“It’s my mother’s passport with Aristides de Sousa Mendes’ signature,” said Cookie Fischer van den Bergh upon discovering the new museum that opened this weekend in memory of the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux who saved thousands of refugees from Nazi persecution.
“It's very emotional for me” because “my mother never told me anything,” a 70-year-old woman, a retired university professor who recently discovered the story of the leak, told AFP.
Thanks to a Portuguese consul's visa issued in June 1940, his mother, now deceased, was able to leave the German-invaded Netherlands, go to Porto, in northern Portugal, on a fishing boat from southern France, and then go on to the United States.
“He is an exceptional man!” said Jean-Jacques Speyer, a 76-year-old former Belgian engineer, as he tried to find his way among the thousands of survivors’ names inscribed on a wall at the entrance to his grandfather’s museum.
Like the descendants of refugees and the family of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who died 70 years ago, hundreds of people paid tribute to the former consul on Friday, on the occasion of the opening of the museum dedicated to him, housed in his former palace in Cabanas de Viriato, in central Portugal.
“I am really grateful” for everything he did, says proudly Antonio Souza Mendes, 74, one of the former diplomat’s grandsons, who has long been fighting to rehabilitate his predecessor’s memory.
– “Pen and Seal” –
Often compared to German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved hundreds of Jews from deportation, Mr. Souza Mendes was recognized in 1966 as a “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, which commemorates the genocide of the Jewish people during World War II.
But in his country, this recognition came later. After his reintegration into the diplomatic corps after his death in the late 1980s and his enshrinement in the Pantheon in 2021, the opening of this museum is another step in perpetuating his memory.
When he learned of Nazi persecution, he sought to fight with his own weapons, “a pen and a stamp,” recalls Antonio de Souza Mendes, who barely knew his grandfather.
However, his gesture earned him setbacks with his own government, led by the dictator Oliveira Salazar, who banned consuls from granting visas to “foreigners of undetermined nationality”, “stateless persons” or “Jews”, due to Portugal's neutrality during the colonial conflict.
“This very devout Catholic man, who had been summoned several times, preferred to follow his conscience, despite the consequences for his career,” explains historian Margarida Magalhães Ramalho, of the Nova University of Lisbon.
-Send Duty-
In June 1940, as German forces advanced, the consul stationed in Bordeaux encountered many desperate families with “children, pregnant women, and elderly people, whom he could help with getting a tampon,” and then “created a veritable chain of issuing tampon “visas” to allow them, in all likelihood, to escape to America,” the historian says.
Within a few days, the consul issued visas to all refugees who requested them, regardless of their nationality or religion, thus saving nearly 30,000 people, about half of them Jews, according to historians' estimates.
Mr. Sousa Mendes was then immediately recalled to Lisbon and dismissed from his duties. Having fallen from grace, this father of 14 children ended his days in 1954 in poverty.
“My grandfather is no longer here, but his message remains,” his grandson says, believing it is his duty today to pass it on.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, praised the example of “courage and compassion” set by Mr. Sousa Mendes, in a message published on the occasion of the opening of the museum, calling on people to follow his example in “fighting discrimination, intolerance and hatred.”
Published on July 20 at 6:27 pm, Agence France-Presse
