Word: petkoffs
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...Americans had to act surreptitiously. Quietly they bought a funeral wreath. They waited until shortly before they were due to leave Bulgaria by plane. Then they put the wreath in a jeep, headed for the airport, but turned off to a cemetery. On the fresh, unmarked grave of Nikola Petkoff, executed eight days before for his opposition to Bulgaria's Communist-dominated Government (TIME, Oct. 6), they laid the wreath. Each spoke a few words in memory "of one of the greatest democrats of all time...
...history, their simple gesture might prove to be a moral aid to Europe as important in its way as material aid. For they had answered, for all free men to hear, the silent question posed by Petkoff's grave: "Am I my brother's keeper...
There was a curiously ironic angle to Nikola Petkoff's legal murder. When Georgi Dimitroff awaited trial in a Nazi jail, Petkoff was one of a group of Bulgarian political leaders who arranged for Dimitroff's 72-year-old mother, Baba Parashkeva, to visit him. Gratefully she said then: "If my son lives through this, he will repay you a thousand times...
...Bulgaria last week the Communist-dominated Government silenced democratic opposition by hanging Nikola Petkoff after his conviction on trumped-up treason charges. Petkoff, leader of the democratic Agrarian Party, was a patriot. He fought the Nazis and spent part of the war behind German barbed wire. After the Russians put the small Bulgarian Communist Party in power, Petkoff opposed the Communists led by the old Comintern agent, Georgi Dimitroff, hero of the Reichstag-fire trial...
Said the U.S. Government in a stinging (but futile) note of protest: "The trial of Petkoff recalls to mind another trial which occurred in Leipzig 14 years ago. In that earlier trial, a Bulgarian defendant [Dimitroff] evoked worldwide admiration for his courageous defiance of the Nazi bully who participated in his prosecution. Today that defendant has assumed another role and it is now the courage of another Bulgarian [Petkoff] whose steadfast opposition to forces of oppression has evoked worldwide admiration...