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science, not the least of which was the risk of displeasing the nation's
German allies. As official mistreatment of Bulgarian Jewry grew, how–
ever, supportive letters and speeches came from the lawyers' union, the
writers' union, the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church, and from indi–
vidual members of parliament, whose majority would have endorsed
deportation until King Boris made the practical (rather than righteous)
decision to postpone the action. As the German military situation dete–
riorated, he found no cause to reverse his position.
Not to be forgotten in this narrative of advocacy for the intended vic–
tims is the counter-narrative of loss, which includes the expulsion in
1939 of
4,000
Jews who were foreign nationals and the later deporta–
tion of more than
I L,OOO
Jews from the former provinces of Thrace and
Macedonia, which were restored to Bulgarian control by Nazi Germany
as recompense for cooperation in the Yugoslavian and Greek cam–
paigns. Few of them returned. There were protests in their behalf too,
but the King and his cabinet remained firm, dooming those Jews who
were not Bulgarian citizens. This example of collaboration leaves
behind a governmental image of besmirched virtue, one that Todorov
acknowledges without reflecting in any detail on how it might taint the
compensating "goodness" of saving native Jewry. Left unresolved is the
question of why the Germans didn't simply send in troops
to
overthrow
King Boris and install a more compliant regime, as they did in Hungary
in the spring of 1944. Because Bulgaria was not a terror state, the
defenders of legal, religious, and human values found forums for their
ideas, leaving a legacy of honor after the war, however qualified, that
few of their fellow nations could share.
And, after all, is this as remarkable as Todorov insists? When decent
people behave decently, do they do anything more than we expect them
to, or than they expect of themselves? Why are accounts of such behav–
ior during the Holocaust celebrated with passionate enthusiasm, as if
virtue were such a rare and fugitive trait during periods of extreme hard–
ship that its mere appearance deserved special recognition? A far more
disturbing issue is the moral failure during the Holocaust that led large
numbers of individuals in both public and private life to behave so inde–
cently. The heritage of dishonor that followed is a major focus of Adam
Nossiter's
Algeria Hotel: France, Memory, and the Second World War,
which, unlike Todorov's study, reconstructs in some of its chapters the
sources of a nation's shame, a passive collaboration with the enemy that,
according
to
the author, remains widely unacknowledged to this day.
Nossiter is less concerned with the history of the Vichy regime than
with contemporary memories of that time. The subjects he interviews
