site.btaLondon Exhibition Shows How European Jews Used Bulgarian Route to Escape Holocaust

A documentary exhibition occasioned by the 80th anniversary of the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews during the Holocaust opened at the Bulgarian Embassy in London, Ambassador Marin Raykov told BTA on Tuesday. The exhibition, titled Let My People Go, commemorates the saving of Jewish people who were foreign (non-Bulgarian) citizens but used the so-called Bulgarian escape route during World War II.

Many of the documents on display are from archives in Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Israel, and this is the first time that they have reached the public. Dozens of ambassadors of EU member states and Western Balkan countries, diplomats, cultural and public figures in London learned about the documented historical facts and commented with interest on the role of Bulgarian government institutions and the use of diplomatic telegrammes, transit visas, Nansen passports and Bulgarian-flagged ships to assist the escape of Jews from Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Germany, Hungary and Romania to Palestine.

Ambassador Raykov said in a speech: "Although Bulgaria was an ally of the Third Reich, we did not send a single Jew to the death camps and a single soldier to the Eastern Front. Nowadays, with a wave of anti-Semitism sweeping across large European cities, it is incumbent on us to remind people that 80 years ago a state and its people, acting in full unison, found a way to resist evil in the most tragic time for European Jews. Together, they set standards of dignity, humaneness and care for the distressed."

The exhibition at the Bulgarian Embassy in London will be on throughout November. It is a joint initiative of the Institute for Historical Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the Independent Society of History and the Bulgarian Memory Foundation. Ambassador Raykov has provided his auspices for the show.