"The Jews from Macedonia and the Holocaust" was an international research project realized by the (formerly known as: Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities "Euro-Balkan") Euro-Balkan University in Skopje, North Macedonia, at the Department for Cultural and Visual Research in 2010–2011. It was led by Prof. Dr. Sofija Grandakovska and it materialized in a chrestomathy and an exhibition with the same name.
Project
The project "The Jews from Macedonia and the Holocaust" was supported by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (Brussels) within the Action 4 Program and it followed the general subject Active European Remembrance aiming at preserving the sites and archives associated with deportations as well as the commemorating of victims of Nazism and Stalinism. The central subject of scientific interest was the destiny of 7,148 Jews from Macedonia murdered in 1943 in the gas chambers of Treblinka II (Poland), their culture and ontology, but also the complex discourse of the post-Holocaust theoretic thought. The aim was to initiate a serious academic discussion on the presence of the Jewish discourse as an inclusive factor in the establishment of the pre-Holocaust, the Holocaust and post-Holocaust historical and socio-cultural image of North Macedonia. The project developed with an interdisciplinary approach, with the involvement of experts from different fields.
Background
In April 1941, the Bulgarian army in alliance with Nazi Germany occupied Vardar Macedonia. On 11 March 1943, the Bulgarian authorities rounded up most of the local Jews and handed them over to the Germans, who transported them to the Treblinka extermination camp. They were gassed on arrival, and none are known to have survived. This had a devastating impact on the Macedonian Jewish communities. From an estimated antebellum population of almost 8000 Macedonian Jews, only a few hundred survived the war.
Further on, a combination of circumstances determined little awareness about the fate of those people. None of those sent to Treblinka are known to have survived to tell the story. After the war, Vardar Macedonia became again part of Yugoslavia, in its new iteration as the Communist Yugoslavia. The official line was of avoiding delving into the crimes of World War II, as they were considered to be capable of potentially destabilizing the internal inter-ethnic Yugoslav relations. This was to some extent relaxed in the Macedonian case, as the perpetrators were German and Bulgarian occupiers. Nevertheless, the mentioning and, even less, the study of the fate of the Macedonian Jews was minimal. Only the historian Aleksandar Matkovski published in 1958, 1962 and 1982 increasingly detailed accounts of the course of events. He made use of Yugoslav, as well as Bulgarian archival material available in Yugoslavia and described in detail the diplomatic, political and legal preparation of the deportation by Bulgarian authorities and their German allies, the personnel and the organization of the concentration camp for Jews in the Tobacco Factory in Skopje and the three transports by Bulgarian State Railway to Treblinka.
Matkovski's update of 1983, A History of the Jews in Macedonia, served as a blueprint for a document edition of 1,500 pages published in 1986 by the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, titled The Jews in Macedonia during the Second World War (1941-1945) (co-edited by Vera Vesković-Vangeli and Žamila Kolonomos). The archival basis of this collection are documents from Macedonian and other Yugoslav archives as well as document copies from Bulgarian, German and other European archives in the possession of Yugoslav archives. The same as for Aleksandar Matkovski, the editors did not have direct access to archives in neighboring Bulgaria. After the war, the Bulgarian authorities sought to promote the narrative of the "rescue" of the Bulgarian Jews from the "Old Kingdom", while avoiding the facts of the extermination in the occupied Vardar Macedonia, Western Thrace and the Pirot region.
For a long time, Matkovski's works and the 1986 collection of archival documents were the only significant studies about the fate of the Macedonian Jews in World War II. The 2010–2011 project aimed to expand the scope of research and the spectrum of interdisciplinary angles around this topic. Another aspect is that, unlike in the previous Communist period, the Bulgarian archives are open to scholars. The project itself was a rather singular event in an otherwise sparse scholarship on this topic.
Chrestomathy
The chrestomathy The Jews from Macedonia and the Holocaust: History, Theory, Culture [Евреите од Македонија и холокаустот: историја, теорија, култура] was published in 2011 by Sofija Grandakovska, as editor, author of the foreword and co-author. The book has an interdisciplinary and intertextual approach, it consists of fourteen original works, created by the authors for this publication and it is structured in three parts. It includes archival material that is of closer importance for the topic of the Holocaust in Macedonia as a result of the research process.
Synopsis
Sofija Grandakovska - Foreword: Homage on the Irony of Evil and on the Historical, Cultural and Theoretic Memory of the Holocaust
The foreword introduces an outline of the historical presence of the Jews in Macedonia, the genealogy of the structure of the Final Solution of the Jewish question in Europe, its implementation in Macedonia and the concept of personal testimony as a document of the passive Holocaust history. It further presents the structure and the interdisciplinary concept of the chrestomacy.
