Dimitar Peshev with Kicka and Kaludka
Kaludka Kiradzieva, Dimitar Peshev’s niece, has left us. Together with her sister Kicka, she took care for years of the Vicepresident of the Bulgarian Parliament, the great personality behind the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews who was though condemned by the Communist regime as an anti-Semite and a people’s enemy.
Out of the 43 deputies who, following the lead of Peshev in 1943, raised their voice by issuing a political document in favour of the Jews, 20 were sentenced to death, 6 to life in prison, 8 to serve 15-year term jails, 4 to serve 5, in 1945 by the Communist tribunals.
Peshev escaped the death penalty by miracle, thanks to the courage of his Jewish lawyer, Josif Nissim Jasharov, but had to serve a harsh sentence: 15 years in jailed, forced labour and the seizure of all his goods.
When the vice president of the Parliament was released, he was considered by the regime as a political criminal, and he was prevented from performing any role in society.
The only people who brought him some relief were his two nieces, who lived with him in the same home in Sofia in Neofit Rilski street, until his death on 21 February 1973.
Kaludka proved herself a brave woman. In the gloomy years of communism she never cared about her own reputation – for being the niece to a famous “enemy of socialism” – but very sweetly she worked hard to make the life of his isolated uncle less harder.
When Peshev wrote his diaries, telling about the rescue of the Jews and the terrible years of the Stalinist trials in Bulgaria, Kaludka fearlessly hid in a cupboard all those precious documents, so that her un uncle could be rehabilitated one day in the future.
At that time, whoever was discovered to keep compromising materials, risked to make his own life more difficult, but Kaludka, together with her sister, never hesitated. For her it was important to saveguard that precious material.
When I met her in Sofia in 1995, I was the first person to whom she read those materials, which were then the most important source for the writing of my book, “L’uomo che fermò Hitler” (The Man Who Stopped Hitler).
After the solemn séance of the Bulgarian Parliament that, in 1988, for the first time, honoured the figure of Peshev and published my book in a special edition, Kaludka became for Bulgaria and the world an active witness to the memory of her uncle.
She came to Italy to tell about her uncle in the Costanzo Show, moving the tv audience a lot; then she inaugurated with me the museum of Peshev in Kjustendil, the beautiful thermal city of Bulgaria; she worked hard for the creation of the Peshev Foundation in Bulgaria, which every year awards the best journalists engaged in human rights reporting; she came to Milan to plant in the Garden of the Righteous the tree for her uncle; she inaugurated in Israel, in Jaffa, in the neighbourhood where thousands Bulgarian Jews had settled after the war, the monument and the fountain dedicated to the man who had made their survival possible.
Kaludka has always been brave, even as in Bulgaria, in 2001, the son of king Boris, Simeon, went on power.
Over the year of his term, the monarchic groups related to him tried to put in the background the role of Peshev in the rescue of the Jews, feeding the false mytha according to which the real hero was Boris, while instead the king was not only responsible for the racial laws and the deportation of the Jews of Thrace and Macedonia, but also worked personally to oust Peshev from his post as deputy-president after his political motion in support of the Jews.
Kaludka never bowed to this historical manipulation and never let herself be enchanted by the speeches of the king’s son, who would have liked her to take his sides to affirm the greatness of Boris III, thus politically exploiting Peshev in favour of the monarchy.
Se kept on defending the truth on the figure of her uncles, with the same sweetness and resolve with which she had taken care about him during the harsh time of persecution.
I will mis
