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