This document summarizes the story of a junior Bulgarian diplomat named Boyan Atanassov who worked in Paris in 1940 following the German occupation of France. Though inexperienced, he issued visas to Jews and others allowing them to escape Nazi-occupied Europe, saving many lives. When the Germans entered Paris in June 1940, most diplomatic missions moved to Vichy but Atanassov remained in Paris on orders from his ambassador, where he continued helping refugees flee by issuing them visas to travel through Bulgaria.

1. THE DIPLOMAT WHO LISTENED TO HIS HEART
LOCATION: Paris, France.
TIME: June-July 1940 following the German
occupation.
“In those times one climbed to the
summit by simply remaining human.”
The words of a diplomat who saved Jews by issuing them with visas,
thus allowing them to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe during WWII
He was actually just an inexperienced junior diplomat, the Second
Secretary at the Embassy of the Kingdom of Bulgaria in Paris and this was
his first posting abroad. It was his second year in France and he
considered himself very lucky to have been posted in Paris; even though
he had come up first in the competitive examination at the Ministry, he
was fully aware he was not well-connected in society. He was really
happy there mainly because he was so much in love with French culture,
French savoir-vivre and savoir-faire (which roughly translate as being
able to delight in good food and good wine and being able to use a
combination of wit and tact—like finding the right phrase so as to say
nothing about something or vice versa, as the need might arise). He had
studied French since he was in high-school and he went at it with a will;
somehow he liked it better than German and Russian; he had read the
French classics and when he studied law at Sofia University he read
textbooks in three foreign languages besides his native Bulgarian. He
considered himself a self-made man and his own man, with a
philosophical penchant towards the left and the disadvantaged, but not
very pronounced, not theoretical, not in a dogmatic way, rather
youthfully, intellectually anarchistic if anything; it was obvious to all but
those who refused to see life such as it was that the social system was
unjust, but there was not much that one could do about that: the
Bolsheviks seemed to be bent on radically changing the world, but the
stories that were coming out of Stalin’s Russia and Spain, torn by civil
war, were pretty chilling; in fact, they were so horrible that most people
doubted their veracity. Maybe it was all Nazi propaganda (he was yet to
find out that Bolshevik propaganda, was its mirror image, as was life
under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat the mirror image of the Nazi
dictatorship, but these discoveries were to be made years later). Now it
was all so confusing. He certainly felt no urge to belong to a group or a
party cell or any sect, or to embrace an ideology and repeat the slogans
of the season and to get into a bind trying to explain away political
acrobatics. He was too much of an individualist for that—a loner, a book-
worm who had never even had time to learn how to dance, not even a
slow tango, let alone a foxtrot, or a folk dance (which choreographically
required much more intricate footwork than its ballroom counterparts),
nor had he had time for any sport other than hiking in the high
mountains. But hiking for him was not a sporting activity, it was more like
a chance to get away from the crowd, a chance to commune with
pristine nature, to experience the Divine grandeur of the rocky
wilderness and the might of the elements. That may have been about as
close as he got to God in his youth; the craggy peaks and cliffs had been

2. THE DIPLOMAT WHO LISTENED TO HIS HEART by Bogdan Atanasov
his Cathdérale de NotreDame. He and his wife never let a weekend go
by without going to an art museum or an exhibition, or some chateau in
the vicinity of the capital or a leisurely ride on a riverboat down the
serene and sluggish Seine.
Bulgarian diplomats were poorly paid and now that he had a two-year-
old boy and another child on the way he had to be even more careful
with his salary. Neither he nor his wife were any good at managing their
money, it simply slipped away through their fingers and they sometimes
had squabbles as to who was the worse spendthrift and they would point
accusing fingers at each other for having bought expensive art books, or
tickets for l'Opéra or the Comédie Française or fashionable clothes or for
entertaining too many guests too often. But the subtle charm of Paris—
the "grands boulevards" and the squares, the "hôtels particuliers" as they
call their posh residences, the churches and cathedrals and the parks and
the monuments were there for all to enjoy and as free as the air. And
then there were the little restaurants with their fine wines and "le
patron", arms akimbo, watching you enjoy his culinary chefs-d’oeuvre…
And another favorite place were the bookstalls along the Seine selling
second-hand paperbacks with yellow covers that came unstuck as you
handled them but they could be bought for next to nothing. And the
pleasures of browsing, picking up one title, leafing through it, putting it
down, then picking up another, then looking at some prints. He liked
Toulouse-Lautrec for his audacity and Degas for his gracefulness and
especially Daumier, the satirist—they were great favorites. Did Daumier
have it in for the theatrical lawyers and yawning judges and brutish
criminals and those "innocent" defendants! But most of all, it was the
crooked and shameless politicians that the artist blasted and the young
diplomat would smile knowingly. Just the way it was in his homeland.
