History of The Jews in The Republic of Macedonia - World War II and The Holocaust

World War II and The Holocaust

In March 1941 Bulgaria became an ally of the Axis Powers and in April 1941 the Bulgarian army entered Vardar Macedonia, in a strive to recover the region, which it saw as a natural part of its own national homeland. Ever since its independence movement began in late 19th century, Macedonia had been trying to get free from Turkish (and later Serb) rule, either as an independent state or as part of Bulgaria proper.

Although Bulgaria had effectively occupied the region, German authorities, who were in charge, recognised only the Bulgarian military administration and not the civil one. The Bulgarian occupational zone included neither Thessaloniki, with its over 55,000 Jews, nor the Western-most part of Macedonia, including the towns of Debar, Struga, and Tetovo, which were part of Italian-occupied Albania. On October 4, 1941, the Bulgarian authorities enacted a law prohibiting Jews from engaging in any form of commerce, and forcing them to sell their businesses to non-Jews. However, such laws were not a novelty for the region since the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had had its own anti-Semitic law enacted as early as 1939. The Bulgarians then ghettoized the Jews of Bitola, forcing them to move from the Jewish areas of the town, which were relatively affluent, to poorer areas of the town.

Bulgarian authorities had already adopted an antisemitic law called "Law on Protection of the Nation" back in January 1941. Over the course of 1942, they enacted increasingly harsh measures against the Jews under their control in Vardar Macedonia, as well as in occupied northern Greece, culminating in 1943 with the deportation on German request of Macedonian and Greek Jewry to the Bulgarian border on the river Danube. From there they were transported with German boats and trains to the extermination camp Treblinka set up by the Nazis in Poland.

Many Jews joined the partisan liberation movement in Yugoslavia. In Macedonia, Haim Estreya Ovadya, a Jewish woman from Bitola, was among the first women to join the partisan movement in 1941.

The day before the deportations, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Macedonia gave the Jewish community advance warning of the deportation. Shelters were organized, as well as connections to the partisan units, but unfortunately, few Jews believed that a program for their destruction was underway and chose to stay together in the ghettos instead. In contrast with the old Bulgarian territories, where widespread protests against the deportations took place, including petitions to the Sofia government, in Macedonia such organized movements were lacking. In the early morning of Thursday, March 11, 1943 Bulgarian police monitored by SS, rounded up the entire Jewish population of Skopje, Bitola and Štip The population was sent to temporary detention center in the state tobacco warehouse known as "Monopol" in Skopje. Among 7,215 people who were detained in warehouses there were:

• 539 children less that 3 years old,
• 602 children age 3 to 10 years
• 1172 children age 10 to 16 years
• 865 people over 60 years old
• 250 seriously ill persons (tied to the bed)
• 4 pregnant women who have given birth in the detention camp.
• 4 people died at the arrival in the camp.

The Bulgarian government asked for a breakdown of the German plans for the eventual deportees, and was told that roughly one-half will be employed in agriculture in Greater Germany and one-fourth, reported to be semi-skilled laborers, will be "allowed to redeem themselves" by "volunteering to work" in the war industries of the Ruhr, while the remaining one-fourth will be transported to the Gouvernement General (German-occupied Poland) for employment in "work directly connected to the war". This information was also distributed to the neutral countries via German diplomatic channels and was reported on March 24, 1943 in the New York Times from Berne, Switzerland, along with the rather cynical statement that "the former death rate in the Jewish colonies of occupied Poland has shown a considerable decrease in the past three months", with the listed reason being that "now many of the male Jews are employed in army work near the fighting zones", and these receive approximately the same rations as German soldiers.

Regardless of these misleading reassurances, Bulgaria defended Jews with Bulgarian citizenship from Nazi deportation orders. Hesitant to the German requests to deport non-Bulgarian Jews, in late 1942 and early 1943 the Bulgarian government utilized Swiss diplomatic channels to inquire whether possible deportations of these Jews can happen to British-controlled Palestine by ships from the Black Sea rather than to concentration camps by trains, about which rumors of mistreatment spread, and for which the Germans requested a significant amount of money. However, this attempt was blocked by the British Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden. After this failure, the Bulgarian government finally succumbed to German requests to transport non-Bulgarian Jews to its border on the river Danube, surrendering them to the Nazi German authorities and to their deaths. Thus, the Jewish communities of Bulgarian-controlled Yugoslavia and Greece were almost completely wiped out. There was much harsh treatment before being transported in German cattle-cars to Treblinka. A few dozen Bitola Jews managed to avoid deportation, and four escaped from the transit camp; none of the 3,276 Jews of Bitola deported to Treblinka survived. In 2003, one Jew remained in the city that had been home to a Sephardic community for more than 400 years. Štip's ancient Jewish community was also completely destroyed.

After liberation of Vardar Macedonia in 1944, total number of surviving Jews, according to Society of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia, was 419. Some sources state that the remnants of the Jewish community re-gathered in Belgrade, Serbia and only about 140 had survived. Most had survived by going into hiding or fighting with the Yugoslav, Jewish partisans. Of those transported to the death camps, nobody survived. Most survivors chose to immigrate to Israel, with some returning to Macedonia, and others remaining in Serbia. As a result of this the number of Jews living in Macedonia drop down to 81 in 1952.