The other day the boys were bad-mouthing Bulgaria. They call that tiny Balkan nation an obedient little Communist thug-state. Whenever Moscow wanted some foul deed done, the KGB turned it over to the Bulgarians, who, the narrative continued, were good at murder, assassination and all kinds of treachery. They talked about the "poisoned umbrella tip" the Bulgarians had used to murder a man Moscow didn't like by "accidentally" jabbing him in the leg on a bridge in London one foggy night.
Oh, did the boys enjoy insulting Bulgaria, particularly Bulgaria's enthusiastic subservience to the Soviet Union! They laughed at the little Russian proverb that "The turkey isn't a bird, and Bulgaria isn't a foreign country." It rhymes in Russian (Indik nye ptitsa, a Bulgaria nye za granitsa).
Please refer anybody who trashes Bulgaria to me for a little "historical therapy." Bulgaria pulled off one of the greatest deceptions in World War II, that saved 50,000 lives and made asses out of the Nazis in the process. Too many good stories are ruined by over-verification, but not this one. I interviewed the king of Bulgaria twice chasing this story. That was King Simeon, son of wartime King Boris. But the most powerful verification to me was the reaction of a Bulgarian Communist diplomat when I congratulated his country for doing what now follows. I'll save that Communist diplomat's convincing quote for the end. Here's something few people know about Bulgaria.
During World War II, Bulgaria found itself on the wrong side. The Bulgarians were far from Nazis. They refused to declare war on the Soviet Union. The only way Hitler could enlist the Bulgarians was to promise them the return of territories lost in previous wars in Macedonia and Aegean Thrace. When Hitler ordered King Boris to deport his 50,000 Jews to death camps in Poland and Germany, King Boris was horrified. The Germans, Boris figured, were impossible to overpower. But, he thought, they might be easy to outwit.
Instead of taking a high moral stance, which would surely bring Nazi retaliation and occupation of Bulgaria, King Boris mobilized a device that later became the premise of a major Hollywood movie. Do you remember "The Sting" starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford? I'm sure they didn't steal the idea from King Boris, but there's an interesting connection. The plot of "The Sting" pinwheeled around a phony illegal betting parlor. They really did it right. There were all kinds of Runyonesque characters pretending to be hanging around making the betting parlor look real.
That doesn't tell you much about "The Sting," but the only important thing is, the betting parlor where everybody seemed to win big bucks at every race was a scam!
And King Boris planned a scam to save the Jews. As though the entire Bulgarian population were part of a football huddle with King Boris calling the plays, nobody squealed. The scam worked brilliantly. All of a sudden there sprung up phony work projects all over Bulgaria. And when the real Hitler-loving Jew-haters called, furiously demanding, "Your Jews! Where are your Jews? You haven't sent us one single shipment!" that was correct. And they never did!
Instead, Bulgarian leaders all the way down from King Boris himself would reply, "Gosh! Gee! We can't spare them yet! We need our Jews to harvest the rose crop, dredge the harbor at Varna, repair and install new rail lines and highways, repair electric grids – you name it!" And the Bulgarian "Freedom-Liars" pretended they were doing it.
Hitler demanded King Boris come to Germany and "explain" this sudden and mysterious inability to ship Bulgarian Jews to Germany. By that time, however, the war was going so badly for the Nazis that they were more concerned with saving their own lives than with taking the lives of Bulgaria's 50,000 Jews. The deception was a roaring success.
Officially there's no proof, but every Bulgarian believes the courageous and imaginative King Boris was poisoned by order of Hitler. He died of mysterious complications soon after telling Hitler goodbye and heading back to Bulgaria.
Thus we now have another major story of World War II that nobody knows but is monumentally easy to prove. Bulgaria's phony "work projects" that saved the 50,000 joins the one about the Norwegian Merchant Marine, third-largest on earth, saved from the Nazis thanks to a phone call from the Norwegian ambassador in Washington to an almost unknown radio station in Massachusetts, and the one about the pro-Nazi government of Yugoslavia overthrown by the third-graders in Belgrade! That one is called the "Diaper Rebellion."
The crowning confirmation of this towering Bulgarian "good deed" came when I was introduced to the Bulgarian ambassador to the U.N. I congratulated him on Bulgarian's magnificent coup. Don't forget, here's a king officially hated by Bulgaria's post-war Communist diplomats. Instead of denying this bit of history and pooh-poohing the achievement of the pre-Communist Bulgarian regime, the Communist ambassador freely admitted King Boris's rescue operation.
But then he added, "Of course, you know the king was forced to do what he did by Bulgaria's working class!"
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