From The International Herald Tribune: Pilgrimage for a forgotten hero BY RAPHAEL MINDER CABANAS DE VIRIATO, PORTUGAL — Lee Sterling knew 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 at the time, barely old enough to recall her, 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 now lives in California, was among 40 people who made a highly emotional pilgrimage last month to retrace their families’ past and to pay homage to the man to whom those lucky enough to have survived owed their lives: Aristides de Sousa Mendes. Sousa Mendes was Portugal’s consul in Bordeaux when Germany invaded France and provided about 30,000 people with Portuguese visas to escape Nazi persecution. He issued many of these 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, Sousa Mendes was recalled to Lisbon, tried and dismissed from the diplomatic service. Stripped of his pension, he died in poverty in 1954. For his efforts, Sousa Mendes received some acknowledgment after his death, starting with Israel, whose Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial honored him in 1966 as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. But the search for those who received his visas or their descendants only began in earnest much more recently, as part of a building campaign to grant Sousa Mendes 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, which is run by descendants of the visa recipients, has managed a database of those he had 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 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 the family were once powerful aristocratic landlords, until the war 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 had in fact not heard of Sousa Mendes, either because their parents never spoke about their wartime experience or because they perhaps never realized just what a crucial role Sousa Mendes had played in facilitating their escape. 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 only in the frantic month of June 1940, when the Germans were tightening their grip on France, while the Portuguese regime was scrambling to bring home their rebel consul from Bordeaux. 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 Sousa Mendes and issued an apology 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 Sousa Mendes has received in Portugal and how his family mansion here had been allowed to fall into ruin, after it was repossessed by creditors following 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 €300,000, or $385,000, toward repairing the roof. Asked about Portugal’s attitude toward Sousa Mendes, Celeste Amaro, an official from Portugal’s Culture Ministry, shrugged her shoulders 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, a 25-year-old 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 they lined up for their visa to exit France. As for Sousa Mendes, ‘‘my father said something about having gotten the visa from a special person, but that was it,’’ Mr. Moed recalled. Almost all the participants in the pilgrimage were Jewish. Sousa Mendes, however, was a practicing Catholic who fathered 15 children and made ‘‘no distinction between religions and whether people were rich or poor,’’ said Mr. Sterling, an American who is a retired attorney. Indeed, Jews accounted for only about a third of the Sousa Mendes visa recipients, with the list also including members of the Habsburg and Luxembourg royal families, Belgian cabinet members, as well as artists like the painter 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 history. 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 with other people who were saved by the Portuguese visas, she said, had also made clear to her the magnitude of 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. ◼ Get the best global news and analysis direct to your device – download the IHT apps for free today! For iPad: itunes.apple/us/app/international-herald-tribune/id404757420?mt=8 For iPhone: itunes.apple/us/app/international-herald-tribune/id404764212?mt=8
Posted on: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 00:05:27 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015