Please discard my previous message. I figured it out how to set special characters without the kbd package-only using what's available in knoppix.
You have to open and edit the configuration file /etc/default/console-setup
There you can change your encodings, codesets and load different fonts. The file is pretty explenatory. Here is mine just to give you an idea how I load cyrillic characters and end even switch between latin and cyrillic in console :
charmap for cyrillic phonetic is cp1251
codeset for my cyrillic is CyrKoi
I am loading fontface Terminus
Then I have my keyboard info and I am switching between latin and cyrillic using Alt+SHift
using : grp:alt_shift_toggle

# A configuration file for setupcon

# Change to "yes" and setupcon will explain what is being doing
VERBOSE_OUTPUT=yes

# Setup these consoles. Most people do not need to change this.
ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-4]"

# Put here your encoding. Valid charmaps are: UTF-8 ARMSCII-8 CP1251
# CP1255 CP1256 GEORGIAN-ACADEMY GEORGIAN-PS IBM1133 ISIRI-3342
# ISO-8859-1 ISO-8859-2 ISO-8859-3 ISO-8859-4 ISO-8859-5 ISO-8859-6
# ISO-8859-7 ISO-8859-8 ISO-8859-9 ISO-8859-10 ISO-8859-11 ISO-8859-13
# ISO-8859-14 ISO-8859-15 ISO-8859-16 KOI8-R KOI8-U TIS-620 VISCII
# CHARMAP="ISO-8859-15"
CHARMAP="CP1251"

# The codeset determines which symbols are supported by the font.
# Valid codesets are: Arabic Armenian CyrAsia CyrKoi CyrSlav Ethiopian
# Georgian Greek Hebrew Lao Lat15 Lat2 Lat38 Lat7 Thai Uni1 Uni2 Uni3
# Vietnamese. Read README.fonts for explanation.
# CODESET="Lat15"
CODESET="CyrKoi"

# Valid font faces are: VGA (sizes 8, 14 and 16), Terminus (sizes
# 12x6, 14, 16, 20x10, 24x12, 28x14 and 32x16), TerminusBold (sizes
# 14, 16, 20x10, 24x12, 28x14 and 32x16), TerminusBoldVGA (sizes 14
# and 16), Fixed (sizes 13, 14, 15, 16 and 1, Goha (sizes 12, 14 and
# 16), GohaClassic (sizes 12, 14 and 16).
# Set FONTFACE and FONTSIZE to an empty string if you want setupcon to
# set up the keyboard but to leave the console font unchanged.
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE="16"

# You can also directly specify nonstandard font and ACM to load.
# Use space as separator if you want to load more than one font.
# FONT='lat9w-08.psf.gz /usr/local/share/braillefonts/brl-08.psf'
# ACM=/usr/local/share/consoletrans/my_special_encoding.acm


# The following variables describe your keyboard and can have the same
# values as the XkbModel, XkbLayout, XkbVariant and XkbOptions options
# in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="us,bg"
# XKBVARIANT="nodeadkeys"
XKBVARIANT="altgr-intl"
# XKBOPTIONS="lv3:ralt_switch,terminate:ctrl_alt_bks p"
XKBOPTIONS="grp:alt_shift_toggle,terminate:ctrl_al t_bksp"

Hope that helps