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Survivor: Aaron M. Cohen

“Get your things. Let’s go,” the policemen ordered. Aaron (then Henri) Cohen, his parents and his younger brother gathered some belongings from their apartment in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and began walking toward the Jewish school, about a mile away.
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April 2, 2015

“Get your things. Let’s go,” the policemen ordered. Aaron (then Henri) Cohen, his parents and his younger brother gathered some belongings from their apartment in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and began walking toward the Jewish school, about a mile away. There, about 600, Aaron estimates, of Plovdiv’s approximately 5,000 Jews were confined in the schoolyard, where they sat weeping and praying. It was March 10, 1943. Earlier that year, Bulgaria had signed a secret agreement with Germany to ship 20,000 Jews to concentration camps in Poland, more than 11,000 from the Bulgarian-occupied territories of Thrace and Macedonia, and 8,000 from Bulgaria proper. But the agreement was no longer secret. “We knew we were going to a certain death,” Aaron said. He was 13.

Aaron was born on Dec. 18, 1929, in Gorna Dzhumaya, Bulgaria, to Mois and Esther Cohen. He had one brother, Amnon, born in 1936. Mois worked in the family businesses — tobacco, furs and horses — and they lived comfortably. 

In 1934, the family moved to a duplex in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second-largest city, where Esther’s family resided and where the upstairs neighbor, a wealthy Greek woman, doted on Aaron. “We lived in Disneyland,” he said.

Two years later, they moved to a fourplex, whose residents included two Armenian families and a Bulgarian landlady. A Turkish family lived across the street. “Everyone got along,” Aaron said.

Mois worked for The Brothers Benjamin Levy, a china and crystal import-export business. From ages 9 to 11, Aaron sometimes accompanied his father on daylong business trips. During the summers, he worked in the company’s spacious retail store, selling merchandise to some of Plovdiv’s wealthiest women. He also attended Jewish summer camp, and, from ages 7 to 13, Jewish school. 

Aaron always sensed an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in Bulgaria. He took it in stride until one day, in November 1938, when one of the storeowners returned from a buying trip to Berlin, where he had witnessed the violence that came to be known as Kristallnacht. “We’re in trouble,” Aaron overheard him tell Mois.

By this time, Bulgaria’s King Boris III had begun aligning the country with Nazi Germany, succumbing to pressure from Hitler and from Nazi sympathizers within Bulgaria and desiring to regain control of Macedonia and Thrace, which Bulgaria had humiliatingly lost after World War I. 

The Bulgarian government passed the “Law for the Defense of the Nation,” similar to the Nuremberg Laws, which became effective on Jan. 23, 1941. “Disneyland was over,” Aaron said. The store was closed and Mois lost his job. Then, on March 1, 1941, Bulgaria officially joined the Axis alliance, regaining Thrace and Macedonia.

To earn some income, Mois began going door-to-door selling artifacts and rugs from his own home and the homes of his two wealthy brothers-in-law.

Food became scarce, and Aaron would remove the mandatory Star of David on his school uniform — “under orders of being shot if I got caught,” he said — and walk across town to stand in a bread line. “Since I was a kid, I always had guts,” he said. 

One night, as Mois returned from work, two Fascist men ambushed him and broke his nose with an iron rod. 

In fall 1942, Aaron’s aunt and uncle, prominent members of Bulgaria’s Jewish community, were taken to Somovit, a forced labor camp near the Danube River. Aaron’s family moved into their house. During this time, Aaron’s cousin Shelley, four years his senior, initiated a rigorous program of study, waking him at 4 a.m. to do homework and learn French. Aaron moved from being a middling student to one of the three top students in his class. “It stayed with me,” he said. After three months, his aunt and uncle returned. 

In early March 1943, as the Jews in the Bulgarian-occupied territories of Thrace and Macedonia were being rounded up and held in detention camps, awaiting transport to Poland, politicians, clergy and ordinary citizens began protesting the deportation of Bulgaria’s Jews. 

