For the paintings and works on paper whose theme is the Bulgarian rescue, Gunderson has based some of her images on photographs from Michael Bar Zohar’s fascinating account, Beyond Hitler’s Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews (1998). Others are invented; still others are informed by details graciously supplied by the personal memories of Princess Maria-Luisa.  The centerpiece of the Bulgarian works, Eleven of Many Brave, is a finely wrought group portrait in charcoal and white chalk of eleven people who played a crucial role in the Bulgarian rescue of the Jews. Before we even know their names, we feel and see how closely, and tenderly, Gunderson has stressed each person’s character. There is a luminous joy and moral strength that emanates from each face; each is stamped, as well, with intelligence, and dignity.  Beginning on the left, we see Vulka Goranova, who, on May 24, 1943, directed the Communists’ secret participation in the protest against the deportation of the Jews; Nikola Mushanov, former prime minister, who spoke out against the pernicious Law for the Defence of the Nation, which made official policy out of Nazi-ordered Nuremberg-style persecution of Bulgaria’s Jews; Rabbi Daniel Tzion, who spoke out vigorously against the mistreatment of his people; Queen Giovanna, who helped many Jews escape through her connections with the Italian Embassy. Tsar Boris III—whose role in the rescue remains controversial even to this day, but whose ultimate decision to rescue the Jews is a matter of historical record--is fifth from the left.  By depicting him as bare-headed and dressed in a simple military uniform, and not in the majestic and formal clothing with which he is represented in her august equestrian  portrait in black, King Boris III, Gunderson has emphasized an enigmatic and complex dimension to the late tsar--not only his well-known aversion to royal pomp and circumstance, but the basic decency of the man who resisted Nazi demands by deciding not to deport Bulgaria’s Jews to the death camps in the “Eastern territories,” but to send them instead as “necessary” workers to local labor camps, thus sparing their lives.  Next to the tsar we see Metropolitan Stefan, who supported the Jews, criticized the tsar for the deportation of the more than eleven thousand Macedonian and Thracian Jews whose subsequent deaths cannot be ignored, or forgiven, in any account of the period, and tirelessly opposed the planned deportations of the Jews of “Old” Bulgaria; beside him stands Dimiter Peshev, perhaps the supremely heroic figure in the whole rescue, the member of the Sobranie who, at great personal risk, single-handedly stood up to Prime Minister Bogdan Filov to denounce, on moral and humanitarian, and not practical and political grounds, the planned and imminent deportation of the Jews.