The Beauty of You and Us Together

art, Folk Dance, Music, Truth and Beauty

 

 

On our last night in Bulgaria, in the evening after dinner on the boat Avalon Passion, a folk dance troop attended at our boat to present a program of Bulgarian folk dancing.  I did not have my camera handy, but I used my phone to take a few photos. It was a group of young men and women and 2 musicians and a very interesting leader. The leader of the group, in introducing the group, waxed philosophical and mystical.  She said that Bulgaria compares to a beautiful woman.  Everyone wants it and is prepared to fight over it. Sadly, that has been its history.

She said that Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist who is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century. According to Bartók, Bulgarian folk music has only uneven beats. And Bulgaria she said, is keeping to its tradition. Bulgaria itself has only uneven beats. Later I checked Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge, and it said

 

“Bulgarian folk music is known for its asymmetrical rhythms (defined by the famous Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist Béla Bartók as “Bulgarian rhythms”), where meter is split into uneven combinations of short (two metric units) and long (three metric units) beats, corresponding to the dancers’ short and long steps. In European folk music, such asymmetrical rhythms are commonly used in Bulgaria, Greece, elsewhere in the Balkans, and less commonly in Norway and Sweden.”

 

I freely acknowledge I find this completely mystifying, but somehow the dancing, the music, and the explanation felt deeply satisfying. I particularly liked the exercises in jubilation where the women danced and shouted “yeah, yeah.” To me they seemed like shrieks of joy from  gleeful dancers in the glory of youth. I loved the performance.

But there was more to the dance. According to the director of the dance troupe, what we celebrated tonight was that the troupe and us, the audience, celebrated the  beauty of “you’ and “us” together,” she said. 36 years ago, during Communism in Bulgaria we could not do that. Today we could celebrate that truth is beauty and beauty is truth. We now, since the time of the fall of communism,  have the capacity to speak the truth without fear of government reprisal.

As our Romanian guide Zio would have said, with gusto, it was all excellent.

Uncovering the Buried Truth

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Bulgaria, Modern History

 

Josh Arthurs in the Department of History at the University of Toronto worked together collaboratively with Lilia Topouzova on their project of bringing to light what happened in the concentration camps of Bulgaria during the years of Russian dominance.

 

Their project was to recreate the life and experience and memories of people who lived through the Bulgarian Gulag. After the collapse of communism in the late 80s and early 90s the records of the camp quickly disappeared.

 

Professor Josh Arthurs explained how that happened:

 

“It took them about several months to do so, and about 40 percent of the operational archive of the Ministry of the Interior was purged. What’s really amazing, though, is that together with colleagues, I found the order that set the purge. So, in fact, we have the kind of transcripts and the order by the Minister of the Interior then that set the purge in motion.

And here’s what we know. Very clearly, the Minister said, “Belene, the name of the camp, should vanish as a system, as a symbol of the repressive system. Belene, the main forced labor camp, should vanish as a symbol of the repressive system.”

So we know that information on the camps was a priority. We can never know for certain what documents were purged. It’s very hard to know that.

 

But we know that they wanted to get rid of evidence.”

 

 

Even after the communist regime collapsed the officials left behind, wanted to hide what happened there. They did not want the truth to come out. Arthurs said that he  and  Lilia Topouzova wanted to “unvanish, undisappear the records of the lives of people who suffered through the Gulag”

 

Topouzova was a graduate student at the time at the University of Toronto, working in England when she noticed a black and white photograph in the Robert Library there. It was a photograph of a labour camp guard.  She was able to read it because she was born in Bulgaria and of course learned the language. The first 11 years of her life had been spent there while she was a member of communist Lenin Youth. She was proud of her position until her world collapsed with the collapse of the communist regime. Years later when she saw that photograph, she decided she had to go back to Bulgaria to find out what happened to that guard.

 

When she got back to Bulgaria she went to the University of Sofia and was browsing through the book store. She did not find any obvious books about the camps so asked a clerk in the store where she might find them. Amazingly, the clerk asked her “What camps?” And this was in a university book store, where one think they knew.