His slim, tastefully-dressed and well-educated wife, Theodora (they
called her Theo for short) looked after the household and the baby boy
and she spoke to him in French—he would be trained to be a European
from the very start. She would push the dark blue baby carriage down to
the embankment of the Seine and point to the river and say "l'eau,
l'eau"-water, and, as if intending to mix the kid up with a bunch of
related concepts, she would add: "c'est la riviere, la riviere, la Seine"
Now if her husband had been there, that would have started him off on
the best way of teaching a little child a foreign language—he loved to
explicate, theorize and dispute and even quibble like a lawyer. But to tell
the truth, he was never petty. He could definitely separate important
issues from trifling ones. And once in the fray for a just cause he had the
tenacity of a bulldog.
It was 1938 and the diplomat smelt the smell of war in the air—the
civil war was still raging in Spain: loyalist Republicans versus General
Franco's Nationalists, to put it simply those were Socialists and
Anarchists pitted against Fascists; there was a crisis over Germany's
annexation of Austria in March; Czechoslovakia was under threat of
imminent German invasion: the powerful Nazi dictator was poised to
strike down that young democracy. Was he going to invade again and get
away with it?
And it was all wrapped in that new ghastly German intolerance of
other nations, inferior races, cultures and ideas and that sort of drivel. He
had been watching the Nazi propaganda machine become more and
more strident and all-pervasive to the extent that he had got into the
habit, when buying a German book, of looking at the date it was
published and if he saw the year was post-1933, he would chuck it away
with disgust because they would have had to make it sound ideologically
correct. (Strangely enough, this is he how he was to react to literature
printed in his own country after the Soviet takeover on 09/09/1944:
every book would be suspect as the new tyranny would be even more
thorough in warping published thought in every field of human endeavor
and he would see that as yet another scourge of humanity, but that
anguish was to be saved for the future.) The anti-Jewish hysteria in the
Reich had become a national madness, and Kristallnacht, when the
Brown-shirts smashed and looted the shops owned by Jews, had been an
2

3. THE DIPLOMAT WHO LISTENED TO HIS HEART by Bogdan Atanasov
unpardonable atrocity—no civilized society should tolerate such
thuggery. And the public burning of books by ideologically suspect
authors! Wasn’t that an atrocity too! The burning of any books was
uncivilized. Authors should be freely competing in the marketplace of
styles and ideas, otherwise we would be stumbling along towards ever
more unjust and corrupt societies. What was happening in the land of
Kant, Beethoven, Schiller and Goethe? He could not grasp how German
idealism, humanism and romanticism could have slid into the
unintelligent blinkered blatherings of Herr Hitler and his
pronouncements about the Germans being the Herrenvolk, the Master
Race, and the racially pure blond Übermensch establishing a German
Reich “über alles,” over all and everything. And the rest of the world
were to be different shades of manure. But this political manipulation of
racial hatred was the height of absurdity. Heine, Remarque, Zweig, Marx,
Freud, and Einstein, too, were Jewish, and they like so many other
German Jews had contributed so much to the German arts and sciences.
Over the centuries they had become an integral part of German society
and culture and suddenly they were to be weeded out and liquidated.
These thoughts puzzled and worried him: what kind of a world was in the
making. He remembered the Jewish friends he had at school and at
university and also the outstanding professor Fadenhecht, who read
international law. He was highly respected as an authority in his field by
his colleagues and he was loved by his students for his clarity of thought,
his progressive ideas, his sense of humor. A tough, but fair grader, he
never pandered to the sons and daughters of the rich and the well-
connected. The young man had got to know the professor’s daughters;
the younger one was dating and would later marry a Jewish friend of his
who was an actor and an outstanding director and was making quite a
name for himself in Sofia society. They were all very fine people.
Well, in actual fact, Hitler did strike again and he got away with it again
and neither the Western Democracies nor Stalin's Russia put up more
than a whimper as resistance. British Prime Minister Chamberlain had
met Hitler twice and when he returned from Munich after his third
meeting he promised the British people "peace in our time". Actually it
was a sellout—that was evident. What a dupe of a stuffed shirt the
British had for a Prime Minister, he couldn't see further than his nose,
but the young diplomat did not share his thoughts with anyone because
it was an open secret that Bulgarian diplomacy was quietly gravitating
towards the Reich, just as it had before World War I. Still there was no
doubt in his mind that everybody in Europe wanted peace and the Prime
Minister had wanted it for England at any price.
