In Portugal, a Protector of a People Is Honored

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/world/europe/in-portugal-a-protector-of-a-people-is-honored.html

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CABANAS DE VIRIATO, Portugal — Lee Sterling knew that his sister had not survived the harrowing journey 73 years ago that allowed him and his parents to escape Nazism by traveling from their home in Brussels to Lisbon and eventually on to New York.

He was just 4 years old and is barely able to recall her now, but after consulting Portuguese archives, he found that his sister, Raymonde Estelle, had spent six weeks in a hospital before dying of septicemia, at age 7. “I hadn’t cried in years, but when I found out, I just couldn’t stop,” he said.

Mr. Sterling, who lives in California, was among 40 people who made an emotional pilgrimage last month to retrace their families’ pasts. They also wanted to pay homage to the man who saved their lives: Aristides de Sousa Mendes.

Mr. Sousa Mendes, Portugal’s consul in Bordeaux when Germany invaded France, provided about 30,000 people with Portuguese visas to escape Nazi persecution, according to the Sousa Mendes Foundation, which is run by descendants of the visa recipients. His status as one of the most important protectors of the Jewish people, if not the precise number of visas, has been confirmed by Yehuda Bauer, a Holocaust historian at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

He issued many of the visas personally and also persuaded some others on the Portuguese diplomatic staff stationed in France to do the same, against the orders of his own government, which was neutral but Fascist. When the government realized the scale of his disobedience, Mr. Sousa Mendes was recalled to Lisbon, tried and dismissed from the diplomatic service. Stripped of his pension rights, he died in poverty in 1954.

For his efforts, Mr. Sousa Mendes received some acknowledgment after his death, starting with Israel, where the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial honored him as a “Righteous Among the Nations” in 1966. But the search for those who received his visas or their descendants began in earnest only much more recently, as part of a building campaign to grant him the recognition he deserves, particularly in his own country, where he remains relatively unknown.

“Without his help, my parents wouldn’t have survived, and I wouldn’t be here. It’s as simple, sad and lucky as that,” said Yara Nagel, a translator who was the first member of her Nagelschmidt family to be born in Brazil. She came from São Paulo, she said, because “I wanted to retrieve my past.”

Since December 2011, the Sousa Mendes Foundation has managed a database of those he helped, built in large part on a visa registry book discovered in Bordeaux. So far, the foundation has identified about 3,200 of the estimated 30,000 people saved by the Portuguese visas.

The foundation also helped organize the pilgrimage along the route taken by some of those who fled, one of the most poignant stops being this small town in central Portugal, where Mr. Sousa Mendes was born and is buried in a family crypt. There, the participants held a remembrance ceremony. Today the family’s former mansion is in ruins, with the roof collapsed, but its prominent place in the town is a reminder that family members were once powerful aristocratic landlords, until the war and Fascism changed their destiny.

Some of those taking part in the pilgrimage had not returned to Portugal since the war. Until they were contacted by the foundation, many descendants had in fact not heard of Mr. Sousa Mendes, either because their parents never spoke about their wartime experiences or because they probably never realized just what a crucial role he played in facilitating their escape.

Mr. Sousa Mendes started ignoring Lisbon’s orders and delivering his visas in 1939, several months before Germany’s invasion of France, in part because he had a twin brother, a fellow Portuguese diplomat, who was stationed in Warsaw and told him about Nazi atrocities there.

Many of his visas, however, were issued in the frantic month of June 1940, when the Germans were tightening their grip on France and the Portuguese government was scrambling to bring home its rebel consul from Bordeaux. Mr. Sousa Mendes eventually gave up his struggle and returned to Lisbon in early July, after the Portuguese had also instructed the Spanish border police to turn back holders of his visas.

In the 1980s, Portugal rehabilitated Mr. Sousa Mendes’s name and apologized to his family, while the Portuguese Parliament posthumously promoted him to the rank of ambassador.

Still, Harry Oesterreicher, the treasurer of the Sousa Mendes Foundation, said that it was disappointing to see the limited recognition Mr. Sousa Mendes had received in Portugal and how his family mansion here had been allowed to fall into ruin. It was repossessed by creditors after his death.

The foundation is now hoping to turn the house into a museum of tolerance, with the Portuguese authorities pledging last month to make an initial contribution of about $400,000.

Asked about Portugal’s attitude toward Mr. Sousa Mendes, Celeste Amaro, an official from its Cultural Ministry, shrugged and said that “our democracy is young, and we still need to do a lot more to understand what happened in our past.” Portuguese people, she added, “really need to know better his history and what a great man he was.”

Ms. Amaro was attending the inauguration of a temporary exhibition on the doorstep of the derelict house, with photos of the visa recipients posted on translucent panels built by Eric Moed, 25, an American architect whose family survived the Holocaust thanks to such Portuguese visas.

Also in attendance was Mr. Moed’s grandfather, Leon, another architect who said that he “very vividly” remembered “the incredible anxiety of my father” as the family lined up for visas to exit France.

As to Mr. Sousa Mendes, “my father said something about having gotten the visa from a special person, but that was it,” Leon Moed recalled.

Almost all the participants in the pilgrimage were Jewish. Mr. Sousa Mendes, however, was a Roman Catholic who fathered 15 children and made “no distinction between religions and whether people were rich or poor,” said Mr. Sterling, who is a retired American lawyer, but was born into a Brussels family of diamond brokers named Serebriany.

Indeed, Jews accounted for only about a third of the Sousa Mendes visa recipients, with the list also including members of the Hapsburg and Luxembourg royal families and Belgian cabinet members, as well as artists like Salvador Dalí and his Russian-born wife, Gala.

Several of the participants said the trip had inspired them to find out more about their family histories.

Jennifer Hartog, who lives in Toronto, said she wanted to write a book about her father and other members of her Dutch Jewish family.

Traveling for two weeks from Paris to Lisbon alongside others whose lives were saved by the Portuguese visas, she said, had also made clear to her the magnitude of Mr. Sousa Mendes’s own personal sacrifice.

“You hear about people who argued that they couldn’t help because it was wartime and they had their own family to worry about, but here was a man with a career, a wife and an incredible amount of children who certainly did do something for others,” Ms. Hartog said.