In 2011, the Institute for the Studies of the Recent Past (ISRP) based in Sofia, Bulgaria received two handwritten student notebooks titled “1943. The Diary of a Mobilized Jew.” Among the hundreds of testimonies and memoirs, this writing proved as a unique and invaluable primary source about the plight of the Bulgarian Jews in the late 1930s, WWII and the post-war years. The personal story emanating from the diary covers just few months (from April to July 1943) and unfolds on the outskirts of a tiny Bulgarian city. However, the diary narrative brings back to life a wide array of historical and regional (political, institutional and social) realities, some of which either remain hitherto underexamined or fell victim to over-interpretation. Thus by virtue of its authenticity and narrative richness, it provides opportunities to reckon with both historiographical and methodological questions, especially against the backdrop of highly charged historical disputes. While tracking historiographical debates about forced labor, in particular, and the salvation and/or the (non)deportation of Bulgarian Jews, in general, in this article, the author tries, if not to entirely revise the dominating (but also contradicting) historical disputes on these topics, but rather bring the scholarly debate (very often spilling over to heated political and public clashes) back to the uncertain, yet authentic ground of Mayer’s first-hand testimony about the experience of forced labor.
Dimiter Sht. Dimov (Fri,) studied this question.