site.btaAtanassov’s List: Daring to Oppose

115 years ago Tuesday, a remarkable man was born – Boyan Vassilev Atanassov. In 1940, as a second secretary of the Bulgarian consular office in France, he accommodated tens of Bulgarian Jews in the legation building in Paris and organized their transport to Sofia.

His efforts offer an illustration of human potential to oppose the world’s evil – not impulsively, but consciously and deliberately. And that at a time characterized with “the appalling silence and the indifference of the good people,” to use Martin Luther King wording.

Boyan Atanassov (August 21, 1909 – November 24, 1997) was the son of General Vasil Atanasov, and graduated in law from Sofia University. He entered foreign service in 1936 and worked in London, Paris, Lisbon and Washington.

His story was included in the special exhibit at UN headquarters in New York in April 2000, honoring diplomats from 24 countries who took extraordinary steps to save Jews from Nazi concentration camps. The exhibit said his was “one of the newly discovered cases of diplomatic heroism.” 

Understanding the context is of key importance for the narrative. In 1940 Atanasov acted in German-occupied France (not the territory of the semi-independent Vichy regime). The anti-Jewish policy of the Nazis was in full swing, French Jews were being persecuted, and the official position of the Bulgarian government was that the Bulgarian Jews whom the war had found abroad could be treated as local Jews.

Without authorization from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sofia, without the knowledge of the Bulgarian ambassador in France at the time, Nikola Balabanov, Atanasov accommodated a group of Jews in the legation building in Paris and organized their transport to Bulgaria with three railway cars hired by the German occupation authorities. The group included Bulgarian volunteers who had fought on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and were persecuted by the Franco regime in Spain. They had fled from Spain, but found Nazi-occupied France a dangerous place and were already desperate to leave France.

Many of these people found refuge in the Bulgarian consulate in Paris, by the explicit consent of Atanassov. The group had to rely on the display of Bulgarian colors (made from pieces of white, green and red paper glued on the front door by the consular chancellor) with the words “Bulgarisches Eigentum” (i.e., Bulgarian Property). “But it was a very feeble protection against the Gestapo men. I was afraid they may be taken away every moment,” said Atanassov.

“Atanassov’s List” is not a metaphor alluding to the famous Spielberg movie. The list exists, it is to be found in the Central State archive. 

Atanassov himself prepared the three-pages typewritten list of travelers, putting Bulgarian names on the top. He personally provided the necessary papers and laissez passer for crossing the borders of several European countries. He personally signed the obligation to pay the transport cost of 33,000 Reichsmarks, aiming to speed the procedure - and to avoid the case being discussed on higher level in Berlin or Sofia.

A loyal servant, he phoned Ambassador Balabanov – but only after personally seeing the group to the station. “Atanassov, you’ll be dismissed by telegram, and you will pay your whole life this sum…”, was the frustrated Ambassador’s reaction. 

Balabanov refused to take any responsibility for the legation secretary's actions. And Atanassov knew well what he was doing. “I broke the Bulgarian laws in order to obey higher law,” Atanassov would say decades later. “I think I did a good deed. And God will forgive me!”1)

The above quotes are from an interview revealing many details about how the operation was carried out: Atanassov’s conversations with German railway and military authorities (“for two weeks they sent us from one office to another, like a ping-pong ball”); an obligation signed “with indelible pencil” to pay 33,000 Reichsmarks, a sum he was in no position to dispose; Atanassov’s argument with a German official who suggested the Jewish names to be scratched out as a condition to give his permission; an argument on whether the case was subject to German or to Bulgarian laws…

This interview, conducted on September 22, 1993 by Roy and Anne Freed for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, does not cover the period after 1950, when Atanassov service ended. He came back to Bulgaria and his family was plunged in dire financial straits forcing the experienced diplomat to take up hard physical labour jobs. The man who had saved so many lives of Spanish Republicans and Jews, was sent into penury.

The fact of the matter was that Atanassov’s fate was not the worst. Out of the 43 MPs of the 25th Bulgarian National Assembly who had signed Dimitar Peshev’s “Letter of Honor” of March 17, 1943 against the deportation of Bulgarian Jews to the nazi death camps, twenty were executed after September 9, 1944; and the rest, including Peshev himself, sentenced to different terms of imprisonment. 

What Atanassov did was not recognized by the communist, nor made public in any way, but he was left free to accommodate himself to the new environment - which was not particularly friendly. “He didn’t take this as a tragedy… I saw it in such a way, but not he”, his son Bogdan said.

Luckily, Atanassov was in command of several languages: English, French, Portuguese, German. And, like his wife Teodora Hadzhimisheva, he was able to work as translator: Jorge Amado, Hemingway, Daniel Defoe, William Faulkner, Voltaire… 

Almost unknown in Bulgaria, his deed was recognized abroad: in March 2000, trees were planted in Israel in memory of Boyan Atanassov for his humanity and rescue of scores of Jews during World War II.