The deportation of some 600 Jews from Drama was part of a pattern that also encompassed Jews from other cities in northern Greece, an area under Bulgarian control at the time. On March 4, 1943, Drama was surrounded by Bulgarian army forces. [1] In the early hours of the morning, seventy-seven three-man squads (police and soldiers) fanned out among the homes of the city’s Jewish population.[2] They gave the occupants 30 minutes to prepare and then marched them to the Monopol tobacco warehouse, which the Bulgarian authorities had reconfigured as a detention camp (the tobacco warehouses were empty at this time of the year). Immediately upon entering the warehouse the Jews underwent a body search in which all the currency and valuables they had brought with were seized. A detailed report on the operation and on the confiscated valuables was drawn up by the local police commander responsible for executing the action, Tsvetan Gruev.[3]
Over the next two days, the Jews of Drama were loaded onto two freight trains bound for Bulgaria. The first group, comprising most of the city’s Jews, were transported on March 5. The next day, the remaining 125 Jews were herded onto a train that arrived at Sidirokastro, near the old Greek-Bulgarian border, at 9:20 P.M. This train also carried some 900 Jews from Komotini and about forty from Alexandroupoli.[4] Due to differences in the track gauge, the Jewish prisoners were transferred, at midnight, to two other trains with smaller open boxcars, amid which they were subjected to acts of brutality by the Bulgarian troops and police.[5] Huddled together, they stood in the open cars in freezing weather.
The first train pulled out at 1:20 A.M., the second at 3:55 A.M., both bound for the town of Simitli, across the Bulgarian border.[6] The journey lasted several hours. On the way the trains passed close to Jewish forced laborers from Bulgaria who were working on a new rail line between Sidirokastro, in Greece, and Simitli. Some of them threw food from their own meager rations into the open cars.[7] In Simitli, all the Jews were again transferred to another train, bound for temporary detention camps in Bulgaria. The Jews of Drama were taken to the city of Gorna Dzhumaya (Blagoevgrad), where they joined the Jews of Drama and Seres who had arrived the day before. There, they were interned in temporary assembly sites: two local schools and a tobacco warehouse.[8] They remained there in packed, harsh conditions for almost two weeks, together with Jews who had been transported from elsewhere....