‘We can create a better world’: Holocaust survivor discusses growing up in Bulgaria, combating antisemitism

When Bulgaria joined the Axis alliance in World War II, Holocaust survivor Albert Farhy heard a strange noise outside the apartment he lived in with his family in Bulgaria. He soon realized the noise came from a lot of people marching through the streets, shouting the phrase “Death to the Jews, Death to America.” 

“The fear that I felt, I never in my life felt again,” Farhy said. “I was feeling that this is the end, they are coming here to kill us.”

Hillel at Pitt, Zachor, Chabad at Pitt and Alpha Epsilon Pi teamed up to host two days of Holocaust remembrance programming in honor of Yom HaShoah. They concluded Monday’s events with a conversation with Farhy at the Hillel Jewish University Center of Pittsburgh in Oakland. During the conversation, Farhy discussed his experience as a teenager living in Bulgaria during the Holocaust and answered questions from attendees. 

Ilan Gordon, a sophomore exercise science major and co-president of Zachor, said it’s important to remember the victims of the Holocaust and their stories in order to “never let something similar ever happen again.” He said Zachor strives to end antisemitism one post, one meeting, one event and one story at a time. 

“With your help, we can create a better world for everyone with less bigotry, racism and hate,” Gordon said. 

Farhy said during the rise of Adolf Hitler, antisemitism spread throughout Europe like an “epidemic.” Farhy attended Hebrew middle school in Bulgaria and said he felt “depressed” when he saw things such as “Death to the Jews,” written on the chalkboard. 

“My father told me once, ‘You are just born in this era, and you do not know what it was [like] before that. I want you to know that this is new to me also. This did not exist in Bulgaria. We were like brothers. Jews and Bulgarians were living in peace without expression of antisemitism,’” Farhy said. 

At the time, Farhy lived in a five-story building in Sofia — the capital of Bulgaria — composed of both Jewish and Bulgarian residents. He said the Gestapo occupied the space next to his building on one side, and the ministry for the persecution of the Jews on the other side. When the government ordered Jewish people to leave Sofia, Farhy said his family traveled to the railroad station with another family where children and their parents had to separate into different cars that took them to a “ghetto” outside the capital. 

“When we arrived in the middle of the night in the town, the president of the Jewish community there greeted us and took us in [to] his house,” Farhy said. “In his house, in each room, a family [had] to live because they were coming more and more each day.” 

Farhy said his father eventually got permission to move their family to another ghetto in Bulgaria where their relatives lived. Three days after a regime change occurred in the Bulgarian government, the Russian army came to free the Jews living in the ghetto Farhy’s family resided in at the time. Farhy added that the entire Jewish community greeted the Russian army upon their arrival. 

“The whole Jewish community was in the square where the day before that we were not permitted to step in,” Farhy said. “The restrictions were awful.” 

An attendee asked Farhy how the Holocaust impacted his faith in God. Farhy said he’s a secular Jew and very interested in science. He said he believes in God but in his “own way.”

“I’m strongly Jewish without being strongly religious,” Farhy said. “The Bulgarian society was Christian, but they were not overly religious like the Polish people.” 

Farhy said most Bulgarians didn’t hold hatred toward Jewish people like in the other European countries. 

“It was fashionable to hate the Jews, but it was not in their hearts,” Farhy said. 

Farhy concluded the event by explaining that the best way students can combat antisemitism is by being friendly.

“Be patient with the person that is antisemitic,” Farhy said. “Engage him in conversation, peaceful conversation, and try to convince him that it is not good for him to have in his heart hate towards those people.”