Bordering the Past: The Elusive Presences of the Holocaust in Socialist Macedonia and Socialist Bulgaria

Much public controversy has surrounded the discussion of the Holocaust in Bulgaria during the Second World War. Whilst about 48,000 Bulgarian Jews from Bulgaria (in its pre-1941 boundaries) were not deported and survived the war, an estimated 11,343 Jews in the territories of Yugoslavia and Greece occupied by Bulgaria in April 1941 were rounded up, deported and later exterminated. Key issues in these disputes over the past revolve around the pondering of Bulgaria and Germany’s respective responsibilities in the deportations, as well as the reasons behind the diverging fate of the Jews in the “old” and “new” kingdoms. In examining the historiography and memory policies relating to the Holocaust in Yugoslav Macedonia and Bulgaria, the present paper demonstrates that a similar reconsideration might also be warranted in Southeast Europe