The project "The Jews from Macedonia and the Holocaust" was supported by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (Brussels) within the Action 4 Program and it followed the general subject Active European Remembrance aiming at preserving the sites and archives associated with deportations as well as the commemorating of victims of Nazism and Stalinism.

The central subject of scientific interest was the destiny of 7,148 Jews from Macedonia murdered in 1943 in the gas chambers of Treblinka II (Poland), their culture and ontology, but also the complex discourse of the post-Holocaust theoretic thought.

[1] The aim was to initiate a serious academic discussion on the presence of the Jewish discourse as an inclusive factor in the establishment of the pre-Holocaust, the Holocaust and post-Holocaust historical and socio-cultural image of North Macedonia.

On 11 March 1943, the Bulgarian authorities rounded up most of the local Jews and handed them over to the Germans, who transported them to the Treblinka extermination camp.

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.

[6] For a long time, Matkovski's works and the 1986 collection of archival documents were the only significant studies about the fate of the Macedonian Jews in World War II.

[8] The chrestomathy The Jews from Macedonia and the Holocaust: History, Theory, Culture [Евреите од Македонија и холокаустот: историја, теорија, култура] was published in 2011 by Sofija Grandakovska, as editor, author of the foreword and co-author.

The book has an interdisciplinary and intertextual approach, it consists of fourteen original works, created by the authors for this publication and it is structured in three parts.

Sofija Grandakovska - Foreword: Homage on the Irony of Evil and on the Historical, Cultural and Theoretic Memory of the Holocaust The foreword introduces an outline of the historical presence of the Jews in Macedonia, the genealogy of the structure of the Final Solution of the Jewish question in Europe, its implementation in Macedonia and the concept of personal testimony as a document of the passive Holocaust history.

Then, with a selection of 49 documents, she traces the path that let to their destruction: the laws of the occupying Bulgarian authorities regarding the liquidation of Jewish assets and a complete exclusion of the Jewish population from social and economic life, the specific law that turned the Jews from Vardar Macedonia into people without citizenship, the minutes of the discussions between the Nazis and the Bulgarian authorities regarding the fate of the Jews, the creation of a Commissariat for Jewish Affairs at the Ministry of Interior and Public Health, the appointment of the Bulgarian officials who ordered the extermination, the agreement between the Bulgarian and Nazi German authorities to "resettle" the Jews, the reports about the rounding-up and temporary encampment, the bills, notes and delivery police reports about the special trains from Skopje to Treblinka, the analysis stating that the deportation of Jews from Macedonia and Thrace was completed successfully, testimonies of non-Macedonian survivors and of staff members about Treblinka, investigations of the liberators at the site of the camp.

Jasminka Namicheva - Human Fate Clenched Between a Yellow Badge and a Paper Envelope – A Kaleidoscope of the Jewish Holocaust in Macedonia Newly discovered paper envelopes issued by the Bulgarian National Bank for storing Jewish objects of value and declarations of the immovable and movable property testify to the anti-Semitic laws adopted by the Bulgarian occupier and their implementation in Macedonia.

The primary attribute of the Final Solution was the secrecy and determination of the perpetrators to not to leave any trace of the crime, of personal or historic memory of it.

Thus the narration of the Holocaust experience carries the structural element of resistance against oblivion, as a counterpoint for the knowledge of the murder of 7,148 Macedonian Jews, among who were the author's entire family.

The personal testimony unfolds the increasingly unbearable situation of the Macedonian Jews, the warning of a leader of the Resistance to avoid staying at home around the days of the rumored deportation, the month spent in hiding in a tiny kiosk in the city, the escape to the partizans and the grueling life of guerrilla warfare, then in 1945, after the liberation, the news from those who escaped from the "Monopol Tobacco Warehouse" in Skopje about the horrors prior to the deportation by train to Treblinka.

Photographs from this period show Jewish families in difficult, crowded living conditions, and illustrate the attempt to carry on with daily activities despite the deprivations and persecution.

In early 1942, Bulgarian authorities issued a directive that Jews were to register with the police, and submit photos of all family members over the age of thirteen.

The fact that Macedonia remained a part of the Ottoman Empire until 1913, accounted for a slower pace of modernization of all the ethnic groups living in its territory.

Furthermore, poverty and overall socio-economic hardship of Sephardic communities in Macedonia made it even more difficult for them to take part in cultural and other changes based upon the model of Western European countries.

The historical narrative demanded that the crimes that had happened during the World War II be avoided, as they were considered to be capable of potentially destabilizing the internal Yugoslav relations.

Tijana Milosavljević-Čajetinac - The Absence of Evil in the Republic (A Possible Dialogue between Plato and Hannah Arendt) By way of comparative realizations, Tijana Milosavljević-Čajetinac juxtaposes the discourse of Plato's philosophy and post-Holocaust theoretic thought of Hannah Arendt, as an intersection between the practical and theoretic relations of evil.

The other crucial question prompted by the discussion is the need to expand the geographic boundaries of Holocaust studies in the countries where it occurred, but where science failed to pay heed, like for instance, in North Macedonia.

Another result of the project was a multimedia exhibition (co-curators: Žaneta Vangeli and Sofija Grandakovska), as a visual replica of the chrestomathy, held in 2011 at the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Skopje and in 2013 at the Gallery of the Jewish Community in Belgrade.

[2][9] The head of the project, Sofija Grandakovska mentioned that she found the Bulgarian scientific environment professional and cooperative in the research process and in later public lectures and discussions in Bulgaria about the topic.

The stance of the scientific public regarding the question of Bulgaria's role in the Holocaust is not in the same line with the political one, which is characterized by revisionism, contradicting the researches and the critical position established by the scholarship.