Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe

12. The Combined Legacies of the “Jewish Question” and the “Macedonian Question”

352 holly case 12. The Combined Legacies of the “Jewish Question” and the “Macedonian Question” The territory of Macedonia is contested and has a history of division. That history has colored the legacy of the Holocaust in the region, especially as it relates to state-building projects of the war itself, but also to those of the postwar and postcommunist periods. The events of the Holocaust in this region are bound—or have subsequently been linked in the narratives of historians, politicians, and cultural leaders —to the national aspirations and political systems of wartime and postwar Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Greece, Albania, and of the Macedonian autonomist movement and the drive for Macedonian independence. During the Second World War, the territory of Vardar Macedonia —corresponding roughly to the borders of the present-day republic of Macedonia—was annexed to Bulgaria. Other areas of “historic” Macedonia, including parts of present-day Albania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Serbia, and Greece, came under German, Bulgarian, or AlbanianItalian occupation.1 Given its prominence and size, I have chosen to focus here on Vardar Macedonia and the legacy of the Holocaust within the framework of Yugoslav/Macedonian and Bulgarian historiography and commemoration. The “Jewish Question” and the “Macedonian Question” Prior to the war, the Jews of Macedonia, who were overwhelmingly Sephardic, numbered 7,762. In all, Macedonian Jews constituted about one-tenth of the Jewish population of interwar Yugoslavia. There are varying timelines and ways of linking the events of the Macedonian Jews’ ultimate deportation to the death camp in Treblinka, which took 12. Combined Legacies 353 place in late March and early April of 1943. One of these was offered by the most prominent postwar historian of the Holocaust in Macedonia , the Macedonian historian Aleksandar Matkovski, who saw the beginnings of wartime persecution patterns in the policies and attitude toward the Jews in Yugoslavia’s interwar Cvetkoviü-Maþek government. Already in 1939, Matkovski noted, this government implemented restrictive legislation, requiring Jews who had arrived in Yugoslavia after 1935 to leave the country. Matkovski thus cast this period as part of a continuum of persecution, arguing that “all these measures caused concern among the Jews who rightly feared that they were a prelude to disaster.”2 Most historians, however, begin the history of the Holocaust of Macedonian Jewry with the arrival of German and Bulgarian troops and administration to the region in the spring of 1941.3 What is evident in all the historiography is that the Macedonian question—or the matter of which state or regime could make a just claim to the territory of Macedonia—and the legacy of the Holocaust are inextricably entwined. Even before Macedonia and Thrace were reannexed to Bulgaria in the spring of 1941, the Macedonian and the Jewish questions were seen by many as interrelated, especially as they related to the issue of minority rights protection. With the exception of Alexander StamboliƱski, Bulgarian leaders of the interwar period shared a common preoccupation with the perceived injustices of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest, and the 1919 Treaty of Neuilly, specifically the territorial losses they entailed. In accordance with the Treaty of Neuilly, Bulgaria was required to relinquish territory to neighboring Greece and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). Some radicalized refugees from these territories joined the so-called Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, which planned and executed political assassinations of high-profile figures in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia to further its platform of autonomy for Macedonia. During the interwar period, Bulgarian leaders and diplomats appealed to the League of Nations to intervene in matters relating to the perceived persecution and denationalization of Bulgarians in the lost territories, most notably in Macedonia. Yet Yugoslav diplo- 354 case mats denied the existence of a Bulgarian minority, claiming all Slavs in Macedonia were Serbs. In response to a December 1929 petition submitted by a group of Macedonian elites, the Yugoslav government stated its position as follows: “Because the Slavic population of southern Serbia is not a minority from the standpoint of language, race, or religion and cannot be differentiated from the other Serbs of the Kingdom, it does not enjoy minority protection.”4 The legacy of minority rights intervention had implications for how Bulgarian political circles understood the “Jewish question.” Bulgarian concern for the fate of their presumed conationals in Yugoslav Macedonia would later surface during discussions of the Law for the...