 

Topouzova did not give up after that rebuff. She knew the clerk was wrong. Either lying or in denial or ignorant. There was no evidence even though everyone had been aware of the camps. There was no evidence of the camps in the Bulgarian museums. It was as if none of it had ever happened.

 

It took 20 years but Lilia Topouzova and her partners did not give up. They found the truth and to the extent the survivors have consented to its display, they have revealed the truth to the world. The evil is no longer hidden.

 

I am grateful for the work Lilia Topouzova, Julian Shehirian and Krasmira Butsova have done to prevent that truth from not being told.  I thank the CBC for telling this story. I hope that in time, despite efforts by people like Donald Trump to hide such truths, other brave and diligent people will appear to uncover such truths to the extent they are covered up.

 

In conclusion this brings me back to the current movement in the United States, though we feel reverberations of it here in Canada, that American children and even adults for that matter, should not be taught things that might make them feel uncomfortable about things their ancestors did in America. Such people think that avoiding discomfort for people today should have priority over uncovering the truth. Better to let the truth rot under the ground than cause any modern American to feel anything less than enthusiastic support for anything people in their country have done. Forget about injustice. Move on to sunny days. Be happy. And how different is it here in Canada?

 

So instead, people are encouraged to forget about truths. This is particularly true when people try to hide truths that reflect poorly on current society and its people in power.  Let the Trumpsters be happy at all costs.  Ignorant but happy. That is what Bulgaria did, even after the communist regime collapsed and that is what Americans are encouraged to do today. They think silence is golden. It’s not.

 

Evangelical Enemies of the state in Bulgaria

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Concentration Camps, Evangelical Christianity, Rebellion and Resistance

 

There was another aspect of these concentration camps that interested me and was not discussed on the CBC radio show. They had some very peculiar enemies that included, of all people, Christian Evangelical Pastors. How could they possibly be dangerous?

 

The Belene labour camp located on an island in the Danube River in which we sailed, had about 2,323 inmates at the height of the repression in 1952.  Most of them were men, but about 75 were women. The prisoners included Bulgarian Turks who resisted the official policy of forcing the Turks to change their names and surnames to Bulgarian names. Go figure. The Bulgarians wanted the Turks to be assimilated, much like Canadian educational authorities wanted Indigenous boys and girls to be assimilated in Canada’s residential schools. Probably, just as in Canada, the authorities thought they were doing this for their own good.

 

From 1949 on, in Bulgaria, Evangelical Christian pastors were also targeted as “enemies of the State.” There was an infamous trial in which 13 such Pastors were tried at a Show Trial, convicted, and sent to the Belene concentration camp in the Danube River.

 

One of them, was Haralan Popov who survived the experience later and founded a mission called “Door of Hope International” to bring Bibles behind the Iron Curtain. He published his autobiography in a book called Tortured to Death for His Faith. I am not sure why he called it that, since he survived to write about it. Its Bulgarian title was The Bulgarian Golgotha. I guess he thought he was Christ-like.

 

But why would they attack pastors?  According to a Google AI search, it was “because their faith and activities were seen as “a challenge and alternative to the official state ideology of atheism and communist control.”  Again, according to Google AI, “In essence, any form of independent association, loyalty to an authority other than the state (God or foreign church leaders), or independent thought was perceived as an existential threat to the communist regime’s absolute control over all aspects of society.” Apparently, some of the pastors were even tortured to induce them to confess their sins against the state.

 

Authoritarians don’t like rebellion and invariably deal with it harshly.  Rebellion is always a threat to the regime. Even from pastors.

Little Siberia: The Bulgarian Gulag

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Authoritarianism, Concentration Camps, History

 

This smoke stack was not, as far as I know, part of a concentration camp. but when I saw it I wondered about it.

On the CBC radio show Ideas, Nahlah Ayed also interviewed Krasmina Butseva, a visual artist, researcher and a senior lecturer at the University of the Arts, London.  She was another member of the team working on The Neighbours as a response to the Bulgarian Gulag. She explained what happened when the installation was first staged for the first time in Sofia, Bulgaria.  Most of the people who visited it spent the most time in the kitchen. That really felt like home to them.

