Aristides de Sousa Mendes do Amaral e Abranches was the Portuguese consul-general at Bordeaux from 1938 to June 1940. He was fifty four years old at the time of the German invasion of France in May 1940. He had a wife, fourteen children and a long career in the Portuguese diplomatic service behind him. He was a Catholic, a monarchist by family tradition, a conservative by political instinct, and a faithful servant of the Salazar dictatorship that had ruled Portugal since 1932. The Salazar government had issued a circular known as Circular 14 in November 1939 instructing Portuguese consuls to refuse visas to, among others, Jews of any nationality who could not produce specific exemption authorisation from Lisbon. Sousa Mendes initially complied with the circular. In June 1940 he stopped complying.
The German army was approaching Bordeaux. The city had become a refugee centre as the French government and the population of Paris fled south. Tens of thousands of refugees, including a substantial number of Jews from across central and eastern Europe, were trying to obtain Portuguese visas as the only available route out of mainland Europe to neutral Portugal and from there to Britain or the Americas. The Portuguese consulate at Bordeaux, the consulates at Bayonne and Toulouse, and the embassy at Vichy were the only Portuguese diplomatic posts in France that could issue the visas. Sousa Mendes spent two days at the consulate in mid June 1940 in what he described in a later letter to his brother as a state of nervous and physical collapse over the question of whether to obey the circular or whether to issue the visas anyway. He emerged on the third day, as he later wrote, with the decision that he would issue the visas to anyone who asked for one, regardless of religion, nationality or documentation, and that he would let Lisbon discipline him afterwards.
He worked for around five days, between 17 June and 22 June 1940, signing visas at the rate of around five thousand per day. The signature alone took most of his time; he had family members and consulate staff helping with the typing of the supporting paperwork. The total of visas issued during those five days has been estimated at between ten thousand and thirty thousand, with the lower figure the firmer count from the surviving consulate records and the higher figure including the family members covered by each individual visa. The estimate of the number of people who actually escaped on the Sousa Mendes documents is around ten thousand, of whom around three thousand were Jewish. He continued to issue visas in smaller numbers from Bayonne and from a French border crossing point at Hendaye through late June 1940 after he had been formally recalled to Lisbon.
Salazar’s foreign ministry recalled him to Lisbon in July 1940, refused him reassignment to any further consular post, opened a disciplinary investigation, and in October 1940 dismissed him from the diplomatic service and stripped him of his pension. He spent the rest of his life in poverty in Lisbon and at his family estate in Cabanas de Viriato in central Portugal. His large family was supported by the Lisbon Jewish community and by individual emigrant families that he had helped. He died in poverty at the Hospital da Ordem Terceira do Carmo in Lisbon on 3 April 1954, aged sixty eight, in a hospital bed paid for by the Lisbon Jewish welfare organisation. His estate was bankrupt at his death and his children paid for the funeral expenses by selling the family furniture.
The rehabilitation came slowly. Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations in 1966. The Salazar regime fell in the Carnation Revolution of 1974, and the new Portuguese democratic government issued a posthumous formal apology in 1986 and restored his diplomatic rank. The Portuguese parliament voted to award him the Order of Liberty posthumously in 1995. The Sousa Mendes Foundation, established in 2010 by descendants and Portuguese Jewish community members, has documented thousands of individual cases of escapees through the Bordeaux visa operation and continues to work to identify the families who used the visas. The case is now standard in Portuguese school textbooks and in the public conversation. The Salazar government’s failure to recognise Sousa Mendes during his lifetime is the part of the case that the Portuguese state has, since 1986, made repeated efforts to compensate for.
Sousa Mendes left a written account of his decision in a letter to his brother, the diplomat César de Sousa Mendes, in late 1940. He wrote: I had to either follow the orders or do what was right. I chose to do what was right. The line is the standard quotation from the case. The letter is held in the family archive at Cabanas de Viriato.
See also
Sources
- Rui Afonso, Injustice and Mercy: Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Porto, 1990
- José Hermano Saraiva, Sousa Mendes: O Justo de Bordeaux, Lisbon, 2001
- Yad Vashem, file on Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Righteous Among the Nations, 1966
- Sousa Mendes Foundation, archives and database of escapees
- Avraham Milgram, Portugal, Salazar, and the Jews, Yad Vashem, 2011
- Portuguese Foreign Ministry archives, Lisbon, files on Bordeaux consulate, 1940