School Principal: Today Bulgarians Prove Again They Can Help People in Need Regardless of Ethnic Origin and Religion

Interviewed by BTA in connection with the 80th anniversary of the rescue of Bulgarian Jews, Vesela Paldamova, Principal of the 134th Dimcho Debelyanov School of Sofia, said that Bulgarians today prove once again that they can help people in need, regardless of their ethnic origin, religion and skin colour.

"The time and the era have nothing to do with showing human kindness. If one is compassionate, merciful, with a strong spirit, and aspires for equity and justice, one will do what is necessary," she said.

The 134th Dimcho Debelyanov School is the only state-owned school in Bulgaria where Hebrew is taught from Grade 1 to 12. "It is studied as a mother tongue in elementary level - under the Constitution, the children from the Jewish community have the right to study Hebrew in our school. In secondary school, children specializing in foreign languages study it in extra classes," Paldamova said.

The rescue of Bulgarian Jews is covered by one lesson in Grade 7, while in Grade 10 it is present in one part of a lesson, the school principal said. "We can imagine the amount of information that reaches the children at school. Without civic education and the teachers' ambition to expand on the subject in the lessons, there is no way it can reach them. In our school, we talk very much about this topic, but this has to do with the specifics of the school," she said.

Students can be taught additional information, not just in Grades 7 and 10.

There is a very good joint initiative of the Education Ministry and the Alef Jewish-Bulgarian Cooperation Center, which provides teachers across the country with the collected essays of all students who have participated in the International Literary Youth Contest mottoed "Whoever saves one human life, saves a whole universe". Students from all over Bulgaria have participated in the contest, which is now open to schools in Europe and Israel, Paldamova said. 

The idea is that students should get interested in the subject, find captivating stories and write their own texts. This led to a great idea: students writing for other students, the school principal said.

"If those texts reach other school students, I am confident they will start thinking about the topic and they, in turn, will show interest in what happened in that dark era, the Holocaust," the principal said.

In the summer of 2021, the 134th Dimcho Debelyanov School unveiled a memorial, the Wall of the Bulgarian Righteous Among the Nations, dedicated to 20 Bulgarians honoured by Israel's Yad Vashem. The idea and funding for the memorial, which is the only one of its kind, came from Roman Stoyanov, grandson of Bulgarian Jews' rescuer Mladen Ivanov. Stoyanov is founder of the Bulgarian-Jewish Cultural Institute. "The homeroom teachers talked to our students about the meaning of the memorial, Paldamova said.

The Bulgarian News Agency (BTA), in partnership with the Alef Jewish-Bulgarian Cooperation Center, set itself the task to recall the events of the past and the participants in them, and to present the importance of the rescue and the rescuers. Nearly 50,000 lives were saved in Bulgaria. According to information on the website of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center, Bulgaria had 50,000 Jews before World War II and zero victims. It is the only country with zero victims.