Sofia Rejects Russia's Claims About Saving Bulgarian Jews

Bulgaria on Friday reminded Russia that it was not the Soviet Red Army but the Bulgarian people who saved thousands of Bulgarian Jews from deportation to Nazi death camps in 1943.

Sofia responded with irritation after Kremlin spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Thursday that Soviet Red Army troops had "prevented the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria and saved some 50,000 people from imminent death".

Zakharova was commenting on anti-Semitic graffiti painted on the Monument of the Soviet Army in Bulgaria's capital Sofia, on Tuesday, which said: "100 years of Zionist Occupation".

Bulgarian authorities condemned the sign and had it removed from the monument shortly after it appeared.

"Those who bring jackhammers, shovels and paint to desecrate monuments are, unfortunately, completely unaware of the glorious pages of their own history, let alone anyone else's," Zakharova said.

She urged Bulgaria to take firm action to prevent "the maligning of the memory of Soviet soldiers who gave their lives to save the European continent from Nazism".

Clearly riled, Sofia was quick to point out that it was the Bulgarians themselves who prevented the mass deportation of the country's Jews at great risk to their own safety, when the Russians were nowhere in the vicinity. The Soviets did not advance into Eastern Europe until 1944.

"When Bulgarian citizens stood on the trains in front of the trains travelling to the Nazi death camps, when representatives of the Bulgarian political, economic and intellectual elite were writing protest letters in support of the Bulgarian Jews and when top hierarchs of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church were joining the Jews, gathered for deportation ... the Red Army was thousands kilometres away," the Bulgarian...