The Bulgarian gulag functioned between 1945 and 1962, primarily. But it was never completely closed.

The Bulgarian gulag was modelled on the Soviet gulag. It’s the same kind of principle. People are sent to a forced labor camp without a trial, without a sentence. They were sent indefinitely in other words. Bulgaria became known after 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as “little Siberia.”

 

And the living conditions were excruciating. There was forced labor, there were hardships, there was disease, starvation. And of course, in some cases death. Not systemic murder as in Nazi Germany but many perished in the horrid conditions of the Bulgarian camps.

 

It’s a very painful experience. Bulgaria is a country of about 7 million people, 110,000 square kilometers. There were about 40 forced labor camp complexes in Bulgaria, so about 80 individual sites. I was shocked by the number.

Krasmina Butseva explained that forced labour occurred entirely without trials. Once Bulgaria was absorbed into the Soviet Block the country was quickly Stalinized and that meant extra-judicial internment and severe repression. Authoritarians always see courts and law as an unnecessary restraint. Usually, it meant no specific sentence. They were imprisoned at the pleasure of the regime until shadowy officials decided the prisoner could be released usually without explanation. Absolute power never has to explain.

The first question of course, is who were these people who were sent to the Gulags of Bulgaria? According to Butseva, the inmates were “enemies. Perceived enemies, alleged enemies. But there are many different categories.”  In most cases the victims were part of the left in Bulgaria. Political dissidents on the non-Communist left. You might have thought a communist regime would pick on the right, but that is not how it worked.  They imprisoned more on the left. That shows me what I always thought, the communist were more fascists than socialists.

Others victims included social democrats, anarchists, members of the agrarian party. Often Trotskyites, and in time other Communists who fell out favor with the party. The regime protected their own so long as they remained loyal to those in control of the party. Again, as we are learning in North American political leaders with an authoritarian bent value nothing more than loyalty. Next, some of the victims who were “invited to stay” included peasants who lived on the land and became “enemies” if they no longer supported those in control. Their defiance made them “enemies.” If they refused to give up their farms to the collective, they became enemies. Rebels could not be tolerated.

Non-conformists were also enemies. These were people who defied social norms and included men who let their hair grow long, listened to western music, liked dancing. Young girls often wore miniskirts and included those who wore hair styles the party elite did not favor. They were seen as political opponents. Then there were ethnic “enemies” like Muslims and Roma people.

Butseva explained that the last wave of Muslim and Roma were sent to the gulag between 1984 and 1987 when communist Bulgaria interned about 500 Muslim men to the camp for forced labour. They used many camps but the one used the most was called Belene Island located in the Danube River. Unfortunately, I never got to see it. The organizers did not think tourists would be interested in former concentration camps, or more likely, the current government did not want to talk about the camps.

One thing surprised me. This is what Lilia Topouzova said about it:

 

“When you visit the site of the former camp, this beautiful island, Belene Island, on the Danube between Bulgaria and Romania, I mean, it’s a striking place. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place. And the sound of it is beautiful as well.”

 

I love beautiful islands, but I this one I did not get to see, or even hear about.

The communist government of Bulgaria used camp internment to get rid of opponents when they were not able to use traditional judicial means because they could not charge them with ordinary crimes. For example, if they could not find sufficient evidence to charge them in the criminal system, they could intern them without the inconvenience of a trial. If people did nothing wrong, the regime could use that process to punish or control them anyway. That’s how autocracies work. And around the world it seems government are turning in that direction. Not good.

Some people are bored with history. I think its important to learn about things like concentration camps, even though they were unpleasant and we were on a holiday, but I hope if we learn more we won’t make such mistakes again.

