I was born in Jaffa 10 years after the end of the war to a family from Sofia, Bulgaria. My family, like many in the Balkans, was originally from Spain.
When I was young, Jews from southeast Europe weren't mentioned in a single text about the Holocaust. We didn't know that our parents, too, were survivors, and possibly heroes.
When I asked my mother what had happened there during the war, she tended to brush me off by saying, "We were deported to Ruse (a town at the border of Bulgaria) and I was always hungry, but we weren't in camps." In other words, there is a hierarchy of suffering and Holocaust stories.
The response of my mother, who was a girl during the war, is an expression of the trauma of the Israeli perception of the 1950s and 60s – anyone who wasn't in Auschwitz wasn't considered a survivor. The Holocaust was identified as Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Treblinka.
Who knew names like Transnistria (Romania), Logor Jasenovac (Croatia), Dakovo (Croatia, designated for women and children), Sajmiste and Banjica (Belgrade), Rab (Yugoslavia), Drancy and Gurs (France), Westerbork, Amersfoort, Vught (the Netherlands), Mauthausen (Austria), or Somovit in Bulgaria?
We spent our childhood among the mythic, inconceivable number "6 million," the terms Sabra [native-born Israeli] and "the first generation of the redemption." We looked ahead to the founding of the Jewish state and the development of the ethos of Israeli heroism. So places from which no witnesses were left were forgotten.
Murders that were less dramatic than death in a gas chamber or a massacre vanished or were marginalized. We never heard about entire communities being deported, or Jewish men being sent to labor camps, anywhere but in family stories.
The Jews of the Balkans, which included Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey, were never mentioned. They were swallowed up by the mythic event.
At the beginning of March 1943, at 5 a.m., 7,123 Macedonian Jews from Skopje, Bitola, Stip, and Pirot were rounded up by the Bulgarian police. Men, women, and children were sent by freight train to the Monopol cigarette factory in the heart of Skopje. They remained there, without food, water, or toilet facilities for a few days. On March 11, they were put back on the train and sent to Treblinka. There were no survivors or witnesses who would tell the story of the life and death of the ancient community. Only the cemetery remains.
This March 11, the first Israeli delegation will depart for Skopje and Monastir in Macedonia. Thousands of residents of Macedonia will join them in a show of identification and recognition. As part of this March of the Living, participants will lay wreaths at the monument to the Jews of Macedonia, and a ceremony will be held at the ancient Jewish cemetery in Bitola, whose first grave dates back to 1497 and whose last grave, from 1943, bears silent witness. The March of the Living is the culmination of a two-way process. The states that comprised the former Yugoslavia have won their independence and are seeking their identity and discovering the part Jews played in the fabric of life there.
At the same time, second and third-generation youth are heading off to seek their family roots in the Balkans. The March of the Living in Macedonia will smash the silence that surrounds the life and death of Sephardi Jewry in Europe, and from here on out, people will once again ask questions, take an interest, and work on research.