The memories of the trench warfare were still fresh in the minds of the
war veterans on both sides. How well Goya had depicted war in "Las
Desastres de la Guerra". The twentieth century had indeed made great
"advances" in the art of warfare—there were machine guns, tanks, air
raids, lethal gases, flame-throwers and land mines. He often reflected on
the duplicity of governments who were organizing all these peace
conferences and disarmament talks and at the same time were spending
billions on developing new and more ghastly military hardware. And the
war in Spain seemed to be a testing ground for Germany's new
armaments. The diplomat's father, a major who had fought the British
and the French in Macedonia in WWI for three years had told him about
the horrors of trench warfare—how his soldiers had died daily from
sniper fire even when there was a lull in the fighting, or from shelling,
from land mines, in bayonet charges, from dysentery, and cholera, and
the Spanish flu, and hunger, and from their festering wounds, or from
gangrene that came from frost-bitten fingers or feet, they died in attacks
and counter-attacks but they held the front despite the odds until the
Bolshevik-inspired mutiny in 1918. And he and his mother and aunts and
brothers had experienced the privations and poverty and famine and
disease and the total lack of medicines in a poor peasant country at war.
Nobody wanted to go through that again. He did not believe that the
young generation would allow another war to be waged. No more
Guernicas. No more war madness. That was what his peers were all
3

4. THE DIPLOMAT WHO LISTENED TO HIS HEART by Bogdan Atanasov
saying. But he was watching the mad dictators in the newsreels and he
read the newspapers and he knew the dictators were accomplished
demagogues and wizards at whipping up old hatreds and picking on
defenseless scapegoats and these were mostly Jews, left-wing
intellectuals and outspoken clergymen. But most people tried their best
to disregard the omens of war and they carried on as usual—life as usual,
business as usual, fun as usual. And his lovely wife entertained the wives
of other diplomats and she spoke fluent English, French and German
without a trace of an accent, unlike her husband, who had not studied
abroad, and they conversed about music, and conductors and singers
and painters and actors and plays and the latest fashions (hats were
especially important) and their various national cuisines, and delicacies,
and how poorly trained and incompetent servants were nowadays and
so-o-o expensive too, and the nannies were, if anything, even worse, and
prices in Paris were exorbitant, it was really beyond words… And the next
day she would be wheeling the baby carriage through the Parc de
Monceau and pointing out the ducks and the swans to her little boy who
was lisping in French, and the day after that they would be more
adventurous and take the bus to the Bois de Boulogne.
And all the time everyone was being determinedly oblivious of the
gathering storm. Paris was and would always be a paradise on earth, the
hub of refinement and culture, and she had set her mind that nothing
and nobody on earth would spoil it for her and her small family. But
spoilt it was very soon, quite suddenly, out of the blue…
On a beautiful day, the first of September 1939, Germany attacked its
much weaker neighbor, Poland, and two days later France and Britain
declared war on Germany. Well, thought the young diplomat to himself,
that was it, what everyone had expected, but had secretly hoped it could
miraculously be avoided. Then he put his wife and child on a train,
second class, via Germany and Hungary to relative safety in Bulgaria.
Maybe his country could keep its neutrality. Maybe. Three days later he
received a telegram informing him of their safe, but sad journey.
What he could not at this moment have foreseen was that some
months later he would be seeing complete strangers off to Bulgaria from
the same railway station. These people, however, would be fleeing for
their lives.
It was ten months now after the outbreak of the War on the Polish
front and the Germans had overrun Holland and Belgium; the British had
barely managed to evacuate their forces back across the Channel and it
looked like there was nobody to stand up to the big bully in Europe. The
future seemed very bleak indeed. And so from racist theory the Nazis
moved to racist practice and they began their extermination of the
"lesser races"—Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies. Towards the West Europeans
they were somewhat more lenient. Of course, it had not been all that
much of a surprise—there had been many straws in the wind, like the
pogrom known as the Night of Broken Glass. That was back in November
1938, but for years before that night of horror, Hitler had been ranting
that "die Juden sind an allem schuld," the Jews are to blame for
everything, and that Germany had to rid herself of that “noxious” tribe.
On June the 14th the Germans entered a desolate and deserted Paris.
Ironically, the French government fled south to Vichy, though hardly to
take the waters at the famous watering place. The sense of defeat and
shame was crowned by Marshal Petain, the country's hero from World
War I, signing the armistice and establishing a pro-Nazi dictatorial
regime. The cowed French nation was split down the middle: some
believing that since they had not been able to resist the Germans they
had better jump on their band-wagon, while others would not accept
defeat, and like General De Gaulle, their undaunted leader in exile,
believed that the Nazi evil would inevitably, sooner or later, be
destroyed.
Vichy became the seat of the collaborationist administration of
unoccupied southern France and all the diplomatic missions of the
neutral countries hurriedly moved down there.