Love of Country in Bulgaria, Canada, or the United States

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Abuse of Power, Bulgaria, Concentration Camps, Death of Truth, History, Social Justice, Truth Seeking

It was at the University of Toronto that Lilia Topouzova and her colleagues Julian Shehirian and Krasmira Butsova, recreated spaces from a Bulgarian home and turned them into an immersive audio installation where Concentration camp survivors’ voices and their silences could live on. Their installation is called The Neighbors. It was the official Bulgarian entry to the 2024 Venice Biennale. That showed that Bulgaria was now dealing with this issue, after decades of silence. We heard small snippets from the audio in the CBC Ideas radio show. In the autumn of 2023 it had its North American debut in a small room on the campus of the University of Toronto.

The room is based on 20 years of research that Topouzova and her eventual interviews with survivors. The original project was done in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Julian Chakurian, was a partner in the project. She is a historian in training doing a PhD in the history of science at Princeton university and also is a multimedia artist with an interest in archives and expositions of what she called “wayward histories.” Too many stories have been lost. Gone for good.

This is what she said about her recordings of the survivors:

 “Based on the oral histories that I recorded, there were three categories of Camp Survivor narratives. There were the narratives of the people who had always told their story. There were very few of them, but these are the kind of practiced narrators. That was one way of remembering the Gulag. The second way of remembering the Gulag were people who still had memories of their experiences, but they had never told them before. Some people had never shared their story, because usually nobody asked them, but they remembered everything, and they usually had chronicles of their experiences, little notes that they had taken down.    And the third category, and that is the most painful category, is of those who couldn’t speak. There was no language. There were no words.”

 

This was a very disturbing description of the survivors in this last category.  One can only imagine the suffering that spawned their condition. As a result, this is what the 3 researchers did:

 

“I knew they had been sent to camps. I could see many of them had their files, but they couldn’t express. Based on these three categories that emerged from the oral histories from the scholarly research, we decided to recreate three different rooms to illustrate the different ways of remembering trauma.”

 

Again, I want to bring this into the modern political arena even though that might be uncomfortable to some privileged Canadians or Americans or their offspring. Imposed silence is definitely not golden.  Nor should the survivors be maliciously misrepresented as people who are maligning their country, as Donald Trump and the Trumpsters are doing in American with their American descendants of enslaved people, and indigenous people. Or women who experienced sexual assaults or violence or systemic racism in that country. Or Canada. Or members of the LGBTQ community,  who have suffered systemic injustice and discrimination for decades. It is a horrible defamation of their suffering by  a privileged sector of their society who call them haters of their country. And again, we have similar men in our country as well. Men who want to hide the truth. We even have women who want to hide the truth.

 

Try to bring the truth out of darkness into light is not an act of hate against one’s country. Trying to get your country to recognize what happened there and admit that is an act of love. That is not hate. If you want to hide the truth of what happened in your country from its people, or others,  that is an act of hate. If you love your country you would never do that.

 

The Sounds of their Silent Memories: Lilia Topouzova

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Bulgaria, Concentration Camps, Death of Truth, History, Truth Seeking

During the Communist era in Bulgaria from 1946 to 1989 there was little room for political dissent. Protesters, anyone who opposed the government, could be arrested, sent to the Gulag, and silenced. Silence was often the point.  The powerful members of the Communist party brooked no public dissent in order to preserve their authority. They wanted silence. They demanded silence. And some of the victims, even after the regime was dismantled, had nothing left to offer other than silence. It was if they had lost the capacity to speak.

 

This really proved the truth of what the  Czechoslovakian writer Milan Kundera once said:

 

 

The CBC radio show Ideas, described the work of Lilia Topouzova this way:

 

For 20 years, Lilia Topouzova has been collecting the stories of those who survived: some had many stories, some had little to say, some had nothing to say — or just no way of saying it. From these eloquent stories she has recreated a Bulgarian room from the Communist era, where her meetings and conversations with survivors can be heard, a space about the absence of memory and what that does to a people, a space to bear witness to those who were sent to the camps, but who were everyone’s friends, relatives and neighbours. The installation The Neighbours is the official Bulgarian entry to the 2024 Venice Biennale.|

Bulgaria has at long last come to own the history of Bulgaria. As a filmmaker, Lilia naturally employs sounds to tell her stories, but this was difficult because many of the survivors did not want to be heard or seen, and neither did the new regime in Bulgaria.  How then to tell their story respectfully?  That was the challenge of her and her team.  She concluded that “this story was fundamentally about sound, about whispers, about hesitation, and the sound of a room where someone simply cannot speak. “She has spent more than two decades studying the Bulgarian Gulag, excavating a history that has been deliberately silenced.”

