In the course of March 1943, under an agreement between the Government of Bulgaria and its ally, Nazi Germany, 11,384 Jews were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp from areas that Bulgaria had occupied and annexed. When reports of the deporteesΓÇÖ fate spread among Jews in Bulgaria proper, Bulgarian and Macedonian public figures organized a mission that went to Sofia, protested the deportation fiercely, and threatened to spare no effort to prevent further deportations. The public tempest made the Government of Bulgaria hesitant about carrying out another deportation from Bulgarian territory. It decided on a different plan: the expulsion of 25,000 Jews from Sofia to provincial towns, as a preliminary stage in their deportation from Bulgaria. A notice to this effect was advertised on May 22. On May 24, Jews in Sofia demonstrated in the yard of the synagogue, and underground Communist groups organized a concurrent demonstration of non-Jewish Bulgarians. The police dispersed the demonstrations brutally and the expulsion order went into effect. However, the Jews were not sent from peripheral towns to the death camps. Evidently, although the Germans pressured Bulgaria to honor its agreement in this matter, the deportation was scuttled by order of King Boris of Bulgaria. Thus, in a rare combination of the kingΓÇÖs personal courage, political circumstances, and public resistance across a broad social and political spectrum, 50,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved.