4

5. THE DIPLOMAT WHO LISTENED TO HIS HEART by Bogdan Atanasov
However, on the orders of Ambassador Balabanov, the junior diplomat
Boyan Atanassov and the accountant, Kalinov, remained on the premises
of the Embassy of the Kingdom of Bulgaria in Paris in order to wind the
diplomatic mission down. The young diplomat's zest for life disappeared.
He had hardly anything to do all day, he had received no instructions
from the Ambassador in Vichy. His thoughts were often taking him to his
family in Sofia: how was Theo coping with no domestic help? The little
fellow had a bad stomach ache. Could it be something serious? Then he
went back to the censored French and German papers and read about
the conduct of the war and tried to read between the lines of the official
upbeat communiqués and the editorials. He kept consulting his two wall
maps of France and Europe and redrawing rough boundaries in red and
blue pencil marks. What direction was the government's foreign policy
going in? Then he walked down the Champs Elysees, now so grim and
uninviting and the traffic was so much lighter (gasoline was rationed) and
the sight of German uniforms and military vehicles and buildings flying
giant swastika flags everywhere depressed him even more. Then he got a
coded telegram from Vichy telling his to go to the Gare du Nord and see
whether there were Wehrmacht troop trains heading for the Channel
ports. Was an invasion of England imminent? Our government wanted
first-hand intelligence. That at least was something to do and not too
boring, either. However, his secret mission proved a failure—he could
neither gauge the numbers of the troops, not even an approximation,
nor did he get any information as to which German units were involved.
That evening there was a knock at the back door. It was a young couple
roughly his age. They asked, speaking educated Bulgarian, very timidly
and with a lot of excuses for having disturbed His Excellency at this time
of the day or rather of the night, if they might possibly talk with him
about a very urgent matter. They glanced at each other now and again
and seemed very uneasy and kept looking over their shoulders. Were
they trying to flatter him with their repeated “Your Excellency,” or didn’t
they know any better that a man in his early thirties could not be the
Bulgarian Ambassador, not would he be opening the back door to total
strangers in almost total darkness.
He heedlessly asked them to come in and they stepped into an office
and sat down. Now they came to the point immediately. Their family
name was Solomon, he was David and she was Esther; they were from
Sofia; they ran a small company here, they had not been to the
Fatherland for quite a few years, they had no passports. He wondered if
they had made a point of losing them? They wondered if His Excellency
might repatriate them to Bulgaria as soon as possible. They were also
short of cash. There were also a few acquaintances of theirs who would
like to travel with them. Could the Bulgarian Embassy arrange for their
transport. They were in the same situation. "Would it be all right if we
stayed on the premises while the formalities are being taken care of?"
asked Esther with a shy smile. "I hope we are not being too impertinent,"
she went on, she thought it would only be for a day or two. The diplomat
thought one did not have to be uncommonly shrewd to grasp the
situation. Evidently, they and their friends feared being arrested by the
Gestapo or the military patrols and without much ado to be shipped to
the concentration camps in Germany to be worked to death or be
directly exterminated by the SS like vermin.
From that moment, the young diplomat knew what he was going to do
—he would listen to his heart; he also knew what he was not going to do
—he was not going to ask permission from his boss in Vichy, nor from the
Ministry in Sofia. He would tackle the mighty Nazi war machine on his
own terms with diplomatic tact and Bulgarian determination.
The diplomat told the young couple that they could stay at the Embassy
while he drew up the necessary documents and permits and secured the
visas and the carriages. Coincidentally, it so happened that Sofia had just
issued an order that all Bulgarian nationals were to return to Bulgaria.
News got around and within the next week the Embassy received
something like a hundred calls. Anxious voices were making inquiries.
5

6. THE DIPLOMAT WHO LISTENED TO HIS HEART by Bogdan Atanasov
There were workingmen and artisans, professional people and
businessmen, former members of the International Brigade in Spain.
Among them stood out the names of some twenty Jewish families. Some
were intellectuals who had made a name for themselves in Parisian
cultural life, some were businessmen in French-Bulgarian companies and
international banks. Some of these people the diplomat had met at
Embassy receptions or at business meetings. Some of them had come to
the Embassy to get information and be advised as to their options. They
stood in the office stunned with fear and were hesitant whether to sign
up and take a perilous train ride though the heart of the Reich or stay
behind and risk arrest and deportation.
Over the next few days, by threes and fours, several Jewish families and
scores of Bulgarians, some with their families, were granted
accommodation on the first floor of the Bulgarian Embassy in the heart
of occupied Paris in early August 1940. For two weeks this group had
the use of the large reception room and another room out of the four
habitable rooms of the premises. In one corner the Jews had a place for
daily prayers.
