Kostov Atanas

Kostov, Atanas Dr. Atanas Kostov was born in 1900 in Resen, Macedonia. After the Bulgarians’ insurrection against the Turks and the resultant atrocities, the family moved to Sofia, in 1903. Atanas studied medicine in Graz (Austria) and worked in provincial towns in Bulgaria. He married Ivanka Merdzhanova in 1934 and had two children. In 1941 during WWII, Dr. Atanas Kostov was sent to Skopie (Macedonia), then part of the new Bulgarian administered territories, where he took charge of the medical services organization. Between the physicians and pharmacists whom he met there, were also some Jews, who fell victim to the anti-Jewish legislation implemented by the Bulgarian government in the new territories of Macedonia and Thrace. Dr. Kostov opposed this discrimination policy, and offered his Jewish colleagues opportunities to work in small and far out places. An agreement was next signed between Eichmann’s representative, Theodor Dannecker and the pro-Nazi Bulgarian Comissioner for Jewish Affairs, Aleksander Belev, for the deportation of the Jews. In February-March 1943, the Bulgarian police, assembled more than 7,000 Jews in the Tabasco Depot “Monopol” camp in Skopie for deportation to the death camps. Dr. Kostov, however, succeeded in freeing his friends with their families, in total, 58 Jews. He had written insistently to Bulgarian government officials warning of the spread of epidemics if the Jewish medical professionals would be deported. After getting negative answers from the Police director in Skopie and from the Interior and Health Ministries, Dr. Kostov went personally to Sofia to obtain their freedom, threatening to present his demission. After a few days, the German Consul in Skopie reported to Berlin about the order sent from Sofia to free the Jewish physicians and pharmacists from the camp. As the Jews didn’t agree to leave without their families, Dr. Kostov renewed his efforts to free them as well. After a few days, he finally received thenecessary order from the Bulgarian government, and all of them, with their families, were saved. Dr. Kostov, a good-hearted and aristocratic man, hadn’t abandoned his Jewish colleagues. After the war, under the Communist regime, they praised and supported Dr. Kostov until his death in 1961. On April 4, 2002, Yad Vashem recognized Atanas Kostov as Righteous Among the Nations.