There is an argument offered by some postwar Balkan historians that has gone largely unnoticed and needs to be revisited. The argument goes like this: The Jewish Question of the early 19th century and the Macedonian Question go hand in hand.The Jewish Question dealt with a community’s right and centuries long struggle to survive in Europe as a separate but equal community, resisting cultural and religious discrimination, forced assimilation, and finally near elimination by a determined 20th century power. The Macedonian Question of the latter 19th century concerned the territorial right of self-determination of a Slav speaking region’s right to resist their neighbors who, in the first half of the 20th century, rejected Macedonian identity, language, and culture (Greece, fascist Bulgaria, Yugoslavian Serbia) and imposed their national identity on the neighboring Macedonian region by armed intervention and denial of civil rights in order to eliminate their communities.
To explore this question this project will examine the organization, processes and post-war politics of the Holocaust conducted in the Vardar region of what today is North Macedonia as a case study. This dissertation further seeks to show how the intersecting history and politics of the Holocaust in the Vardar region of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia from 1941-1944 provided a foundation for exploring broader questions of post-Yugoslav Macedonian national identity. The case study focuses on Vardar Macedonia, examining how modern Macedonian history is uniquely woven into the overlapping narratives of Bulgarian, Yugoslav, and Partisan historiography, all of which are closely connected to the succeeding Macedonian state sponsored Holocaust memory.
The Vardar is one of four historical Macedonian regions, along with, Pirin (bordering western central Bulgaria), Pelagonia, named for the ancient kingdom bordering northwestern Greece and northeastern Albania and, Aegean Macedonia, located in the north and northeastern Greece, bordering southwestern Bulgaria. The Vardar region is named for the river identified in the Iliad by Homer flowing from the northwest to the southeast of Macedonia into Greece and the Aegean Sea. Vardar Macedonia had been occupied by the Kingdoms of Serbia since 1918 and by Yugoslavia until 1941. Vardar Macedonia was then invaded and subjected to military occupation by the Bulgarian Army in concert with German forces defeating Yugoslav forces during the first two weeks in April. The Bulgarian Army secured the Wehrmacht’s rear area lines of communication through Macedonia as German combat troops pushed southward in its conquest of Greece.
During the post-war period, Balkan, Macedonian, and Holocaust historians have written that Sofia sought guarantees from Berlin in 1943 to not be required to deport its own 48,000 Jewish citizens from within its “old territories” by orchestrating the near-total deportation and extermination of Jewish populations from the “new territories” of Vardar and Aegean Macedonia that had been occupied by Bulgaria since 1941. When the Soviet Red Army installed the Bulgarian communist government, the deportations of nearly 11,000 Jewish Macedonians to save 48,000 Bulgarians were stylized as a “rescue.” However, Macedonian and Holocaust historians have questioned this long held “rescue” national narrative since the 1990’s. They point out that the “new territory” Vardar Jews denied Bulgarian citizenship and subjected them to two years of severe Berlin Decree style racial laws. They were subsequently, without warning, rounded up by Bulgarian police on 11 March 1943, and transported by the Bulgarian State Railway in Skopje to the Treblinka death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. Over ninety-eight per cent of the prewar Macedonian Jewish population were eliminated.
This study will explore along with the historiography the Bulgarian path to continue focus on the single dimension that the non-deportation of Jewish citizens within the “old territories” of Bulgaria had been “rescued” by the state. Since the end of the communist era, the “rescue” narrative has gone from the “official” to the dominant primary lens through which Bulgaria viewed its role in Holocaust history. Rescue has been viewed as pernicious as it has been persistent to the extent of surviving the delegitimized communist era and continues shaping the country’s popular historical memory even into the 21st century.
The study relies on qualitative research methodology and archival primary diplomatic and Macedonian Holocaust related documents found in the Yugoslav Archive in Belgrade. Macedonian published occupation rules and regulations, lists of the deported to Treblinka and personal data of many victims, including addresses that no longer exist, occupations and school records can be found in the Macedonian State Archive and the Office of the City Engineer in Skopje. The work will conduct a critical literature review of secondary histories, monographs and academic studies and translated academic Journal articles pertinent to the Holocaust on the Vardar, 1943. The work will use previously unknown or unused personal testimonies, letters, diaries and recorded interviews of witnesses of the Skopje deportations, accounts from partisan veterans, witness statements of the children of victims saved from the events on March 11, 1943. Data analysis also includes a number of recorded interviews also found in the Recordings and photo Archive at the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.
The study explores ways in which the memorialization of March 11, 1943, transformed the meaning of Jewishness and the Holocaust into a nationalist connection by offering a parallel continuity for the Macedonian autonomists and nationalists of the previous generations. This analysis requires a revisit of the uniquely Macedonian interpretation of the Yugoslavian tenet of “Brotherhood and Unity” used successfully by Tito when building and consolidating the Socialist Federal State of Yugoslavia. He demanded commemoration be that of collective “national sacrifice” during the war by the six member states where no one member state suffered more than another. Memory of the war was guided by veterans organizations of the Yugoslavian National Liberation Army which was the product of the union of the multiple anti-fascist Partisan groups who effectively fought the Nazi’s. However, post-war Macedonian interpretations stressed its unique “sacrifice” and had its own memory rubric. The cruel war fought in the mountains and the villages is seen as a uniquely national experience memorialized by the struggles of the people as Partisans with the tragic deportations of the Macedonian Jewish neighbors remembered as a state sponsored Day of National Remembrance, every 11th of March.
In the end, this work is also about how a particular understanding of Jewishness was reflected in a wider debate about national legitimacy. In particular, the Macedonian national understanding of their memory of War in the Balkans,1941-45 and the significant creation that emerged from that war. The symbol of the small bands of Partisan Macedonians served as a key element of the basis in the struggle for that legitimacy and the later formation of the multi-ethnic Socialist Republic of Macedonia on the basis of that understanding. Historians have rarely commented that the answer to the two 19th century questions would come to both communities in the form of statehood in 1948.