Posted on 01/16/2012 10:46:19 PM PST by Cronos
A global search has been launched for Holocaust refugees saved by a little-known Portuguese diplomat stationed in France during the Second World War – a man described as “one of the great unsung heroes” of the era by renowned Canadian writer Peter C. Newman, who credits the maverick consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes with helping his own family escape the Nazi death chambers.
Sousa Mendes has never received the kind of attention given to Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist credited with saving more than 1,000 Jews from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories.
Sousa Mendes’s “courageous” actions to help at least 10,000 Jewish and other refugees – and possibly twice that number or more – flee a fallen France in 1940 remain largely under the radar, said spokesperson Harry Oesterreicher of the Seattle-based Sousa Mendes Foundation.
While hundreds of those given “life-saving visas” by Sousa Mendes have been identified – including such notable figures as the Spanish artist Salvador Dali and Curious George authors Hans and Margret Rey – thousands of other refugees never knew who cleared their way to freedom and their descendants remain in the dark, Oesterreicher said.
That’s why the organization has announced “an unprecedented search for the rescuees” who were issued visas by Sousa Mendes in June 1940.
The foundation noted that Sousa Mendes was later tried in Portugal and “harshly punished.” He died in 1954 in poverty and official disgrace.
The Austrian-born Newman, 11 years old when he and his family were making their dramatic dash to immigrate to Canada amid the horrors of war, recounted in his 2004 autobiography, Here Be Dragons, how the “forgotten saint” Sousa Mendes was key to their successful attempt to get out of France in the wake of the German invasion.
“Lisbon did not accept Jews,” Newman writes, “but this edict was ignored by ... Sousa Mendes, a devout Catholic with an enlightened attitude who had decided to help the frightened refugees as a humanitarian gesture.”
Newman, a former editor of the Toronto Star and Maclean’s and one of the country’s leading authors of Canadian political and corporate history, said he returned to Bordeaux, France, a few years ago to visit the city where his family received their visa from Sousa Mendes.
He told Postmedia News that he searched for the historical marker commemorating the Portuguese consul’s “humanitarian courage.”
“The plaque is placed so high on the building that it’s impossible to read it from the street unless you have a ladder,” said Newman, now 82.
“I don’t know if that was done because they didn’t want anybody to read about what happened or if it was done to keep the plaque from being defaced.”
Either way, it was symbolic of the relative obscurity of the Sousa Mendes story. Newman applauded the foundation’s bid to seek out other rescuees and their families, and spread knowledge of a hero who died “unheralded and unrecognized.”
As a Protestant I give him compliments. A man among men.
He’s also almost a dead-ringer for me.
Then you look like a real man!
Amazing that there is yet another such story from that period. Thanks for posting this.
Yes, a Protestant man. Never Catholic. Ever.
You are a Protestant. We get it.
We got it after your first post.
Breathe.
Yeah, insult. But don’t take it personally or you’re a jerk. Gotta love Catholics. Like my ex-wife. Always in the right, no matter what.
all decent Christians did this — whether Lutheran or Catholic or other. The Nazis came up with their own brand of Christianity — Aryan Christianity that denied the Jewish origins of Christ
The bravest man I ever knew was our battalion’s Roman Catholic chaplain in Germany. Not a service member, he celebrated Sunday Mass in our chapel. He spent the War in Dachau for his opposition to the Nazis. And it left him without a trace of bitterness or self-righteousness.
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