The Shoah (1939–1945)
Roundup and deportation of the Jews of Skopje
mars 1943·Skopje
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
The Jews of the city, arrested in a single night by Bulgarian authorities, are locked in the Monopoly tobacco warehouse before leaving in three convoys toward the East.
Skopje was home to the largest Jewish community in Macedonia, Sephardic and still speaking Judeo-Spanish, settled there since the expulsion from Spain. The partition of Yugoslavia placed the province under Bulgarian administration, a regime that protected the Jews of its pre-war territory but agreed to hand over those of the annexed lands. In the early hours of the eleventh day of March, the Bulgarian police surrounded the Jewish quarters of Skopje and arrested the entire community. The families were locked inside the State Monopoly tobacco warehouse on the outskirts of the city, where they were held for weeks in conditions of extreme overcrowding. From there, at the end of the month, three convoys departed eastward. Almost no one returned.
- Period :
- The Shoah (1939–1945)
- Type :
- Shoah
- Region :
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Country :
- Macédoine du Nord
Jaša Romano, *Jevreji Jugoslavije* ; Frederick Chary, *The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution* ; Zvi Loker (dir.), *Pinkas Hakehillot Yugoslavia*, Yad Vashem.