 

Obviously, that was a very difficult task.  Bringing this story up to our times, it is a stark reminder, that when the forces of darkness try to muzzle the truth, or hide the truth, or even, destroy the truth, as many are doing around the world, even in the United States, much to our current surprise, we must all realize that if those dark forces are allowed to be successful any later job of restoration will be extremely difficult. Whether in Bulgaria, the United States or Canada, for that reason, we must be vigilant to resist those powers of darkness, even if it is challenging.

 

As the CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed said, “Lilia is fascinated by what lives inside silence.”  By that she meant inside both the silence of survivors and the authorities. The victims often came to visit Topouzova, but then did not speak. They kept silent, because it was uncomfortable for them to speak about the horrors they had experienced.  Sometimes they came to see her with their files but could not speak.

 

I was struck by the similarities to what survivors of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools said. They too were often reluctant to speak. Who can blame them? Dredging up painful incidents and practices is never easy. Sometimes silence seems like the only bearable response. We must respect those survivors who are brave enough and strong enough to speak, for only by hearing those words can the rest of us learn about what happened. And we need to learn what happened so that we never let it happen again. We must cherish those who are able to speak, for the benefits they bestow upon us.

 

Topouzova said,

 

“They didn’t want to talk to me about the camp. They wanted to talk to me about the weather, about Canada. I was also beginning to recognize that the camps are a kind of a present absence.”

 

It is hardly surprising, under such circumstances, how difficult it is to bring to the light such horrible events. The camps were truly chambers of horror. Consequently, Topouzova said this about the camps,

“Everybody knows they existed. Nobody wants to talk about them, at least directly. So, I’ve had conversations with people about ordinary things, like the weather and mosquitoes, for instance.”

 

In some cases it took years for victims to speak. That’s how horrible the experience was. We must be grateful to them for sharing.

 

Silence is not Golden

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Concentration Camps, Death of Truth, History, Modern History, Truth Seeking

 

 

This island in the Danube River was benign. Other islands were not that.

Right in the middle of the Danube River, on an idyllic island the main Bulgarian concentration camp was located. That island was called Belene  and it was the main forced labour camp of  a network of concentration camps in Bulgaria  that now is largely ignored by the current government, even though it is no longer a communist government. That struck me as odd. Why the silence?

 

No one mentioned it to me on our cruise either. No one mentioned it on any of our excursions. It was as if it never happened.

 

According to Lillia Topouzova, “Very clearly the [Bulgarian Interior ] minister said, Belene should vanish as a symbol of the repressive system.”

 

No one wanted to be reminded what happened there. Even the victims were not keen on bringing up painful memories. At least, at first. Topouzova on the other hand, was very interested in the silence of both oppressors and oppressed and everyone else in between. She respected the silence of the victims. And she was very patient. As she said,

 

“There was no language. There were no words. I knew they had been sent to camps. I could see many of them had their files, but they couldn’t express. And the silence of those who lived near the camps, but learned to never acknowledge their existence. They didn’t want to talk to me about the camp. They wanted to talk to me about the weather, about Canada. I was also beginning to recognize that the camps are a kind of a present absence. Everybody knows they existed. Nobody wants to talk about them, at least directly. So I’ve had conversations with people about ordinary things, like the weather and mosquitoes, for instance.”

 

It was hardly surprising that I had never heard of the Bulgarian Gulag. It was no accident. It was deliberately kept a secret supposedly to protect the Bulgarian society’s reputation, but really to protect the reputations of the powerful. Now I really want to see them. I knew we would sail very close to the island where one of the main camps was located.

