It ‘s March 1941. The German war machine has been unbeatable. Bulgaria has been neutral, hopeful that it can regain territory lost in World War i and the Balkan Wars—without joining the Axis or the Allies. But the constitutional monarchy led by King Boris iii is in a precarious position of weakness. Many believe the king is a timid puppet figure. Other political parties are gaining strength. And Bulgaria is about to face a test of character hazarding tens of thousands of lives—and the honor of the Bulgarian people.

The previous year, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler had demanded that Bulgaria make a choice: Ally with Germany, let Nazi forces transit through Bulgaria, and receive new territories—or face invasion.

Bulgaria capitulated, and Hitler persuaded the Romanians to give Bulgaria the Dobrudja, a piece of land Bulgaria had ceded after losing World War i. King Boris took the land back and signed an agreement with Germany.

A few days later, the German Army traveled through Bulgaria to attack Greece and Yugoslavia. It quickly overran the two countries, and Hitler rewarded Bulgaria with two new provinces: Macedonia and Thrace. With the gains of territory, a wave of enthusiasm and patriotism surged through parts of the population. But the excitement soon passed, as something troubling set in: part of the cost of allying with Germany.

‘Laws for the Protection of the Nation’

As German influence in Bulgaria flourished, pro-Fascist politicians began to have their way. King Boris and the Bulgarian Parliament enacted what was called the “Law for the Protection of the Nation.” This law had protected the nation from a German invasion, but it did not protect Bulgaria’s Jews—it targeted them.

Based on Germany’s Nuremberg Racial Laws, the “protection” law severely limited the freedoms of approximately 50,000 Jews living in Bulgaria: It barred Jews from owning stores and from public service, identified Jewish houses with signs, and subjected Jews to a curfew.

But much of the population regarded the laws as a stain on the Bulgarian reputation. When Bulgaria had enshrined its constitution in 1879, it made Bulgarians, Turks, Jews and all others equal citizens under the law in every respect. The Bulgarians wanted to uphold that history.

Writers, doctors, artists, priests, shoemakers, farmers and Communists lashed back against the new law in a tidal wave of outrage. Many disobeyed the laws and found ways to protect the Jews.

Former government ministers also banded together and wrote to the parliament:

Poor Bulgaria! We are 7 million people, yet we so fear the treachery of 45,000 Jews who hold no positions of responsibility at the national level that we need to pass exceptional laws to protect ourselves from them. And then what? … Gentlemen. Decide now! Will you stand behind the Constitution and the Bulgarian people in defense of freedom, or will you march in step with the political mercenaries and bring shame on yourselves as you undermine our country’s life and future along the way?

Schoolkids rallied around their Jewish classmates, and business owners conducted secretive deals to allow Jewish store owners to keep their incomes.

But the laws remained. Bulgaria had avoided a German occupation. But they could not stop the rise of pro-Nazi politicians into positions of great power.

The Nazi

The most important of these leaders was Alexander Belev. In 1935, Belev had traveled to Berlin to study the notorious Nuremberg Racial Laws, on which the Bulgarian “protection” law was based. In January 1942, he attended the Wannsee Conference in Germany, where Nazis discussed implementing the “Final Solution” for the “Jewish problem:” mass extermination.

A few months later, the Commissariat of Jewish Affairs was established as a department of the Bulgarian government. Belev was the first chairman. Because of the widespread outrage among Bulgarians over the anti-Jewish laws, Belev worked swiftly and quietly.

In October 1942, Nazi authorities sent a message to Belev’s office in the capital city, Sofia: “Please approach the Bulgarian government and discuss with them the question of the evacuation of Jews stipulated by the new Bulgarian regulations …. We are ready to receive these Jews.”

Germany and Bulgaria’s plan was to start the “evacuation” with 12,000 Jews who lived in Macedonia and Thrace, the two areas the Nazis had given to Bulgaria in return for their alliance. Belev’s plan was even more insidious: Round the number up to an even 20,000, adding 8,000 Jews from “Old Bulgaria” to the death trains.