A smaller, raggle-taggle group of youngish Bulgarians remained pretty
reticent; they just said that they had come from Spain and had no
documents or money on them. They were not very refined persons, by
any means; they were shabbily dressed, unshaven and famished. The
diplomat figured them out unequivocally as members of the
International Brigade who had managed to escape summary execution at
the hands of General Franco's troops and had evaded detention by
the French authorities and subsequent extradition back to Spain. Or they
might have been dutifully handed over to the Gestapo. Their fate too was
sealed—it was either the bullet “while trying to escape” or prison for life.
The diplomat was acting under no orders from his superiors, he was
just following his conscience. Had the Bulgarian Ambassador in Vichy
known about what was going on in Paris he would have probably fired
him on the spot. Luckily the accountant not only did not report him, but
on the contrary, he offered to help by doing the shopping in the morning
at a nearby market. He would haul back heavy bags of food under the
suspicious looks of the Military Police. That had to be done for these
people, who did not dare go out in the streets. And it would not have
been a good idea to have a lot of coming and going at all hours at a
foreign mission that was supposed to be closed down.
The young diplomat knew that the really tough part was still to come.
Everything in Paris and in occupied northern France was in the hands of
the military. How in the world was he, a junior diplomat of a friendly but
officially neutral country, going to make the Germans reserve two or
three railway carriages so that a pack of perfectly useless Bulgarians
might travel from one end of Europe to the other, just when the
Reichsbahn, the German State Railways, had such a pressing need for
carriages to transport their troops to ports on the English Channel in
preparation for the greatest invasion of the British Isles in history.
Day after day, he went from one military office to another, from the
General Directorate of the German State Railways in France to the
General Kommendatur of the City of Paris trying to get permission for
one or two carriages. In the meantime the list of likely travelers was
getting longer and by the end of the first week was getting close to one
hundred, but he was not getting any closer to securing even a single
carriage. He felt like he was being struck back and forth like a ping-pong
ball.
He was utterly frustrated but there was no way he could give up. What
would become of these poor people? He could not leave them in the
lurch. He would keep pestering those SOBs had to keep going. He just
took a deep breath and started from square one.
He got into the Citroen that he had all but commandeered. It belonged
to Mr.Patsurkov, a Bulgarian businessman, who was selling the famous
Bulgarian rose oil to French perfume manufacturers. The wealthy man
was letting the diplomat use his car because the fellow had no gas
coupons, while the Embassy had gas coupons, but no car and nobody
6

7. THE DIPLOMAT WHO LISTENED TO HIS HEART by Bogdan Atanasov
who could drive a car. So they worked together as a team criss-crossing
Paris trying to locate the office that would deign to pull those carriages
out of officialdom’s magician’s hat. One thing you could rely on getting
was the military giving that mechanical, shrill “Heil Hitler!” salute
sometimes with a clicking of heels, though, to tell the truth, few were
that well drilled. In response, the Bulgarian diplomat would produce a
low-key “Hi” with a flip of the palm at belly level and his abhorrence
must have shown through. He soon realized that he was being sent on a
wild goose chase with the obvious intention that he should throw up his
hands in exasperation and despair.
In his briefcase the diplomat carried a three-page typewritten passport,
called a passe-avant, containing the names of all the prospective
passengers and certifying them as being subjects of the Kingdom of
Bulgaria. This document had two unusual features, the diplomat saw
them as being ruses to outwit the German authorities: firstly, it was
stamped in every corner of every page and the pages were bound with a
white-green-and-red ribbon (the national colors) and sealed with a seal
in red wax; secondly, the twenty odd Jewish names did not come at the
top or at the end of the list, but were interspersed among the obviously
Bulgarian family names like Ivanov, and Petrovski ending in –ov or -ski.
It was eleven days after his private war with the German military
bureaucracy had started when there was a breakthrough. An army
captain in charge of the allocation of carriages decided to try his hand at
international politics and render the Kingdom of Bulgaria a service. He
began thumbing through a time-table and a few minutes later he was
dictating to his secretary: “…three third class carriages (which meant
hard wooden seats) shall be consigned for the use of the Ambassador of
the Kingdom of Bulgaria, Herr Boyan Atanasov. The same shall undertake
to defray the transport costs amounting to 33,000 Reichsmarks…” He
informed the Bulgarian diplomat, addressing him as Your Excellency the
Ambassador, of a possibility of having three third class carriages ready at
der Ostbahnhof in three days time (out of habit the diplomat referred to
it as la Gare de l'Est). The German was not in a mood to quibble over
place names. Of course the young diplomat had no authority to obligate
the Bulgarian government to pay the travel expenses of all these
displaced persons. He hesitated for a few long seconds, the captain
noticed this and was on the point of pulling the sheet of paper away.
