The official line was of avoiding delving into the crimes of World War II, as they were considered to be capable of potentially destabilizing the internal inter-ethnic Yugoslav relations.
The earliest available version of the study is a typewritten manuscript of 91 pages written in Serbo-Croatian and dated 1957 (kept at the Yad Vashem library alongside a translation into Hebrew).
This description was followed by a minute examination of anti-Jewish policies, the roundups and internment of the Jews at the temporary detention center in Skopje, their deportation, and the subsequent liquidation and plundering of Jewish properties.
The account drew from a wide array of archival records from the Bulgarian Commissariat for Jewish affairs, the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior, the Yugoslav Federal and Republican commissions on war crimes, the Military Historical Institute in Belgrade, Yugoslav and Macedonian Jewish communal institutions, as well as the Macedonian state archives.
[1] In 1982, Matkovski published an extended version of the 1962 book, titled A History of the Jews in Macedonia, with a widening of the temporal and geographic scope of the analysis.
It describes in detail the political, diplomatic and legal preparation of the deportation by the Bulgarian authorities and their German allies, the personnel and the organization of the concentration camp in the "Monopol" Tobacco Factory in Skopje and the three train transports to Treblinka.
[1] Four years later, in 1986, the German and Bulgarian archival materials were translated into Macedonian and their publication was coordinated by former partisan Žamila Kolonomos and historian Vera Vesković-Vangeli.