The English translation of Nadège Ragaru’s book, originally in French, is a welcome addition to the perennial debate on how narratives of historical processes are (re)shaped over time. Ragaru takes her readers on a journey through history, memory, commemoration, propaganda, and the creation of myths in national and international debates. Two figures are at the heart of her investigation: 48,000 and 11,343. These numbers represent, on the one hand, the Jews who survived the Second World War in Bulgaria, or the “old” kingdom, and, on the other, those who perished in the Nazi death camps after being deported, in 1943, from the regions of Yugoslavia and Greece that Bulgaria had occupied, the so-called “new” kingdom. But the numbers alone are not what matter in this story. Ragaru paints a picture that explains how the number of victims and survivors of the Holocaust still play a sociopolitical role to this day, making her book an invaluable addition to the scholarship that portrays the events of the Second World War and their meaning for contemporary societies. All Ragaru’s reflections are important and allow the reader to reevaluate conventional knowledge with the help of her meticulous research.

As an ally of Nazi Germany during the war, Bulgaria had more political freedom than many of Hitler’s satellites, thus making it possible to question the country’s role in the deportation of Jews in the Balkans and emphasizing the importance of a broad coalition of actors for the survival of the Jews living within the country’s prewar borders. Ragaru delves deep into the controversial historical debate about these issues – a debate exemplified in particular by today’s commemoration of the events related to the Holocaust, which reveal the difficult relationship that official Bulgaria has with this particular aspect of its past and the role it plays in international debates.

The book is divided into five chapters framed by an extensive introduction and a conclusion. In the first chapter, the 1945 trials which sought to prosecute anti-Jewish crimes in Bulgaria are at the center of the analysis, which shows how these trials shaped Bulgaria’s postwar interpretation of the wartime events. The trials became a useful tool for the new communist rulers to establish a narrative that depicted the Bulgarian nation as a victim, heroized the efforts of the partisans, and blamed the Nazis and a number of Bulgarian fascists for any brutality and anti-Jewish policies. More broadly, the trials did not lead to a definitive conclusion on Bulgaria’s measures towards the Jews. Ragaru demonstrates how this first narrative was strongly influenced by the communist leadership’s postwar goals and how this contributed to creating a wedge between those parts of the Jewish community that wanted to prove their allegiance to the new government and those who chose emigration to Israel in subsequent years – some 90 % of Bulgarian Jews.

The second chapter focuses on a cinematic production from the late 1950s, the film Sterne/Zvezdi, a Bulgarian–East German coproduction that depicts the deportation of Jews from the Bulgarian-occupied territories – the first and only production of its type in Cold War Eastern Europe. As in the first chapter, here, too, Ragaru demonstrates how this film reflected political motives related to the East-West divide. The depiction of Nazi crimes played an important role in an era dominated by recriminations toward West Germany. Moreover, the author sees the film as having the political purpose of “cleansing” interpretations of events of any Bulgarian responsibility for the annihilation of the Jewish communities in Yugoslavia and Greece. Finally, the film’s gendered representation of Jewish suffering contributed to stereotypical analyses of the fate of these communities.

The third component of the author’s examination of how the events of the Second World War have been shaped and reshaped is a short film clip shot in March 1943, depicting the deportation of Jews by Bulgarian police. Ragaru meticulously explores how this film was reinterpreted during the Cold War, served different political purposes, and proves the entanglements of memory politics and socialist rule in Bulgaria. Ultimately, the (re)interpretation of this short film scene is testimony to the propaganda function it fulfilled toward national and international audiences, promoting a view of the Bulgarian people and its authorities in accordance with the communist one-party system and its ideological aims of showcasing the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews.

The three chapters described above build up to the fourth, which focuses on European and transnational interpretations of the fate of the Jewish community in Bulgaria after the demise of communism and into the 2000s. New actors in memory politics emerge, encompassing the whole political spectrum, survivor organizations, as well as the Jewish communities in the United States and Israel. This demonstrates how, in a world reshaped by major global shifts, the politics of memory have contributed to a change in how the actors involved in both the rescue and deportation of Jews have been represented, and how certain figures who governed Bulgaria during the Second World War have been rehabilitated. Moreover, the reorganized political landscape sparked new disagreements in the international arena, involving divergent interpretations of the past in Bulgaria, North Macedonia, and the United States.

The book’s final chapter develops the argument outlined in the preceding one by further analyzing the conflicting narratives in Bulgaria and North Macedonia on the fate of their respective Jewish populations, and the role of the Bulgarian authorities within this context. The transnational function of policies of remembrance is illustrated through new academic discussions as well as museum representations of the Holocaust and its Bulgarian particularities in Europe, the United States, and Israel. This shows how a new generation of actors has emerged that, in the past two decades, has shaped the debate on both the survival and the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria and the territories it occupied during the war. It comes as no surprise that even the most recent debates and (re)interpretations have not led to any consensual narrative on the Holocaust in Bulgaria. Rather, the status quo prevails, entrenched, a veritable institutionalization of the differing views, both on the national and international stage.

In conclusion, Ragaru masterfully disentangles historical facts, myths, and constructions through a plethora of sources and archival material from several countries. She explores how events shaped subsequent knowledge and narratives, portraying these events in new lights, and giving the complexity of her knowledge about the Holocaust in Bulgaria a truly worthy frame. A flurry of protagonists step on and off the mnemonic stage, inspiring new interpretations and reevaluations, as the story unfolds in front of the reader’s eyes. Ragaru’s book is an important case study of the ways in which the history of the Holocaust has been shaped by policymakers, NGOs, testimonies, and victims, and how it has been reshaped as knowledge advanced and (political) framings changed. The book is well worth a read, challenging as it does the reader’s assumptions at every step, handing them the tools to form an opinion based on a truly in-depth and comprehensive piece of historical research.