Europe’s Jews and the Shoah

As a daughter of Holocaust survivors from Bulgaria, now living in the Netherlands, I feel very hurt by the article about the plans to make a movie glorifying Bulgarian King Boris (“Director hoping to fund a dream project about Bulgarian king,” CJNews.com).

Under the regime of Tsar Boris, hundreds of resistance fighters were killed “in the name of the king.” More than 100 of them were members of the Jewish resistance. My family was persecuted, not allowed to work, robbed, had almost no rights and was obliged to live in ghettos. The adults were not allowed to exit these ghettos and my mother, a child who was only eight years old, could only buy groceries during certain hours of the day. Their rations were so miserable that most of the children and the old people got severely ill.

Men were sent to forced labour camps. My father’s whole family, including his one-year-old niece and his 16-year-old brother were sent to such a camp near the town of Pleven. One night the camp was set on fire, the doors were locked and 10 Jews were burned alive. One of them was my uncle.
No Bulgarian Jewish organization in Bulgaria or in Israel has ever considered Boris to be our saviour or hero. Neither have Yad Vashem or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

My parents were saved despite the king, not thanks to him. He deported all the Jews from Macedonia and Thrace, which were occupied by Bulgaria (including my family members) and was planning to do the same with the Jews from the old territories. Only after tremendous pressure from the church, opposition leader Dimitar Peshev and prominent representatives of the intelligentsia, did the king reluctantly agree to postpone the deportations. Instead, he sent the Jews to the forced labour camps.

Lyna Degen
The Netherlands

Thank you to Lou Hoffer for sharing important memories from Shargorod (“An unforgettable moment,” letters to the editor, Dec. 7). I am also a survivor from that town, which is one of hundreds of concentration camps in Transnistria. The latter is a territory in southwestern Ukraine of about 41,000 square kilometres, where about 300,000 Jews, Gypsies and political undesirable persons had been deported from Romania in 1941 by the fascist government of Ion Antonescu.

My reason for writing is to let people know of another place that has been called Transnistria. This is how that came about: the former Romanian province of Bessarabia became the independent Republic of Moldova. However, in 1990, a group of separatists broke away and occupied a narrow strip of land in eastern Moldova, proclaiming its independence and calling it Transnistria. This can create lot of confusion. Therefore, if anyone wants information about Transnistria during the Holocaust, they must search “Transnistria during WWII”.

Felicia Carmelly
Toronto

The art of translation

We read with interest your review of the book, The Vale of Tears, by Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung (Dec. 7), an important and valued addition to our Holocaust literature. This book, which was written as a memoir in Yiddish, was translated into English by award-winning translator and Yiddish scholar Vivian Felsen.
The excellent quality of this translation has allowed for the wide accessibility of this work to the general public. Thus, we find the omission of any mention of the translator puzzling.

It is difficult enough to accomplish an accurate and meaningful translation from Yiddish to English because of the geographical nuances of the Yiddish language. However, in the case of The Vale of Tears, Felsen had to deal with biblical, chassidic and talmudic references, which required research and elaboration to produce an appropriate and accurate translation.

A translator’s art is not a simple rote project and surely involves a great deal of sensitivity, along with an extensive academic knowledge of her subject. The result, in this case, is a book that accurately reflects the author’s intent and makes available his experiences to the vast majority of Jews. The failure to acknowledge Felsen’s contribution was disappointing.

Edward and Anita Wein
Toronto