Trama

A documentary film exploring the legacy of the Holocaust in the Balkans through the personal stories of three Bulgarian Jews from New York. Robert Bakish, Chaim Zemach and Misha Avramoff recollect their childhood experiences growing up in Bulgaria, their survival and immigration to America, and their struggles to make sense of their survival in the context of the larger story of the Holocaust.—ERM

A Question of Survival introduces audiences to a little known but consequential story of survival through the personal narratives of three Bulgarian Jews from New York. Misha Avramoff was 5, Chaim Zemach 14, and Robert Bakish 17 years old when in March 1943 the imminent deportation of Bulgaria's 48,000 Jews was suddenly postponed and ultimately cancelled. Prior to that the Bulgarian pro-Nazi government, an ally to Germany, had handed over to Germany 11,343 Jews from Northern Greece and Macadonia, territories it had occupied during the war. Under pressure from the leadership of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, influential politicians from the ruling party and most notably the vice president of Parliament, Dimitar Peshev, as well as opposition leaders and some regular citizens, the government caved in, sparing the lives of the country's entire Jewish population.

Fearing for their safety but not fully realizing the magnitude of the Holocaust ("for us the war was an abstraction" remembers Robert, who observed Allied airplanes on their route to bomb neighboring Romania), the Bakish and Zemach families left Bulgaria for Palestine before the end of 1944. The family of Misha Avramoff joined the mass exodus of Bulgarian Jews in the period 1948-1949 after the creation of the state of Israel. By the end of the 1950s all three families had immigrated to New York City.

Only in the U.S. and now adults, did Misha, Robert and Chaim fully grasp the magnitude of the Holocaust and what had happened to millions of European Jews. The images of children showing their tattoos from the concentration camps haunt Misha to this day. Surrounded by Jews who had lost so much, they began to downplay their own story in order to fit in. Misha became a social worker and devoted himself to working with Holocaust survivors, mainly from Poland, with Project Ezra on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Robert Bakish became a metallurgical engineer and immersed himself in his work, rarely speaking about his past, not even with his only son. " I never looked back." Chaim Zemach had a successful career as a cellist in New York, and was at the time the only Bulgarian musician in the Metropolitan area. All three remained silent about their own survival.

In A Question of Survival the three men for the first time are given a platform to talk in public about their experiences. The film, enhanced by rare archival footage from newly-accessible Bulgarian archives, is centered around the men's lively debates and their differing views of whether they can be considered Holocaust survivors, the pressure they felt to conform to the accepted narrative of the Holocaust, and the shock of realizing, as young adults, how close they came to death at the hands of the Nazis.