World War II Remembered

Flight from Bulgaria

252 Flight from Bulgaria • Joan Bliss Wilson My father’s family had been involved in the Middle East ever since my great grandfather went to Syria as a missionary in 1856. Ten years later, in 1866, he founded the American University of Beirut. His name was Daniel Bliss and he was the first president of the University . His son, Howard Bliss, was the second. My father, Huntington Bliss, Howard’s son, was born and grew up in Beirut. After graduating from Amherst College, he taught at the St. Louis Country Day School in Clayton, a suburb of St. Louis, but, like others in the Bliss family, he wanted to continue in the family tradition of teaching in the Middle East. He was therefore delighted to be offered the opportunity to teach at the American College in Sofia, Bulgaria. It was 1938 when he took his wife and three daughters to Bulgaria. I was seven years old, and my two sisters were younger still. We sailed from New York on the Italian luxury liner Conte de Savoya. For me the most memorable happening on the ship was the movie The Chocolate Soldier. It was a musical, and my favorite song In this family photo, Joan is seated on right Flight from Bulgaria: Joan Bliss Wilson 253 from it was “My Hero.” I loved it so much that I learned to play it on the piano, and I still play it today. The only stop on that trip that I remember was at Naples, Italy, where we visited the ruins of Pompeii. Our house in Bulgaria was on the edge of the campus, which was surrounded by a fence. Outside the fence was a field, and in the distance we could see Bulgaria’s capital city, Sofia. After the War in Europe began in 1939, we watched the Bulgarian soldiers training in the field. Our new Chevrolet was taken from us that year to be used by a Bulgarian general, but otherwise our lives continued pretty much as usual. My first year in Bulgaria, I attended a German school in the city, but when we were car-less, I changed to the grade school on the campus attended by the employees’ children. It was a one-room schoolhouse with four grades and one teacher. There was one other student in my grade and perhaps 10 in the whole school. The language of instruction was Bulgarian, so by this time in my youthful academic career, I’d had first grade in English, German, and Bulgarian. The war activity seemed far away. Every morning my parents would listen to the 8:00 a.m. news on BBC radio, and I’d aim to get to breakfast about 8:15 a.m. so I could avoid hearing it. Initially the fighting was mostly in the western part of Europe. Hitler had invaded Russia in June 1940, and as time went on the German armies were getting closer and closer to Bulgaria Because the Bulgarians had seen what happened to Hungary and other countries in Europe when the German Blitzkrieg was launched against them, the Bulgarians capitulated without any fighting. In the spring of 1941, I remember going into Sofia and watching the German soldiers marching on their way south to attack Greece. Sofia was bombed twice. Once when it happened at 2:00 a.m., I thought it was thunder, but my father said it was bombing, and we went outside and watched from our back yard. We could see a few planes and hear the explosions , but it didn’t last long. I don’t believe there was much destruction , but it was frightening. I don’t know who was doing the bombing. There was a lot of talk among the adults after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the United States declared war on Japan, Germany, and Italy. I was unaware of any changes in our life until one day my parents told us that we were leaving to go back to the United States. It seems that all Americans had been given the option of going 254 World War II Remembered either to the States or to Istanbul, Turkey. A plan had been formulated to exchange Germans living in the United States for Americans living in Europe. Three round-trips were planned. Thirteen of us left Sofia in a sealed railroad car in May 1942, on the same...