"No, no. I'll sign it," he said knowing full well what he was getting himself
into. Half a lifetime of salaries could hardly have paid that debt back, but
he felt he had no option but to sign. A faintness had come over him. Was
he going to have a stroke?
The next hurdle was the transit visa from the Reichskonsulat, the
Consular Office. That took two days of haggling over some legal points
and the monocled German diplomat refused to accept the passe-avant
because he saw those Jewish names on it. "If you just deleted the Jewish
names from this list, you would get you visa immediately. Otherwise it
might be impossible for me help you, my dear sir." He was no longer
"Your Excellency." The Bulgarian diplomat began arguing that according
to Bulgarian law all Bulgarian subjects have equal rights, that Bulgarian
law does not differentiate between Bulgarians, Jews, or Turks. It was to
no avail. On the following day the Bulgarian diplomat decided to bluff his
German counterpart, and said that it would be regrettable if this
straightforward, run-of-the-mill matter had to be referred to their
respective foreign ministers to thrash out. “What are we, the diplomats,
here for? We will become ridiculous if we send a simple matter such as
this one to our superiors to resolve.” The maneuver worked and he soon
had the precious life-saving visa in his hand. He felt a sense of elation: in
time of war, insanity, cruelty and hatred, an act of mere humanity had
prevailed.
Three days later a party of Bulgarian émigrés, men women and
children, got together with their bundles and baskets and suitcases
gathered in the narrow street outside the Embassy building. The
pandemonium was incredible. Traffic was blocked. Policemen were
swearing. Taxis were being overloaded with passengers and baggage.
7

8. THE DIPLOMAT WHO LISTENED TO HIS HEART by Bogdan Atanasov
Others were honking as they tried to weave through the crowd. But in
the artificially created chaos, the twenty odd Jewish travelers managed
to leave the Embassy premises, their safe haven, and merge with the
crowd below. Stuck all over their baggage there were stamped bands,
self-made Bulgarian flags and signed tags stating in French and German
that the Government of the Kingdom of Bulgaria was responsible for the
contents thereof.
The diplomat got to the Gare de l’est more than an hour before the
train was due to leave. It was night time, the station was dimly lit, but he
did not need any help finding the three third-class carriages—the shrill
cries and the chaos which reigned on the platform were indication
enough. Some were sitting on their bundles and bags and suitcases, still
hesitating whether to get on or stay behind; others had gotten cold feet
and never showed. That was understandable. It was a long haul. He tried
to get into one carriage and thought he might walk down the corridor
and see if he could recognize some of the people but gave it up as soon
as he squeezed in and somebody dug an elbow in his ribs as he tried to
get past in the other direction. A noisy squabble had erupted between
two gesticulating Bulgarians with their chubby wives chiming in; it was
over two window seats coveted by both families. There was some name-
calling which could easily have escalated to fisticuffs. In the same
compartment a young Jewish couple were talking to each other almost in
a whisper totally oblivious of the din around them.
No one took any notice of him. Perhaps it was too dark. The train
reached its destination—the Bulgarian border—safely and without any
mishaps, although for many on board it was a nerve-racking three-day
journey, as they expected to be hauled off and arrested at every stop the
train made and every time men in military or police uniforms went
through their ritual checks. Fortunately, these checks were performed
unthoroughly, without any zeal. The only good evil men do is when they
proceed without their wonted thoroughness.
* * *
Nine years later, after serving in Lisbon, Washington and London, the
two parents decided it was time to return to Bulgaria as their two older
boys could not (nor did they want to) read Bulgarian and they needed to
get a Bulgarian education. The history textbooks their grandfather sent
(to boost their patriotism) were horrible – printed on poor quality paper,
the pictures were smudgy, and the words in that awkward alphabet too
long.
Actually, the diplomat was dismissed from the Ministry within a few
weeks after their arrival. For not being a party member, for not
kowtowing to the almighty Party, but chiefly for being educated and not
working class. And having spent too many years in the capitalist world
and always wearing a tie. That is unforgivable. An Orwellian situation.
People who thought for themselves and did not repeat the latest Party
slogans with wide-eyed fervor were more than suspect and no one
outside the party could hold a key job. There was only one employer—
the State and the only job they would let him have was loading scrap iron
onto freight cars. Then he joined a bunch of debarred lawyers who had
become glaziers, but after a week they asked him to give it up – he was
clumsily breaking too many new panes. His sons, too, soon wised up as
to the political situation—it was a one-party tyranny with no election
campaigns and several times a year young and old had to march in those
monstrous five-hour parades, waving little red paper flags. In school it
was constant indoctrination. “One doesn’t write like that” was all that
his brave old lit teacher had dared to warn the elder brother. What he
had meant was more like “And keep your mouth shut at school and don’t
express wayward views in your essays. Somebody may inform on you
and we’ll both be in big trouble.” We had obviously all been caged to be
tamed and there was no getting out. Not for four decades.
