Aristides de Sousa Mendes: Portuguese Diplomat Who Saved Jews During World War II

You are here:

Home
HOLOCAUST
Aristides de Sousa Mendes: Portuguese…

POTUGAL DIPLOMAT

During the Second World War, Aristides de Sousa Mendes was Portugal’s counsul-general in the French city of Bordeaux. Antonio Salazar, Portugal’s authoritarian leader, forbade the issuance of Portuguese visas to refugees desperate to escape Nazi Germany. Sousa Mendes defied his own government and provided tens of thousands of such life-saving documents — including to many fleeing Jews. (Exactly how many Jews he rescued is unclear.) For his efforts to save Jewish refugees, Sousa Mendes was recognized by Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Quote: “For three days that June, Aristides agonized over what to do. On June 17, 1940, with his jet-black hair having turned white practically overnight, he began issuing visas to everyone, regardless of nationality or religion, in direct violation of Salazar’s Circular 14. He said he would ‘rather stand with God against man than with man against God.’ ”

Sources: Wikipedia (introduction), The Jerusalem Post (introduction and quotation)

Learn more about Aristides de Sousa Mendes Wikipedia. ►

Read “US Senate honors Portugal’s Holocaust hero ” ►

Watch “Aristides de Sousa Mendes: Defiance in the Name of Compassion” [9:58]. ►

Photo: Portugal Resident

We welcome your comments. Click here.

Notable &
Quotable

“[T]he foundations for extremism usually are held in check by various restraints. Societies are not liberal, moderate, progressive, and free because almost all their citizens – let alone their politicians — are liberal, moderate, progressive or committed to the freedoms of others.

“But societies consistently avoid extremism when the infrastructures of freedom are strong: when key institutions and norms encourage a more decent, rights-respective, lawful politics; when powerful social movements and independent media hold leaders to account, expose rather than reinforce political fantasies, and champion the rights of the vulnerable; and when information is produced and scrutinized by scholars, civil servants, and non-governmental organizations devoid of either government repression or vested interests.

“Yet no infrastructure is rigidly immovable, and once key components are eroded and weakened, once sections of the political and cultural elite attempt to mobilize the foundations of extremism, the system of restraints can swiftly collapse.

“While genocide on the scale of the Holocaust is historically exceptional, its central lesson is that the broader danger of extreme atrocities is not. In the words of the great historian Ian Kershaw, the Holocaust ‘lit a warning beacon that still burns brightly: it showed how a modern, advanced, cultured society can so rapidly sink into barbarity… It showed what we are capable of.’ Only by rejecting false narratives of conflict and polarization, and maintaining systems of rights and freedoms for all, can we hope to prevent that capability from once more becoming a reality.”

— Jonathan Leader Maynard in his incisive article “Could It Happen Here?: The Holocaust and Atrocities in the 21st Century” To read the entire article, click here.