Dimitar Peshev, the vice chairman of the Parliament, personally asked King Boris to intervene. Decades later, Aaron learned that his father, a childhood friend of Peshev’s, had traveled to Sofia to plead with Peshev. Additionally, two heads of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Stefan of Sofia and Metropolitan Kyril of Plovdiv, implored King Boris to have mercy on the Jews. 

Metropolitan Kiril himself showed up outside the schoolyard where Aaron’s family and others were detained. Monks accompanying him hoisted him above the wall so he could address the interned Jews. “Children, I will save you,” he said. “I will prostrate my body over the railroad tracks. They’re not taking you anywhere.”

Shortly afterward, the chief of police stood at a podium inside the courtyard. “Jews, go home. Your lives have been spared,” he said. King Boris had agreed to delay the deportation of Bulgaria’s Jews.

The more than 11,000 Jews in Thrace and Macedonia, however, met a different fate. They were shipped to Treblinka and murdered. 

Germany continued to pressure Bulgaria to hand over the additional 8,000 Jews. On March 19, 1943, Peshev introduced a resolution in Parliament calling for a halt to deportations. But it was voted down, and Peshev was forced to resign in late March.

King Boris continued to delay. Then, in late spring, perhaps as a compromise to appease the Germans, he ordered 20,000 Jews from Sofia evacuated to the countryside, and many of the men were sent to forced labor camps, where they built roads. 

In fall 1943, Aaron went to public high school, the only Jew in his class. He experienced some displays of anti-Semitism, but overall he and his family lived fairly normally, preoccupied with making arrangements to send him to Palestine with Youth Aliyah, an organization rescuing Jewish children from Nazi-occupied countries. 

On Sept. 9, 1944, the Soviet Union, having declared war on Bulgaria, entered the country. All anti-Jewish measures were abolished.

A month or two later, Aaron departed for Palestine with a group of 37 13- to 15-year-olds. As his mother said goodbye, she said, “One day, on behalf of our family and our people, you have to pray at the graves of the saints and the king.” They had been instrumental in saving the lives of Bulgaria’s total population of 48,000 Jews. She then ran alongside the train, waving and crying, as it departed. Aaron was also in tears, but excited.

Eventually the group reached Palestine, where Aaron was sent to Kibbutz Geva in the Jezreel Valley near Afula. There he attended school, worked with animals and trained with Gadna, the Haganah’s pre-military program. “Those were the best years of my life,” he said. 

In 1946, Aaron and other young Bulgarian immigrants founded Kibbutz Urim in the Negev. A year later, he joined the Palmach and worked protecting water pipes in that area. 

Aaron’s parents and brother immigrated to Israel in 1950. That year, he married Phyllis Novak, a young American woman. In 1951, he began driving a truck for Makarot, the Israeli water company. 

Phyllis returned to New York a year later, seeking medical care for a pregnancy. Their son Aryell was born in August 1952, and Aaron joined them in November. Three days after arriving, he was enrolled in night school to learn English and had procured a job loading dairy trucks.

Six months later, the family moved to New Jersey, where Aaron worked in a factory and attended evening high school classes. 

They moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 1954. There, Aaron started a janitorial business, State Maintenance. He sold it in 1996 but has continued to work as an employee, through various acquisitions and name changes. 

In January 1955, Aaron and Phyllis’ son David was born, followed by their daughter Leora in April 1957. Aaron’s marriage to Phyllis later ended. 

On March 19, 1983, Aaron married Sandra Gold. 

Now 85 and a grandfather of five and great-grandfather of four, Aaron works full time for American Building Maintenance. Additionally, since 2012, he has been a regular speaker at the Museum of Tolerance.

In 2000, Aaron returned to Bulgaria to carry out his mother’s request. With some monks at the Bachkovo Monastery, he prayed at the graves of Metropolitans Stefan and Kiril. And at the Rila Monastery, where King Boris III is buried, he recited Kaddish.

“I had given an oath and I had fulfilled it,” he said.

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