The Pater families saw he had committed a grave error of judgment
and the whole family paid for it dearly. Later and with hindsight, he
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9. THE DIPLOMAT WHO LISTENED TO HIS HEART by Bogdan Atanasov
considered himself lucky that he had not been exiled from the capital
and forced to live in a remote village or sent to a labor camp for speaking
his mind and telling a joke at the expense of the Party bosses and their
one-track minds and simplistic ideology, things he did a little too rashly.
And he was lucky to be earning his living by translating the monthly
Bulgaria Today rather than be working in the railroad junkyard. It was
unimaginably boring, infantile propaganda written by ideological hacks
that sounded quite odd in good French. After eight hours at work, he
would come home to devote himself to rendering his beloved Voltaire
and Balzac and Maupassant and Romain Rolland into polished Bulgarian
prose. He would start translating in the evenings and continue well into
the small hours of the morning and, naturally, over the weekends. He
could never meet the publisher’s deadlines for he was working for
perfection, not to oblige the director’s annual economic plan. But he got
away with it as he had made quite a name for himself as a translator.
He went into early retirement so he could break loose from what he
used to call “that conveyor belt for political crap” and devote himself to
high literature and the high cause of saving his fellow countrymen from
pesticides. So he translated Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It caused a
quite a stir in the stagnant waters of totalitarian bumbledom. He and his
eco pals had a lot of trouble finding a publisher.
He went on translating adding Swift and Hemingway and Faulkner and
Heller to the long list of great novels he crafted. Faulkner was his special
favorite. Sometimes he would spend hours reworking one single
(labyrinthine) sentence of his. He invariably found the way out. His
advice was beguilingly simple—“Just keep at it, hang on like a bulldog
and don’t give in. It will all come out right in the end…” That was him all
over, no matter what he was involved with.
* * *
One day, some thirty odd years after the Parisian odyssey, the former
diplomat, no longer young nor a diplomat, was happily strolling with his
first grandchild in the park. Then he noticed a grandfather and a
grandson staring at him. He had been recognized by one of the Jews he
had rescued. The elderly man stopped him and asked if his name wasn't
Atanassov. “You were in the Embassy in Paris in 1940, weren’t you? You
saved our lives, me and my wife’s! You remember me? I’m Philosof." The
ex-diplomat smiled sheepishly but could neither remember the face nor
the name. He did not pretend to either. They had a pretty friendly
conversation and they recalled some memories of France and the War…
But it was all so remote and somehow unreal. His idyllic life in pre-war
France was so far removed from life under the evil eye of Big Brother in
the Kremlin and his surrogate Communist Party and its secular arm—
State Security Police. It seemed as though these remote events had
never been. And France might as well have been on the Moon for he
hadn’t even the remotest chance of seeing her again. He had never been
allowed to travel abroad, nor his wife, nor his sons. “The Police will never
deny me a Passport to travel abroad,” he would quip. “How’s that?” “I’ll
never apply for one,” he would reply with a rippling laugh. These
thoughts flashed through his mind for a second or two, but he did not
consider such a fate a misfortune; he was happy to have his family,
especially his grandson, his friends, his books, his translations, his books
and journals on ecology, and his nature hikes in the mountains in all
weathers. He would never moan (that would be personal), but he could
be blisteringly critical of the political system and the country’s
uneducated, bungling, grasping leaders. Then seconds later, snapping
back to reality, he lightheartedly remarked that he never had to pay back
that staggering sum of 33,000 Reichsmarks. “The captain must have
mislaid the receipt when he had to moved out of his Paris office in a
hurry,” he joked. The two old men laughed and then somewhat hurriedly
they said their good-byes... The eternal dissident and the cautious
follower who went with the flow went their different ways.
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10. THE DIPLOMAT WHO LISTENED TO HIS HEART by Bogdan Atanasov
Their grandsons were much too young to know what past, present and
future were all about. Or how your past affected your present and future
and your children’s and grandchildren’s future as well, nor could they
know that the events of the past would slowly be wiped out of old
people's minds, and be gradually forgotten by the media, and be finally
ignored by the history books of the next generation except, perhaps, in a
footnote or two.
Would the young ever care, the grandfather mused on the way home?
He was sure some ideas are worth caring about and people's lives are
worth saving and some events are worth remembering. Yet how
awkward it is to meet someone who is indebted to you and, strangely
enough, you are to him, for without him and his predicament you would
never have been tested. How flat and worthless the life that has not
been put to the test! Yes, his life had been eventful and he was a truly
happy man and he did not need money as a measure of his worth, of his
success and, least of all, for his happiness.
