LISBON – On March 3, 2021, the US Senate passed a resolution honoring Aristides de Sousa Mendes do Amaral e Abranches (1885-1954), who as Portugal’s consul-general in Bordeaux, France in June 1940 issued transit visas to some 30,000 hapless refugees including 10,000 Jews who were desperate to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. The diplomat, summarily sacked by Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar for defying his infamous Circular 14 against admitting Jews, died in his homeland in poverty and disgrace.
The American honor comes two years after Portugal’s Parliament unanimously voted to memorialize Sousa Mendes in the National Pantheon in Lisbon, located in the 17th century Church of Santa Engrácia in the Alfama, the historic Jewish barrio before the forced conversion of 1496. The shrine includes both the tomb of national figures like fado singer Amália Rodrigues and footballer Eusébio, and cenotaphs honoring the explorers Vasco da Gama and Prince Henry the Navigator. There is no higher tribute in the Iberian country.
Now the Sousa Mendes Foundation, established in 2010 by Mendes’s grandson António Moncada de Sousa Mendes and his cousin Álvaro, is restoring Casa do Passal, the imposing 19th century family estate in the town of Cabanas de Viriato in Portugal’s north-central province of Beira Alta which the bankrupt ex-diplomat forfeited to a bank before his death in 1954 – and which has remained unoccupied ever since. Thanks to a grant from the European Union, the derelict manse is being transformed into a museum perpetuating de Sousa Mendes’ humanitarianism. It is slated to open in 2023.
For de Sousa Mendes’ grandson, António, 71, the belated recognition comes after decades of work overcoming great resistance to restore his grandfather’s ruined reputation. Indeed, António suffered from Portugal’s Gestapo-trained secret police, the Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado, just as his grandfather did. In 1970, he fled to Belgium as a political refugee and draft dodger, seeking to avoid being sent to die in Portugal’s pointless colonial wars in Africa. In 1974 – the same year as the Carnation Revolution toppled prime minister Salazar’s fascist Estado Novo regime – and eight years after Yad Vashem posthumously recognized de Sousa Mendes as a Righteous Among the Nations, António ended up in Montreal, Canada where he worked as an interpreter. Now living in retirement in Lisbon, in 2017 he penned Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Memories of a Grandson.
Until the 1974 revolution, it was unwise to mention Aristides, who had crossed Salazar, António begins in an interview in a hotel near Lisbon’s airport.
“I’m not a historian, I’m a grandson,” he says, launching into a torrent of history. And like all history, there is a backstory.
Aristides and his wife Angelina had 14 surviving children, born across the world where the career diplomat and lawyer was posted – including Africa, Brazil, America, Spain and Belgium. The Sultan of Zanzibar was António’s father’s godfather. Everywhere, the family were held in high esteem, known for helping anyone in need. Even when posted abroad, Casa do Passal served as a soup kitchen. The family had a good life – until Aristides made a life-changing decision in Bordeaux.
In November 1939, Portugal’s prime minister Salazar issued a secret proviso, known as “Circular 14,” ordering his country’s consulates to “refuse visas to foreigners of undefined, contested or disputed nationality, stateless persons and Jews expelled from the countries of their nationality or from which they came.”
Aristides believed Salazar’s order to be inhuman and racist, and contested it. He was ignored. When he took into his home refugee Chaim Kruger, a Polish hassidic rabbi who had also lived in Antwerp, he was made aware of the perilous situation Jews were facing. Sousa Mendes realized that he would have to go against his government’s orders to help the flood of people queuing outside the consulate, wanting visas to escape through Spain into neutral Portugal and on to America. The diplomat offered a visa to Kruger and his five children, but the rabbi refused to accept it unless all the refugees in Bordeaux received one too. Thanks to Sousa Mendes, the family finally crossed into Portugal and boarded the vessel Nyassa in June 1941 bound for New York.
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.”
Summoned back to Lisbon by Salazar, Aristides continued to issue visas along the way. At the French-Spanish border at Irun/Hendaye, he personally raised the barrier gate to lead through a throng of refugees whose visas had been rejected.
Arriving in Lisbon on July 8, 1940, Aristides – who had loyally served as a diplomat for 32 years – was forced into retirement. He never received his last paycheck or a centavo of his pension, points out his grandson.
Viewed as a traitor, unable to work and without an income, he relied on help from his family and visa recipients who were sheltering in his home, Casa do Passal. Often the family ate in Lisbon’s Jewish community canteen where Aristides stated, “They too had become refugees.”
Aristides spent the rest of his life vainly trying to clear his name, claiming to be unfairly punished by his government at a time when Salazar was reaping praise for Portugal’s role in helping war refugees. As the family became ostracized, the Sousa Mendes’s 14 children were unable to study or work in Portugal and by 1949, all had emigrated.
On April 3, 1954, Aristides died a pauper in the Franciscan Hospital in Lisbon. He was buried in a Franciscan habit. No one from his family was present.