March 11 , 2007

March 11 is the anniversary of the deportations of the Jews from Macedonia to Treblinka. This year, on March 11th, Dr. Ichak Adizes attended the 2-day holocaust commemoration that was held in Skopje, Macedonia.

Although Macedonia's Jewish community today has only 200 members, the tight-knit group has been fighting to revive Jewish traditions, Jewish identity and Jewish life in this newly independent country.

"A person standing alone is like a solitary tree on a mountain," he said. "It can break easily in the wind. We in our community are like 200 trees standing together, with 30 strong oaks among us — our young people."

--Viktor Mizrachi, President of Macedonia's Jewish community

Macedonia is building the Memorial Holokaust Center for Jews

Two years ago, Macedonia officially started the construction of the Memorial Holocaust Center for Jews in the capital city of Skopje.

The Memorial Holocaust Center, in a symbolic way, will bring back the victims of Treblinka home, in Macedonia, in the middle of their famous Jewish settlement in Skopje. The center of 4,000 square meters is expected to be completed by March 11th, 2008.

The new Bet Yaakov Synagogue that is built on the top floor of the Jewish community center building in downtown Skopje is a simple sanctuary decorated with striking stained-glass windows illustrating Jewish symbols. It is going to be the first new synagogue to be built in the Balkans since the end of World War II. It represents a powerful symbol of Jewish survival.

Never to be forgotten and repeated

Macedonia was annexed by Bulgaria in April 1941. By March 1943 all of its Jewish citizens had been rounded up by the Bulgarian police and military forces and deported to Treblinka. Only two percent of Macedonian’s 7,000 Jews survived. Today only 200 Jews remain in Macedonia.

The Macedonian Jews were deported in simultaneous actions that began in the early morning of Thursday, March 11, 1943. In Monastir, Skopje, and Štip, where there was a tiny population of Sephardic Jews, several hundred police and soldiers, as well as cart drivers with their carts, gathered at municipal police stations at 2 a.m. to receive instructions for the removal of the Jews and their belongings. In Monastir, the Bulgarian military established a blockade around the city to prevent escapes.

At around 7 a.m. the Jews from Monastery and Stip were forced to walk to the railroad station, where a train was waiting to take them away to neighboring Skopje; a temporary detention center had been established at the state tobacco monopoly warehouse known as Monopol. The Monopol was chosen for its ability to hold thousands of people, and also because it was served by a railroad.

For the next 11 days the Monastir Jews, together with Jews from Skopje and Štip, approximately 7,215 in all, lived in crowded, filthy conditions in four warehouses at Monopol. The weather was cold, there was little food and few blankets, and the Jews were continually searched, beaten, and humiliated. Women and girls were raped. Elena Leon Ishakh, a doctor from Monastir who was released from Monopol to work for the Bulgarians, survived the war and left this description of the Monopol:

Hunger pervaded… Only on the fifth day did the camp authorities set up a kitchen, but for over 7,000 of us there were too few stoves. Food was doled out starting at eleven in the morning, and the last ones were fed around five in the evening. Food was distributed once daily and consisted of 250 grams of bread and plain, watery beans or rice… They also gave us smoked meat, but it was so bad that, despite our hunger, we couldn't eat it… Under the pretext of searching us to find hidden money, gold, or foreign currency, they sadistically forced us to undress entirely… In some cases they even took away baby diapers… If anything was found on somebody, he was beaten….

Nico Pardo was one of the few who managed to escape from the Skopje detention center and after the war he described the Jews' despair in Monopol:

We were in a terrible mood. The youngsters tried to sing every so often, but the adults and the elderly people were in deep depression. We did not know what awaited us, but the dreadful treatment we received from the Bulgarians showed the value of the promises given us that we would only be taken to a Bulgarian work camp. Here and there youngsters whispered of the possibility of an uprising and a mass escape, but they never materialized. There was no prospect of it succeeding. The yard was surrounded by a wooden fence and behind that a barbed wire fence. At each of the four corners there was a sentry with a machine gun and other armed guards would patrol the yard. Also, the belief that the worst possible fate did not await us prevented such suicidal acts from taking place.

Three railroad transports took the Macedonian Jews from Monopol to Treblinka. The journey typically took six days, and during this time the Jews were locked in cattle or freight cars. Several Jews died during each transport, and the living had to endure the presence of corpses.

On the morning of March 22, 1943, some 2,300 Macedonian Jews from Monopol were forced to board a train consisting of 40 cattle cars. Families journeyed together, and the transport included at least 134 small children no more than four years old, and at least 194 children between the ages of four and 10. The train arrived at Treblinka six days later on March 28 at 7 a.m. Four people died on this transport. The overwhelming majority of these Jews were from Skopje.
On March 25, German and Bulgarian soldiers loaded about 2,400 Macedonian Jews onto a train made up of freight cars. All the Jews from Stip, who numbered 551, were on this second transport, as were about 2,000 Jews from Skopje and Monastir. Sarfati was scheduled to board the third transport, and he watched the Jews board this second train:
Each wagon carried between 60 and 70 people with all their baggage. The people came out of the building carrying their belongings on their backs. Everyone was carrying things, from the oldest person to the youngest. With bowed heads, all approached the black train. In front of each wagon stood a German and a Bulgarian policeman checking off a list. It was impossible to sit down in the freight cars. As soon as the 'livestock' had been loaded into a car, it was locked and sealed. Only heads were visible through the small windows… Those of us in the building were not permitted to watch, and the police waved their machine guns toward our windows to keep us from watching. The train was ready and left about eleven o'clock. Hands were waving goodbye from the small wagon windows and all of us in the building were shedding tears.

The last train carried around 2,400 Jews, approximately 2,300 of whom were from Monastir. The Jews began boarding the freight cars at 6 a.m. on March 29 and by noon the train was full.

A total of 7,200 Jews from Macedonia, including many children, were sent away to the Nazi camp "Treblinka" in Poland and most of them were killed there.