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

47,000 Jews a chance to live, the Jews from Macedonia and Thrace perished under his watch.
    Moments after the meeting with Gabrovski, in the hallway outside the interior ministry, Peshev turned to the leather shop owner and coat maker from Kyustendil. "Suichmezov, shake my hand," Peshev said. "The deportation of the Jews has been stopped. You can phone Kyustendil immediately and tell them the news."
    Suichmezov left the assembly building with the rest of the Kyustendil delegation. At the back door they encountered a group of Jews crowded around the entrance. "God bless you, Asen!" exclaimed a young man from Kyustendil. Moments later, as they walked toward a liquor store to phone Kyustendil, another man approached. His name was Colonel Avram Tadger, a Jewish veteran of two Bulgarian wars who was forced out of the Union of Reserve Officers by the Law for the Defense of the Nation. "Which one of you is Asen Suichmezov?" the colonel asked. Suichmezov spoke up; Colonel Tadger seized the coat maker's hand and began to cry. "I have come to shake your hand," the veteran exclaimed. "Bravo for your courage!"
    The Jewish school yard in Plovdiv and the adjacent high-walled gymnasium were packed with hundreds of Jews, surrounded by their flimsy suitcases and cloth sacks jammed with clothes. It was the late morning of March 10; the order to suspend the deportation had still not been delivered to the authorities. Throngs of people were standing outside the fence, shouting, pledging not to let the Jews go.
    Susannah Behar would recall the terror she experienced when the police demanded quiet to make an announcement. They ordered all the Jews to line up. Susannah believed it was almost time to escape to join the Partizans; the deportations would now begin.
    Instead, the police told everyone to go home.
    The physical sensation of relief at that moment—for the Behars in the school yard and the Barouhs and the Confortys in Kyustendil and the Eshkenazis waiting for news in Sliven—would be recalled, sixty years later, as something beyond description.
    By afternoon, the Jews of Plovdiv were home. Many found that their houses, left unlocked in the rush to leave, were untouched—watched over by worried neighbors.
    In the late afternoon, Bishop Kiril paid a visit to the rabbi's house. Susannah would remember him in his bishop's cap and silver-topped cane, embracing each one in the family before joining the rabbi for a private meeting in her father's study. As he walked toward the study, the bishop stopped and gazed at the rabbi's children. "The whole Bulgarian Orthodox Church," he promised, "will stand up for the Jews."
    And so it did in the months to come. Metropolitan Stefan, the nation's top religious official, applied moral pressure on Boris, imploring the king "to demonstrate the compassion and lucidity incumbent" on his position "by defending the right to the freedom and human dignity that the Bulgarian people have always upheld by tradition and by temperament. . . . The wails and tears of these Bulgarian citizens of Jewish origin whose rights are being denied them," Bishop Stefan insisted, "are a legitimate protest against the injustice being done to them."
    Dimitur Peshev, for his part, realized the authorities still intended to carry out the deportations. Perhaps, he reasoned, public exposure could shame the government. By March 17, Peshev had gathered forty-three signatures for a letter to the prime minister protesting the plan. "We cannot believe that the deportation of these people outside Bulgaria, as suggested by some evil-intentioned rumor, was planned by the Bulgarian government," the letter declared. "Such measure is unacceptable not only because these people of Bulgarian citizenship cannot be expelled outside Bulgaria, but because it would be disastrous and bring ominous consequences upon the country. It would inflict an undeserved stain on Bulgaria's honor. . . ."
    Peshev's public rebuke of his own government's plan was