Thirty-Seventh Issue: Diplomats during the Holocaust

I am always inspired by stories of individuals making a difference during times of great peril. This issue is about nine diplomats from countries all around the world who used their powers to save lives (predominantly Jewish ones) during the Holocaust in World War Two.  

 

 

The first is Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas, who was from Brazil and married to a Jewish American woman. He saved 800 people, about half of whom were Jewish, and the others were communists and/or LGBT which put them in danger as well. He was the Brazilian ambassador to France during the German occupation, and while his own countrymen tightened their immigration laws and investigated his activities, he disregarded them and issued as many visas as he could.

Even after he was ordered to stop, Luiz kept giving out visas. He would forge the date to a date that was prior to the order, and remove any mention that the person was Jewish. Eventually he was recalled by the president to go back to Brazil and was found guilty of breaking their Jewish immigration policy, but he was not punished as he was technically retired. He went to Paris after the war where he lived till his death.

 

 

Another diplomat, from Italy, who helped Jews escape death was Guelfo Zamboni. He was Consul General for Thessaloniki in Greece during the Nazi occupation. Thessaloniki was a town with the world’s largest community of Sephardic Jews – around 56,000 people. Almost all of these people were taken to concentration camps, but Guelfo did do whatever he could. He made 350 Jews into Italian citizens, making false papers for people who neither spoke nor understood Italian. Guelfo’s successor, Giuseppe Castruccio transported these Jews with Italian papers to Athens, which was not under Nazi control.

 

 

 
Henry Slawik was a Polish diplomat who saved over 30,000 refugees, including 5000 Polish Jews. He fought against the Germans during the invasion of Poland in 1939, and was kept in a prisoner of war camp as an ‘enemy of the state’ after he was captured. Thanks to Henry’s fluency in German, he was taken to Budapest by a Hungarian minister and there he began to create the Citizen’s Committee for Help for Polish Refugees where he organized schools and orphanages. He also worked on helping Polish exiles leave their prisoner of war camps and go to France or the Middle East to join the Polish Army and fight the Germans. He lived and worked in Budapest for a while, but then the Hungarian government started to separate the Polish Jews from their colleagues, so Henry forged documents to make sure that these Jews could get to Yugoslavia or elsewhere without being taken away. He created an orphanage for Jewish children and to hide its true purpose he made sure that the children were often visited by Church authorities to lend legitimacy. He called the orphanage a School for Children of Polish Officers.

When the Nazis took over Hungary in 1944, Henry hid and ordered his refugees to leave the country. They all managed to escape, including the children. Henry was not so lucky, and was captured and tortured by the Germans. He did not betray any of his colleagues, Polish or Hungarian, and was hanged in a concentration camp. His wife survived the war and found their daughter after the war.

 

 

Gilberto Bosques Salvidar was a Mexican diplomat during World War II. He was stationed in France, and gave visas to 40,000 people, mostly Spanish refugees after the Civil War there and Jews who wanted to leave for obvious reasons. Gilberto rented a castle and a summer camp in Marseilles and used it to keep refugees, saying it was Mexican territory under International law. In 1943, Gilberto and his family as well as forty members of his consular staff were arrested and kept in Germany for a year, but he was released after the Mexican president put German citizens in Mexican jails and then did a prisoner exchange. After Gilberto was released, he continued in his career, working as Mexican Ambassador in Portugal, Finland, Sweden and Cuba. He was friends with Fidel Castro and worked to help with communications between the United States and Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Gilberto lived to be almost 103!

 

 

 
Eduardo Propper de Callejon was a Spanish diplomat in occupied France. He helped thousands of Jews flee the country during World War II and also happens to be Helena Bonham Carter (the actress)’s grandfather. When France surrendered to Nazi Germany, Eduardo quickly declared the castle that his wife’s family owned to be his main residence so that the art collection there would not be plundered. Eduardo came from a mixed family – his father was Jewish, but his mother was Catholic and he was raised Catholic. His wife, Helene Fould-Springer, was a painter who was from a Jewish banking family, though she too converted to Catholicism. From the Spanish consulate, in cooperation with the Portuguese consul, Eduardo gave out over 30,000 visas to Jews so that they could cross Spain to get to Portugal. Once the Spanish Foreign Minister found out, he made him transfer to Morocco. After that he was posted to other cities such as Rabat, Zurich, Washington D.C., Ottawa and Oslo.