EPILOGUE
The young diplomat in the story was my father, Boyan V. Atanassov
(1909-1997). This is a true story in all but some of the dialogue and I tell
it as Boyan recounted it a number of times to his three sons—Bogdan,
Vassil and Pancho. The events related took place in Nazi-occupied Paris in
the Summer of 1940, almost a year after the beginning of World War II,
the final paragraphs—in Sofia.
It should be noted that my father, Boyan Atanassov, is most probably
the first Bulgarian to have saved Bulgarian Jews from annihilation in Nazi
controlled Europe. The heroic rescue of the over 48,000 Bulgarian Jews
(documented in Michael Bar-Zohar’s Beyond Hitler’s Grasp) happened in
the Spring of 1943. When documents in the archives of the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs in Sofia were declassified, I actually found some of the
names on that collective passport or "passe-avant" as it used to be called
in French. Other documents have also been found by researchers of that
period.
I and my son Boyan and daughter Teodora represented Bulgaria when
the gentile diplomats of some 50 countries or their descendants and the
persons they had rescued or their descendants met in the hall of the
Security Council of the United Nations in New York in April, 2000. The
event was called “Visas for Life.” The UNO foyer housed an exhibition of
photographs and outline biographies of these diplomats and consuls who
saved Jewish lives, some just a few individuals, some scores of people,
others thousands. Their stories not only read like thrillers, but were
exceedingly moving and powerful human testaments. Most of these men
had acted either without the approval of their superiors or even in
defiance of express orders from their respective Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. Some had to sacrifice their careers. Some were discharged in
disgrace and later died in poverty. All went unrecognized, both at home
and abroad, by Jews and gentiles alike.
The exhibition, which was aptly called "Visas for Life," was organized
by Eric Saul of San Francisco. This exceptional man and his friends
achieved the "impossible" and brought to light the deeds of forgotten
men who had saved the lives of civilians at a time when human life was
cheap, when governments were using political ideologies to justify mass
extermination and plunder.
In conclusion, I would like to state that this piece only got written
because of some questions that Eric Saul kept asking us: It would be
great to know what these diplomats were like. What kind of people were
they? What interests did they have in their private lives? What drove
them to commit themselves to saving people whose lives were on the
line not for anything they had done, but for belonging to a particular race
and religion? What character traits did these diplomats have in common,
coming as they did from different backgrounds, cultures, races and
religions?
One rough-and-ready answer is that these diplomats had much in
common—they could not watch injustice and cruelty and genocide
without making a stand, a personal stand, for the little guy, for the
persecuted when they saw they had a chance to do something about it.
They did their own thinking, they made their own decisions and acted
accordingly because they knew that morally they were in the right. My
father said as much in his interview with Dr. Ann Freed: when he was
signing the papers obligating the Bulgarian government to the tune of
33,000 RM for the transport of the émigrés without being authorized and
10

11. THE DIPLOMAT WHO LISTENED TO HIS HEART by Bogdan Atanasov
posing as the Bulgarian Ambassador, he was breaking the civil law, but by
acting to save human lives he was obeying a higher Law – the Law of the
Creator. These diplomats did not do what they were doing in order to
make a fortune at the expense of those in peril. Their families were
mostly badly off, and many died penniless. They obviously were people
who liked all of humankind above the differences that the various races
and religious groups and members of classes focus on so often,
differences that too many are all too ready to fight over. These righteous
diplomats were obviously people with a special kind of heart—a heart
full of compassion for the downtrodden, a heart that knew no fear when
fighting the good fight, who threw caution to the winds when the lives of
good people were in danger. You could see integrity and resolution in
their eyes and tenacity. What they had done once they would not have
hesitated to do again. They were indomitable, unstoppable.
For all our sakes, let us hope that they were not of a dying breed.
EPITAPH
On April 13, 2005, Boyan Atanassov (1909-1997) was posthumously
recognized by Yad Vashem for his “humanitarian conduct at a time when
such behavior was in short supply.“
On September 22, 1993, Boyan Atanassov gave an interview to Dr. Ann
Freed. The videotape is in the Ann and Roy Freed Archive of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bogdan B. Atanasov was a professor of English literature and
translation at the American University in Bulgaria from its foundation in
the fall of 1991 until his retirement in 2004. From 1990 to 1991, he was a
member of the Union of Democratic Forces in the Constituent National
Assembly and a member of its Foreign Policy Commission. As an MP he
wrote the bill establishing AUBG—the first American university in an East
European country.
Bogdan B. Atanasov
bbatanasov@yahoo.com (310) 473-500, (310) 707-6559
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