site.btaBulgarian Foreign Ministry Reacts to Russian Foreign Ministry's Allegations that Soviet Army Saved Bulgarian Jews

Sofia, November 3 (BTA) - "It is not the Soviet Army but the Bulgarian people who saved Bulgarian Jews," the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry said in a press release on Friday.

The Ministry reacted to a statement by Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova, who said during her briefing on Thursday that "during World War II our soldiers prevented the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria and thus saved some 50,000 people from unavoidable death." The remarks were prompted by the appearance on October 31 of a graffito on the Soviet Army Monument in Sofia reading "100 Years of Zionist Occupation". The inscription most probably referred to the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, by which the British Government for the first time announced support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. Zakharova said that "the desecrators [of the monument] do not have the slightest idea of their own history".

"While Bulgarian citizens stood on the tracks to stop the trains headed for the Nazi death camps, while members of the Bulgarian political, economic and intellectual elite wrote protest letters in defence of the Bulgarian Jews and Bulgarian Orthodox Church hierarchs joined the Jews summoned for deportation, stating that the compatriots would be taken to the camps only together with them, the Red Army was thousands of kilometres away from Bulgaria's borders," the statement of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry Press Centre said.

"Without underrating the significance and role of the Red Army for the liquidation of Nazism in Europe in the course of World War II, we insist on emphasizing that such attempts at supplanting historical facts do not further the universal human cause of combating the resurgence of anti-Semitism, racism and intolerance and categorically condemning neo-Nazism in its contemporary forms," the statement noted.

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs takes a consistent stand on the issue of the desecration of monuments, we condemn acts of intolerance and racism in all their forms and work with other institutions and law-enforcement authorities in Bulgaria to identify the perpetrators and hold them to account," the statement pointed out.