 

 

 Angel Sanz Briz was another Spanish diplomat. He was posted to Budapest in 1942, and between June and December of 1944 he and his colleagues issued fake Spanish papers to over 5000 Jews, saving them from being sent to concentration camps. He was only allowed to give papers to 200 Jews, but he just kept enlarging this amount. He bought or rented houses out of his own money in Budapest to provide shelter for refugees, which often made the difference between life and death for them. He was transferred to Switzerland, but his replacement, Giorgio Perlasca continued his work despite the lack of authorization from their bosses back home, and kept issuing visas and making sure the Jews in the safe houses were okay. Angel continued his career, and was later Ambassador to Lima, Bern, Bayonne, Guatemala, The Hague, Brussels and China.
 
Alberto Carlos de Liz-Texeira Branquinho was a diplomat from Portugal who, with his colleague Carlos de Almeida Fonseca Sampaio Garrido, saved the lives of 1000 Jews when he was posted in Hungary during World War II. The two of them rented houses and apartments to act as safe houses for refugees. They got permission from their government to give visas to anyone who had a relative in Portugal, Brazil, or any Portuguese colonies. However, the Hungarians who were occupied by Nazi Germany did not support this. One day at five am the police raided the house of Carlos, arresting his guests. His guests were later released due to his interventions. Five of the guests were members of the famous Gabor family – Magda was the secretary of Carlos and supposedly also his lover – her younger sisters were Eva Gabor and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
 
Eventually, the Portuguese ruler at the time ordered his ambassador back to Lisbon, since the United States and Britain wanted politically neutral countries to leave Hungary. After the war, both men continued to serve their country as diplomats.

 

 

 
Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust in Hungary. His grandfather was a diplomat, and he followed in his footsteps. Raoul did high school and eight months in the military which was compulsory at the time, then he went for a year to study in Paris and studied architecture at the University of Michigan. He hitchhiked across the United States during his summers, learning about new places and people. He graduated and his grandfather helped him get a job in South Africa where he worked for six months, eventually moving to Stockholm to work at a bank and then moving to Hungary. Working with a business associate who was Jewish, Raoul saw how difficult the new restrictions placed against Jews’ abilities to travel and work freely were, and began to be worried. When a relief committee made up of Swedish Jews wanted to find someone who could go to Budapest and organize a rescue program for the Jews in Hungary, Raoul’s name came up. He proved willing, and was assigned to the job.
 
Raoul immediately began issuing “protective passports”, which were not legal but if you had one, it said that you were a Swedish subject and could not be deported. They looked official enough, and were accepted by German and Hungarian authorities, usually along with a bribe. Those with this passes also did not have to wear the yellow badge that was required for Jews. When the German government finally said these passes were invalid, Raoul asked the wife of the Hungarian minister for help, and she convinced her husband to allow 9000 of these passes to be honored.
 
With money raised from Swedish Jews, Raoul rented over thirty buildings in Budapest and put Swedish flags all over them, saying they were protected by diplomatic immunity. Almost 10,000 refugees ended up being housed in these buildings. At one point, Raoul intercepted a train of Jews about to leave for Auschwitz. His driver described what he did: “... he climbed up on the roof of the train and began handing in protective passes through the doors which were not yet sealed. He ignored orders from the Germans for him to get down, then the Arrow Cross men began shooting and shouting at him to go away. He ignored them and calmly continued handing out passports to the hands that were reaching out for them. I believe the Arrow Cross men deliberately aimed over his head, as not one shot hit him, which would have been impossible otherwise. I think this is what they did because they were so impressed by his courage. After Wallenberg had handed over the last of the passports he ordered all those who had one to leave the train and walk to the caravan of cars parked nearby, all marked in Swedish colors. I don't remember exactly how many, but he saved dozens off that train, and the Germans and Arrow Cross were so dumbfounded they let him get away with it.”
 
