Gedenkstätte Stille Helden

The doctor Pavel Gerdjikov ran the internal medicine department of a military hospital near the Bulgarian capital Sofia from 1941.
In March 1943 he distributed medicines to Jews about to be deported by train, on his own initiative. He was able to remove four children from the train, rescuing them from deportation to an extermination camp. He placed three of them in a convent, and one child with a neighboring family.
Gerdjikov hid his friends, the Jewish Levi family, in his medical practice for eight months from May 1943. When the building with the hiding place was hit during an Allied air raid, he rented accommodation for Abraham and Mary Levi and their daughters Erika and Nina in a village outside Sofia. Gerdjikov forged identity papers with non-Jewish names for three of the Levi family. He provided them with food until the end of the war.
In 1980 the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem honored Pavel Gerdjikov as Righteous Among the Nations.