The plans were finalized on Feb. 22, 1943. Jews would be rounded up into tobacco warehouses around the nation. Trains would then transport them to concentration camps. On February 23, Belev traveled to the new lands of Thrace and Macedonia to organize the deportation of the Jewish population there. The key, he believed, was secrecy. “The deportation of the Jews,” he told Interior Minister Petur Gabrovski, “should be kept in strict confidence.”

But Liliana Panitsa, Belev’s secretary, couldn’t bear the disturbing secret. She alerted a Jewish friend of the upcoming plans. About the same time, an optician in Sofia had a chance encounter with a Jewish acquaintance. The optician was the brother-in-law of Gabrovski, one of the few men in Bulgaria who knew the plans. The optician received a bribe and revealed the plans. Over the next several days, Jews across Bulgaria learned of the rumors.

The rumors soon spread to Kyustendil. This tranquil hill town, set amidst orchards and wheat fields, lay near the mountainous border with Macedonia and far from the halls of power in the capital. This town of street vendors and family cafés was gripped by fear. They had heard of the terrible fate of Jews in other European countries.

The first week of March, residents caught sight of trains coming from Thrace. Historian Sandy Tolan describes the scene:

They were packed with Jews, crying out and begging for food. Shocked local residents and Jews interned in nearby work camps raced alongside the tracks, throwing bread into the cars as the trains rolled by. [One bishop wrote,] “In the freight wagons, there were old and young, sick and well, mothers with their nursing babies, pregnant women, packed like sardines and weak from standing; they cried out desperately for help, for pity, for water, for air, for a scrap of humanity” (The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East).

Those in Kyustendil and in the train cars did not know it at the time, but these trains were bound for two of the most infamous Nazi death camps: Treblinka and Auschwitz.

After hearing rumors, after seeing the trains, and after receiving orders to prepare supplies for deportation, the citizens of Kyustendil could have left it at that and awaited their fate. But they didn’t. They chose to send a group of men to Sofia to urge Parliament against the plans in person. The proposed group included a number of men, but several decided they did not want to take such drastic action. Only four decided to attempt it. The leader of this tiny group would be Asen Suichmezov, a storekeeper.

The Storekeeper

Suichmezov had traveled into Macedonia; he had seen Jews ripped from their property and deported to Poland. He had heard the rumors, and he was willing to take on the impossible mission.

Expectations of his success were not good, as Tolan describes in his book. Some Jewish friends passing his shop would say, “Goodbye Asen! We’re never going to see you again.” Others clung to hope and pressed him to meet with Parliament on their behalf. Not knowing if it were possible to save them, he agreed. “I had given my word to the Jews that I would defend them,” Suichmezov wrote years later. “And I would not back out.”

The group—Asen and three other informal delegates—set out. The plan was to go to the capital, Sofia, by rail, try to meet with Vice President of Parliament Dimitur Peshev and somehow convince him and the entire government to revoke an enormous plan that was already in motion.

They had less than 12 hours to make contact with the leaders of the nation, to convince them to immediately cancel the orders, to save the Jews, and to salvage their country’s honor.

Meanwhile, in other towns across Bulgaria, Jewish families were being rounded up into schoolyards, classrooms, tobacco warehouses, and other locations.

The Politician

In Sofia, Peshev was growing more and more disillusioned with the pro-Fascist politicians. He believed in democracy, in Bulgaria’s national ideas, in its constitution and in leaders who were more than just accomplices to the Nazis.

Along with the king, Peshev had believed that Bulgaria’s sovereignty depended on conceding to Germany and had voted for the Law for the Protection of the Nation. He had believed the law was temporary, would not be taken to extremes, and would not evacuate or destroy Jewish Bulgarians.

But too many rumors were stacking up. And now Asen Suichmezov was standing in his office. Dimitur Peshev could no longer deny the rumors. He was now faced with the biggest decision of his life: Preserve the alliance with the most powerful country in Europe, or rebel and risk invasion?

“I could not remain passive,” Peshev later wrote. “My conscience and understanding of the grave consequences both for the people involved and for my country did not allow it. It was then I made the decision to do everything in my power to prevent the execution of a plan that was going to compromise Bulgaria in the eyes of the world and brand it with a mark of shame that it did not deserve.”

