Free The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan

taken to the Rhodope Mountains with the Partizans. She slipped back into the school yard to update her father on the plan. If the deportations seemed imminent, the rabbi and his daughter agreed, Susannah would escape to join the armed struggle against the pro-Fascist monarchy. Moshe's brother, Jacques, was already there.
    In Kyustendil, meanwhile, the town's Jews anxiously waited for news from the delegation that had left for the capital to meet with Dimitur Peshev, vice president of the parliament.
    Dimitur Peshev had a fondness for fine suits cut close to his sturdy frame; invariably, a clean white handkerchief poked out in a triangle from his breast pocket. He wore cuff links, and his hair was carefully combed back with oil.
    Peshev lived alone in a third-floor room above his sister's Sofia apartment. He was partial to backgammon and Voltaire. Often he would come downstairs in his fedora and buttoned-up suit coat to call on his two young nieces. Standing at the door in their lace-bordered dresses and party shoes, they would take their uncle's hand and walk with him to the neighborhood sweet shop.
    Dimitur Peshev had spent much time dreaming of "national ideals and universal human aspirations for something pure and sacred." He believed in parliamentary democracy. He considered the Bulgarian Nazi imitators, "spouting borrowed slogans" and marching about in their brown uniforms, as actors in "a grotesque and pathetic vaudeville."
    Yet Peshev was vice president of the parliament in a pro-Fascist government put in place by King Boris III. The young lawyer had grown disillusioned with the Socialists after witnessing the harsh rule of a peasant regime. He saw his accommodation to the Fascists as part of the reality of European geopolitics. In tying his future to the king's, and to Bulgaria's alliance with the Nazis, Peshev sought to ensure a measure of national sovereignty for Bulgaria. The country's relations with Germany were precarious; somehow, the nation had managed to remain unoccupied and had even recovered old pieces of the fatherland.
    Like the king, Peshev seemed to believe that in this dangerous balance, the nation's foreign policy required a nod to Hitler. Years later, he would recall his vote in favor of the Law for the Defense of the Nation, writing, "This sacrifice was made more palatable by the knowledge that the restrictions on the Jews, however painful, were nonetheless temporary and would not be taken to extremes." It was in this man's hands, more than anyone's, that the fate of the nation's Jews now rested.
    On the morning of March 9, Asen Suichmezov stood at a hat shop on a Sofia street and rang up Dimitur Peshev at home. Suichmezov and his three companions had arrived from Kyustendil the night before. Peshev invited the men to his house, where Suichmezov made Kyustendil's case, speaking through tears about the long lines of train cars at the railway station.
    In several previous meetings over recent weeks, the vice president of Bulgaria's national assembly had spent considerable time and energy explaining that there was no plan to deport the Jews. If there were, Dimitur Peshev had assured his worried visitors, surely he would know about it. By the morning of March 9, however, when Suichmezov and the others appeared before him, Peshev had begun to investigate. He had heard the deportation rumors from a close Jewish friend from Kyustendil. He had listened to a fellow parliamentarian describe the wrenching stories from Macedonia: "old people, men, women, and children, carrying their belongings, defeated, desperate, powerless people begging for help, dragging themselves towards some unknown destination . . . that could only be surmised, to a fate that conjured up everyone's darkest fears."
    In the days just before Suichmezov and the others arrived, Peshev had realized that the rumors he'd been hearing were true. At that point Dimitur Peshev—pro-royalist member of the assembly, leader of a parliament that