 

But Lilia Topouzova, and her two fellow researchers, were determined to ferret out the truth and bring what really happened into the light of day, but only if that met with the approval of the victims she interviewed. She worked very hard to respect their wishes.

 

It took her 20 years to amass the story. That was the sound of silence. And it was not golden, but it was fruitful.

 

Bulgaria’s Gulag

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Authoritarianism, Concentration Camps

 

“Gulag” was a word used to describe the brutal concentration camps of Soviet Russia.

I listened to a fascinating CBC Ideas Podcast entitled “Voices of a Silenced history: Inside Bulgaria’s Gulag,” on a topic dear to my heart. The topic was the efforts of those in power to try to drive history to ignore what they don’t like and twist the truth to paint themselves in a better light.  This is a common occurrence. Currently this is what the American conservative movement is doing vigorously, thanks to the endorsements of the president of that country, who has many truths about himself that he wants to keep hidden.

 

Lilia Topouzova is a documentary filmmaker and a historian at the University of Toronto whose work is focused on the afterlives of political violence and the relationship between remembering and forgetting. As it happens, CBC Ideas aired this story just before we were travelling to Bulgaria. My ears perked up when I heard that.

 

Topouzova felt she was the perfect person to tell this story, since she was born and raised in Bulgaria. This is how she introduced herself:

 

“In order to get anyone to tell you a story, you need to encounter the person. You need to see the person. So when you’re making a film in Eastern Europe, or when you’re conducting research as a scholar in Eastern Europe, you need to be able to A, drink, B, smoke, and C, eat a lot.

And so, you know, maybe as a younger person, I was good at all these three things. But more than anything, I think it’s about also letting people know who you are.”

 

Lilia Topouzova has some amazing standards. She said that she never records anything with people until she has spent at least a year with them. She was also very sensitive to people who had experienced trauma, and many of the people she interviewed had definitely experienced trauma.

 

For 2 decades Topouzova has been studying things the Bulgarian establishment wants to keep in the dark.  They do not want any light shone upon them, much like many American conservatives do not want to hear anything about racism in their perfect country, nor exploitation of labour, and much like many Canadians don’t want to hear anything about what happened in Canada’s Residential Schools, at least no more than they have already heard, which is too much. Power does not like to hear anything that might besmirch its reputation. That is why to them ignorance is sacred in the words of James Baldwin.

 

Topouzova has been studying something I never heard of before, the Bulgarian Gulag, which according to Nahlah Ayed, the CBC host of Ideas, is “a history that has been deliberately silenced.”

After the communists from Russia took over the government of Bulgaria in 1944 they began to eliminate their political opponents as best they could. That is what authoritarians like to do, as we are now finding out. They started that right after their coup d’état in 1944. The new Bulgarian government implemented a policy of terror and intimidation across the country. In fact, the mass purge organized by Bulgarian authorities was the most brutal among all USSR satellite countries. By autumn that year, between 20,000-40,000 people were murdered or imprisoned without any trial. They were, among others, members of local authorities, notables, teachers, Orthodox priests and traders.

 

Officials at all levels were expelled with justifications ranging from retribution for past offences and the “fight against fascism”. Again, sadly, this now sounds very familiar to us even in North America. Some of the officials associated with the previous government were arrested as early as September 9 1944. As we have learned recently, authoritarians or ‘wanne’ be authoritarians, like to impose revenge on their enemies. In Bulgaria, many of them were deported to the USSR where they could be dealt with expeditiously.  About 130 “show trials” as we have come to call them, were held from December 1944 to June 1945. They were called “People’s Tribunals” to make them sound innocuous. Many of the so-called “judges” had no legal education or experience. About 10,000 people were accused, including members of the ruling Bulgarian dynasty, royal councillors, most of the cabinet ministers of the 1941 government, members of parliament, officers, policemen, city mayors, businessmen, lawyers, judges, journalists, and so on. About 2,700 of them were sentenced to death, more than 1,200 to life imprisonment and about 1,600 to long-term imprisonment.