H o l o c a u s t   S u r v i v o r s  a n d   R e m e m b r a n c e  N e t w o r k
... preserving the past to protect the future ...

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Beliefs
In the Era of the Holocaust, 29 Who Made a Difference


by
PETER STEINFELS
February 3, 2007

 

The book is called "Diplomat Heroes of the Holocaust," and perhaps the most telling thing about it is that it is very slim.

Richard C. Holbrooke, former ambassador to the United Nations, made that point during a ceremony, held Jan. 24 at Park East Synagogue on Manhattan's East Side, to mark the book's publication.

During the years of Nazi persecution and then mass murder of Jews, Mr. Holbrooke noted, Europe's embassies and consulates were filled with thousands of officials, but very few of them proved willing to toss aside protocol and instructions to save the lives of people threatened with death in the camps.Paldiel's "Diplomat Heroes"

"Diplomat Heroes of the Holocaust" is a documentary record of 29 exceptions. It was written by Mordecai Paldiel, director of the department at Yad Vashem --the main Holocaust memorial museum in Israel-- that designates non-Jewish rescuers of Jews with the honorific title Righteous Among the Nations.

Stationed in cities either already or about to be under the control of the Third Reich, this small minority of determined and ingenious officials issued passports giving Jewish refugees new citizenship status, sometimes to unlikely places, like El Salvador.

They issued exit and entry visas and letters of protection so that Jews could pass to safer territories. They accepted fake documents or even helped people procure them. They made up phony stamps and created new documents to impress local officials and border guards. They bluffed and they threatened and, in many cases, personally sheltered or hid Jews or accompanied them to border crossings.

Europe's consulates were filled with officials. Most, but not all, turned Jews away.

Defying their own governments' policies against assisting refugees, and especially Jewish refugees, was often as necessary as defying German power. Feng Shan Ho, for example, China's consul general in Vienna after Austria became part of the Nazi Reich, earned a reprimand and then loss of his post for freely issuing visas to Shanghai. Approximately 18,000 Austrian Jews actually escaped to China, while others used their visas to reach safety elsewhere.

Even stranger was the success of two diplomats in Lithuania, Jan Zwartendijk, a businessman serving as honorary Dutch consul general in Kaunas, and Chiune Sugihara, a consul general (and spy) for Japan there. The two men issued thousands of documents providing for the entry of Jews into the Dutch-controlled Caribbean island of Curaçao and for passage through the Soviet Union and Japan to get there. Needless to say, the beneficiaries of this scheme neither had heard of Curaçao nor ended up there. They did, however, escape death in Eastern Europe.

The story of Raoul Wallenberg is now legendary. The charismatic young envoy was sent from Sweden (with the backing of President Franklin D. Roosevelt) to protect the Jews in Budapest who had survived the annihilation, overseen by Adolf Eichmann, of half a million Hungarian Jews in the course of 1944. With a staff of hundreds, most of them Jewish, Wallenberg worked night and day distributing passports and providing safe housing, food and medical care while the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross movement committed anti-Semitic outrages and the Red Army closed in on the city. Wallenberg was to disappear forever in the hands of the Soviet forces, his exact fate debated for decades.

But the diplomat hero that Mr. Holbrooke highlighted in his remarks was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, an aristocratic Portuguese consul general in Bordeaux, France, from 1938 to July 1940. In May 1940, he faced pitiable crowds of refugees from the German invasion of France, many of them Jews camped in the streets and parks and desperate for visas allowing escape into Spain and Portugal.

He also faced an absolute prohibition by Portugal's dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, against issuing transit visas to refugees and especially to Jews.

In mid-June, the consul general agonized for several days, cut himself off from the world, at one moment agitated, at the next despondent. Suddenly he proceeded to his office and announced: "I'm giving everyone visas. There will be no more nationalities, races or religions."

The next days were frenzied. All day and into the night, visas were issued. Fees were waived. No one filled in names. Sousa Mendes traveled to the Spanish border to make certain that refugees were able to cross. He confronted Spanish border guards when needed --and continued to sign visas.

Lisbon was upset and on June 23 stripped him of his authority. Returning to his property in Portugal the next month, he only disturbed the authorities more by acknowledging his deeds and defending them straightforwardly on humanitarian and religious grounds. Dismissed from the diplomatic service and with 12 children to support, he had to sell his family estate and eventually died in poverty, supported by an allowance from Lisbon's Jewish community, where he ate at a soup kitchen.

"Diplomat Heroes of the Holocaust," with an introduction by Mr. Holbrooke, is published by KTAV and the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Center for International Affairs of Yeshiva University. Rabbi Schneier, senior rabbi of Park East Synagogue and founder of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, has been active for decades on behalf of religious freedom and interreligious dialogue.

The book relates its dramatic stories in relatively undramatic fashion. Rather like a legal record, it quotes testimony given to Yad Vashem; the names and words of people who were rescued come and go with only a quick glimpse at who they are and what became of them later. And yet those names are reminders of the preciousness of each woman, man and child in the ranks of those caught up by the millions in this nightmare.

The book can refer only in passing to what motivated its diplomat heroes. Some spoke of humanitarian duties, others of Christian beliefs; both groups cited simple human feelings. "Our father told us that he had heard a voice, that of his conscience or of God," recalled a son of Aristides de Sousa Mendes.

The book also recognizes that the inherent tension between a diplomatic profession resting on following instructions and the moral demands arising from unforeseen and overwhelming human suffering has not gone away. In his introduction to the book, Mr. Holbrooke mentions refugees from Vietnam and Darfur.

What does it mean, however, that this was not the particular moral quandary preoccupying those present at Park East Synagogue? When Mr. Holbrooke entertained questions, they were all about Iraq.

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Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company.

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