Vasileva Nadejda

Vasileva, Nadejda Nadejda Svetoslav Hadji Vasileva was born in 1891, in Nikopol on the Danube and grew up as an orphan child among Jewish families who befriended her. The Bulgarian government had established anti-Jewish policies in 1941. But only after the establishment in August 1942 of the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, under Aleksander Belev’s pro-Nazi guidance, did the systematic persecution against the Jews increase in Bulgaria and the annexed territories as a prelude to their deportation to the death camps. According to the agreement signed between Belev and the German “specialist” for deportations, Theodor Dannecker, the Jews of Thrace were round up, assembled in temporary camps and deported in March 1943. The transport, which departed first to the port city of Lom on the Danube, lasted two weeks. There, the Jews were forced to wait three days in closed cars until their further deportation. Nadejda, who was living and working as a nurse in Lom, was shocked when she saw human heads and hands stretching out of the cars and heard shouts in Bulgarian, Turkish and Ladino: “Aren’t there any human people who will give us at least some water!” She immediately brought them water, food and others necessary thinks which she supplied with the aide of people nearby. When menaced by the Bulgarian gendarmes to stop it, she answered: “You may kill me, but let me give a drop of water to these poor people”. In doing so, she disobeyed orders and confronted authority, especially Slavi Pantev, the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs’ local delegate. Thanks to police director Stambolov’s protection, she wasn’t arrest and with the aide of the local Jewish community, she obtained permission from Pantev to distribute food to the Thracian Jews. Inside the wagons the smell was nauseating and the filth awful; one old man lay dead while a baby was being born. Some local Bulgarian Jewish women, Louisa Sabitaev, Malca Elkan and Esther Kapon, succeeded in coming near the lines, embraced her, and said weeping: “Your name will be written with golden letters in Jewish history.“ After those days in which Nadejda did all she could to ameliorate the starvation and anguish of the persecuted, more than 4,000 of them were transported by boats to Vienna, and then by train to the Treblinka death camp. On December 18, 2001, Yad Vashem recognized Nadejda Svetoslav Hadji Vasileva as Righteous Among the Nations.