps she was not supposed to—about what was going on in the country."
By the fall of 1947, nearly everyone in Palestine was anxious about the UN investigation and how its recommendations could determine their future. There was talk about a division of Palestine into separate states for Arabs and Jews. Most Palestinian Arabs saw that as a potential catastrophe. No one could predict what would happen to the Arabs on the Jewish side of the partition; more important, they wanted one Palestine. Increasingly, Ahmad would discuss politics over coffee and arguileh (water pipe) at the diwan in the Khairi family compound, where the conversation would turn inevitably to the sorry state of the Palestinian Arab leadership.
The Arabs of Palestine were weaker and more fractured than ever. Thousands of men had been killed or wounded during the Arab Rebellion and tens of thousands imprisoned; the leader of the revolt, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the ex-mufti of Jerusalem, was in exile and his image permanently tainted in the West. The ex-mufti had taken up with the Nazis in Berlin, where he tried to mobilize Arab support for the Axis. To many Arabs in Palestine, the ex-mufti was still a nationalist hero fighting against the British and the Zionists, and they looked to him to deliver an independent state across the whole of Palestine and to defend them in the event of war. These would be extremely difficult tasks to perform, especially from exile.
Arabs inside Palestine competed for power in the ex-mufti's absence, but philosophical differences, personal rivalries, and profound mistrust prevented a unified leadership from emerging. Much of the friction had its roots in the Arab Rebellion. Nationalists, aligned with the ex-mufti, saw the elite or "notable" class as too willing to sell out Palestine to the Jews; for the notables, it was better to get something than nothing: Arabs had to accept the reality of the Zionists.
The surrounding Arab states, just emerging from colonial rule into fledgling independence, had their own agendas. Publicly, Arab governments proclaimed their support for the ex-mufti's goal of a single independent state in Palestine and pledged to send armies to defend the Palestinian Arabs if necessary. Privately, however, some Arab leaders harbored deep reservations about joining any future conflict and were wary of one another's territorial ambitions for Palestine. In November, Transjordan's King Abdullah met secretly with Zionist leaders along the Jordan River, and the two sides forged an agreement to essentially divide Palestine between them: The Jews would have their state, as outlined in the plan being discussed in the United Nations, and Abdullah would expand his desert kingdom to include land on the west bank of the Jordan River, on territory the UN was considering as an independent Arab state.
This gap between public pan-Arab unity and the hidden interests of individual leaders would prove significant in the months and years to come.
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The news from the United Nations in New York arrived in the early hours of November 30, 1947. It was after midnight in Palestine, still early in the evening in the United States. Ahmad may have been sitting over his water pipe and backgammon game at the diwan in the family compound. The family may have been at home, huddled around its large wooden radio, straining to listen through the static to the honey-voiced commentator Raji Sahyoun on Arab-run Radio Jerusalem. Bashir and the other young children were probably asleep.
Whatever the circumstances, the news itself would not be forgotten: On the recommendation of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, the UN General Assembly had voted, thirty-three states in favor, thirteen opposed, with ten abstaining, to partition Palestine into two separate states—one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. A UN minority report, which recommended a single state for Arabs and Jews, with a constitution respecting "human rights and fundamental freedoms without distinction as to race, sex, language or religions," was rejected.
Palestine was to be divided. After three decades of colonial rule, the British would leave on May 15, 1948. If all went according to plan, the Arab and Jewish states would be born on the same day.
The Khairis were in shock. Under the UN partition plan, their hometown of al-Ramla, along with neighboring Lydda and the coastal city of Jaffa, was to become part of an Arab Palestinian state. The plan stipulated that 54.5 percent of Palestine and more than 80 percent of its cultivated citrus and grain plantations would go to a Jewish state. Jews represented about one-third of the population and owned 7 percent of the land. Most Arabs would not accept the partition.
If the partition plan went forward, al-Ramla would lie only a few kilometers from the new Jewish state. At least, Bashir's parents thought, it could have been worse; under the UN plan, the family would not be strangers on its own land. Still, what would happen to the Arabs in what was now to be Jewish territory? The partition would place more than four hundred thousand Arabs in the new Jewish state, making them a 45 percent minority amid half a million Jews.