Over three hundred and fifty diplomats worked together to save Jews in Hungary, including the Portuguese diplomats Sampao Garrido and Carlos de Liz-Texeira Branquinho I mentioned above. Others were an Italian businessman named Giorgio Perlasca who pretended to be a Spanish diplomat, and a Swiss diplomat named Carl Lutz. As time went on, Raoul became afraid for his safety. He slept in a different house every night.
 
In 1944, Raoul was captured and taken to prison as a spy. His whereabouts after that are not known, though many have said that they saw him or met him while he was imprisoned. He was last seen definitely by a fellow prisoner, Gustav Richter, in 1945. Raoul Wallenberg was declared dead in October 2016. His family spent much of their lives searching for him but his whereabouts may never be known.

 

 

 
Chiune Sugihara (also known as Sempo as it was easier for Europeans to pronounce) was a Japanese diplomat who served in Lithuania and saved over six thousand Jews flee Europe during World War II. Chiune was a diplomat for Japan and always stood up for what he believed in. In 1935, he quit his post in Manchuria because he didn’t approve of the way the Japanese were treating the local Chinese population. In 1939, he became vice-consul of the Japanese Consulate in Lithuania. As the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in 1940, many Jews from Poland as well as Lithuania tried to get exit visas. No country would issue them, so hundreds of refugees came to the Japanese consulate. Lithuanian Jews made up between 1/3 and ½ of the country’s population at the time. The Dutch Consul gave some of them a final destination to Curacao or Suriname which were Dutch colonies at the time and did not require visas. However, they could not go directly there, and many others did not have that option to begin with either. Chiune contacted his superiors, who said that if they did not have proper immigration procedures or enough money, these Jews could not have visas.

Chiune knew that if the Jews stayed in their country they would be in danger. He ignored his bosses and issued ten day visas to Jews so that they could travel through Japan to get to Curacao or Suriname. The Soviet officials let the Jews with Japanese visas travel through the country through the Trans-Siberian Railway, though they charged them five times more than the usual price. Chiune hand wrote visas every single day for months, writing a month’s worth of visas each day. The visas were issued to heads of households so they could take their families with them, and according to witnesses, Chiune was “still writing visas while in transit from his hotel and after boarding the train at the Kaunas Railway Station, throwing visas into the crowd of desperate refugees out of the train's window even as the train pulled out. In final desperation, blank sheets of paper with only the consulate seal and his signature (that could be later written over into a visa) were hurriedly prepared and flung out from the train. As he prepared to depart, he said, "Please forgive me. I cannot write anymore. I wish you the best."

Many of the refugees travelled across the Soviet Union, and then to Kobe in Japan where there was already a Jewish community. The Polish Ambassador in Tokyo organized help for them, getting asylum visas for refugees to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Burma, immigration certificates to the British Mandate of Palestine, and immigrant visas to the United States and some Latin American countries.  About two thousand Jews were able to leave this way. The rest of them stayed in Japan until they were deported to Shanghai where there was also a large Jewish population. Some didn’t go to Japan at all and went straight through to Shanghai. Most of the 20,000 Jews in Shanghai survived the Holocaust.

Chiune worked in East Prussia, Prague, and Bucharest throughout the war. When the Soviets came into Romania, they put Chiune and his family in a POW camp for over a year, and they were finally released and took the same train the Jewish refugees had taken back to Japan. Chiune settled in Japan with his wife and sons. He was dismissed from his post as diplomat due to downsizing, but thought it might be related to the unauthorized visas he had issued. He worked in some laborious jobs, and then finally using his knowledge of Russian worked in the Soviet Union for over a decade, sending money back home to his family in Japan.

Though Israel and other countries recognized what Chiune had done, his own country remained more or less ignorant. He died in 1986, and when a large Jewish delegation from around the world showed up to his funeral, his neighbors realized what he had done. When he was asked a year before he died why he issued visas to Jews in Lithuania, Chiune said that “the refugees were human beings, and that they simply needed help”. About ten years later, Chiune’s widow travelled to Jerusalem and was met by survivors who showed her the visas that her husband had signed. There is a park named after him in Jerusalem, a memorial to him in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, and it is accompanied by the quote "He who saves one life, saves the entire world."

There are many other stories like these. If you’d like to know more about them, click this link. There are and have been so many good people in the world.