But time was running out. At that point, late in the afternoon, some towns were already preparing to move the Jewish citizens of “Old Bulgaria” into the trains. Peshev thought their best chance was to go to the prime minster and challenge him to revoke the orders. He rushed to his office and requested entry. The prime minister refused. Peshev was fired from his post a couple weeks later.

Peshev returned quickly to the anxious group. Their next best—and possibly last—option was to storm the office of Interior Minister Petur Gabrovski.

The men strode into Gabrovski’s office and confronted him with the knowledge of the Jewish deportations. Gabrovski denied everything, but seemed nervous.

Peshev threatened to bring up the deportations and Belev’s agreement in Parliament, which would effectively mean announcing it to the Bulgarian population, who would be horrified at the stain on their country’s character. A national scandal would result, with Gabrovski’s name all over it. Gabrovski cracked but refused to rescind the order. He called for the decision to be made by the king.

The King

Prof. Michael Bar-Zohar, author of Beyond Hitler’s Grasp, a history of the Bulgarian Jews’ rescue, describes King Boris’s decision:

From the start, until that day, [King Boris] had been a very loyal and subdued vassal of the Germans. Up until that point, he had done everything the Germans could expect of him. He passed the Law for the Defense of the Nation, he created the Commissar for the “Jewish question,” he approved the head of the Commissar who was an ardent Nazi, he sent the Jews of Thrace and Macedonia to their deaths, and he actually approved the sending of 8,000 Bulgarian Jews as well. But on the 9th of March, 1943, when he had to make a decision, he changed his policy. And from this day, he realized that as King of the Bulgarians, he could not carry out such a policy.

The king blocked the deportation.

One Jewish man recalled walking to the train station with his baggage packed, passing sobbing neighbors on the way. Suddenly someone came running. “Turn back! There’s been a change.” The change? He no longer had to board a train headed to his death.

King Boris was later called directly into the office of the German chancellor. Hitler furiously demanded an explanation: Why were the Jews in Old Bulgaria still there and not in the Polish concentration camps? King Boris told the chancellor that Bulgaria’s Jews would instead be used to pave roads and work in labor camps.

King Boris sent the Jews to work in labor camps, using them as a front to keep them alive. Hitler grew suspicious enough of the king that he sent agents to secretly monitor the camps, one of whom wrote: “The efficiency of the Jewish work in construction of roads and railroads is minimal so far. In some of the camps, the Jews work for a few hours a day and can lead very pleasant lives. The Bulgarian government uses the inclusion of Jews in the work effort as the overall reason against the demand for the deportation to the east.”

Do Not Follow a Multitude to Do Evil

What happened in Bulgaria—one of the only countries in Europe to save nearly all its Jewish population—could not have occurred without what one Bulgarian-French intellectual called the “fragility of goodness.” If Belev’s secretary had not committed the good act of reporting the plans to her Jewish friends; if Asen Suichmezov had not boarded a train on the night of March 8 to attempt an almost impossible task; if Dimitur Peshev had waited until the next day to be convicted by his conscience; if King Boris had deliberated for a few hours before revolting against Nazi policy, nearly 50,000 Bulgarian Jews would have perished. And their blood would have stained Bulgaria. Instead, a few of the most ordinary of ordinary citizens and a handful of politicians changed history.

In doing so, they provided a vivid demonstration of the command in Exodus 23:2: “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.” While many thousands of Bulgarians were outraged by the anti-Jewish laws, in the end, it was four—four ordinary citizens who boarded the train to Sofia to do something, even if that something was impossible. In Macedonia and Thrace, the Bulgarians were so compliant that 11,000 to 12,000 Jews were in fact sent to their deaths at Treblinka.

Implicit in Moses’s command was not only that we don’t “follow a multitude to do evil,” but that we actively work against it. In an age where truth is likewise “cast to the ground,” those who bear the name of Christian cannot merely disagree, but must openly strive against lies and evil. If Asen Suichmezov had simply consoled his Jewish friends, if Dimitur Peshev had merely hated the idea of the Jewish deportation, or if King Boris merely disagreed with Hitler in his diary, thousands more Jews would have gone to their deaths—and tens of thousands of their descendants would not be alive today. It took not just thought but action to save them.

When your individual time comes, ask yourself: Will you be the ordinary citizen who disagrees inwardly, or will you be the extraordinary citizen who stands up and takes action?