Section I: The Historical Narrative and Testimony as Passive History
1. Vera Vesković-Vangeli - Treblinka, Compilation of Documents On the Genocide of the Macedonian Jews in WW II
Vera Vesković-Vangeli introduces the historical presence of the Jews in Macedonia since the times of the Roman Empire and their participation in its pre-Holocaust history. Then, with a selection of 49 documents, she traces the path that let to their destruction: the laws of the occupying Bulgarian authorities regarding the liquidation of Jewish assets and a complete exclusion of the Jewish population from social and economic life, the specific law that turned the Jews from Vardar Macedonia into people without citizenship, the minutes of the discussions between the Nazis and the Bulgarian authorities regarding the fate of the Jews, the creation of a Commissariat for Jewish Affairs at the Ministry of Interior and Public Health, the appointment of the Bulgarian officials who ordered the extermination, the agreement between the Bulgarian and Nazi German authorities to "resettle" the Jews, the reports about the rounding-up and temporary encampment, the bills, notes and delivery police reports about the special trains from Skopje to Treblinka, the analysis stating that the deportation of Jews from Macedonia and Thrace was completed successfully, testimonies of non-Macedonian survivors and of staff members about Treblinka, investigations of the liberators at the site of the camp.
2. Marija Pandevska - The Rescue of the Jews from (1941-1943): Options and Opportunities
Drawing from diaries, statements, testimonies of those who escaped deportation and death in Treblinka, Marija Pandevska creates an analysis of the objective conditions and the practicability of the opportunities for rescue operations. The authorities sought to keep the plan secret, many Jews did not believe the rumors about the preparations, the testimonies say that they were assured by Bulgarian Archimandrite Stefan and Bulgarian Archbishop Filaret in Bitola that nothing would happen. A few young Jews involved in the resistance of the Macedonian branch of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the Resistance Movement in Macedonia heeded the warning and absconded. Some of them entered the Partisan units of Macedonia and continued to share the fate of the Macedonian Partisans. Some of them were killed in battles and others managed to survive until the country was liberated.
3. Jasminka Namicheva - Human Fate Clenched Between a Yellow Badge and a Paper Envelope – A Kaleidoscope of the Jewish Holocaust in Macedonia
Newly discovered paper envelopes issued by the Bulgarian National Bank for storing Jewish objects of value and declarations of the immovable and movable property testify to the anti-Semitic laws adopted by the Bulgarian occupier and their implementation in Macedonia. They also bring to light the destiny of twenty-eight Jews with foreign citizenship in Macedonia, thought to have been murdered in Treblinka. These new artifacts found in the period between 2007 and 2010, apart from being valuable from an historical aspect, provide the possibility for another deliberation in a different context, as museums objects. The museum approach towards the archive material related to the Holocaust in Macedonia would deepen the interdisciplinary approach with new forms of discussion within the field of museology and the Holocaust.
4. Liljana Panovska - On the Jewish Deportation From Thessaloniki in 1943 (According to the Testimony of Rafael Kamhi)
The study follows the personal testimony of Rafael Moshe Kamhi, a participant in the Ilinden Uprising and an eyewitness to the deportation of the Macedonian Jews from Thessaloniki in 1943. The document, written in the Macedonian dialect of the Thessaloniki region, consists of a panoramic cross-section of the Jewish neighborhoods in Thessaloniki, the course of the deportation and the destruction of spiritual and material values of the Jewish culture. One of the points of significance of the study is the historic approach towards personal testimony and its archival importance in conveying the past, the extent a personal testimony presents an important methodological tool for the historic factography.
5. Žamila Kolonomos - How did I Survive the Holocaust?
The primary attribute of the Final Solution was the secrecy and determination of the perpetrators not to leave any trace of the crime, of personal or historic memory of it. Thus the narration of the Holocaust experience carries the structural element of resistance against oblivion, as a counterpoint for the knowledge of the murder of 7,148 Macedonian Jews, among who were the author's entire family. Žamila Kolonomos hailed from the Jewish community of Bitola and, shortly after the 1941 occupation, she joined the anti-fascist resistance. The personal testimony unfolds the increasingly unbearable situation of the Macedonian Jews, the warning of a leader of the Resistance to avoid staying at home around the days of the rumored deportation, the month spent in hiding in a tiny kiosk in the city, the escape to the partizans and the grueling life of guerrilla warfare, then in 1945, after the liberation, the news from those who escaped from the "Monopol Tobacco Warehouse" in Skopje about the horrors prior to the deportation by train to Treblinka.
Section II: How Culture Remembers?
6. Ivan Mikulčić - The Jews in Stobi
The section dedicated to the possibilities and forms of remembering the Jewish culture in Macedonia begins with an archeological study of the earliest Jewish community in Stobi. The layer of the Synagogue I, dating from the 2nd century CE, attests an economically powerful Jewish community. The excavations at the site called "House of Parthenius" indicate a rich house owner apparently keen on antique art, who commissioned art works according to his own artistic preferences. In fact, he managed to rescue parts of what was not destroyed by fanatic Christians at that time. Some specific details indicate he was a Jewish Samaritan. The author considers that the archeological artifacts are related to Joannes Stobaeus and that the library of the house was the place where he stored the manuscripts of the Greek authors, many of them thus saved from oblivion.