My Dad had been sent, along with my Mom and older brother, to Paris in the spring of 1939 to study French at the Sorbonne. The Army had sent him so that he could come back and teach it at his alma mater, West Point. Well, as you know, things started going to Hell that fall and Mom and Sandy, my brother, came out on the last US ship to leave from Le Havre in early April of 1940. Dad had been seconded to the US Embassy in Paris by then and he stayed, not leaving until the swastika was flying over the French side of the Pyrenees. But there is an interesting story to his departure and that story is the Portuguese Consul in Bordeaux who is considered a Rescuer by the Jews and by others for his actions in 1940. My Dad was in Bordeaux when the Germans entered in June, 1940 and his red, official US Government passport had a visa from Consul Aristides de Sousa-Mendes and Dad was not at all certain that he would be allowed into Spain and thence into Portugal for reasons explained below. He was and able to do so and when he got to Lisbon, he went aboard the US steamer and had his passport locked in the ships vault and used what were called Boarding Papers for the next couple of days until the ship sailed for the US. Here is a website that tells de Sousa-Mendes story. It is really remarkable.
Essentially, the Portuguese Consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa-Mendes, had an attack of conscience and would not allow his government's policy of barring refugees from the NAZIs to stand in his way of rescuing people whom he knew to be in grave danger if they ever fell into German hands. He issued hundreds, if not thousands, of Portuguese visas to these refugees despite cease and desist orders from the Lisbon government of Antonio Salazar and then personally saw to many hundreds more getting across into Spain. For this, he and his entire family were crushed by the Salazar regime, socially, economically, and medically. De Sousa-Mendes died in 1954, unmourned in his own country and generally ignored elsewhere as the world believed the scurrilous crap that the Salazar government had put out about him, that he was insane. But history has caught up with the lie and he is now honored at Yad Vashem and at the US Holocaust Museum, among others. There is a monument in his home town that the local populace has always kept clean and repaired.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Mendes.html
Essentially, the Portuguese Consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa-Mendes, had an attack of conscience and would not allow his government's policy of barring refugees from the NAZIs to stand in his way of rescuing people whom he knew to be in grave danger if they ever fell into German hands. He issued hundreds, if not thousands, of Portuguese visas to these refugees despite cease and desist orders from the Lisbon government of Antonio Salazar and then personally saw to many hundreds more getting across into Spain. For this, he and his entire family were crushed by the Salazar regime, socially, economically, and medically. De Sousa-Mendes died in 1954, unmourned in his own country and generally ignored elsewhere as the world believed the scurrilous crap that the Salazar government had put out about him, that he was insane. But history has caught up with the lie and he is now honored at Yad Vashem and at the US Holocaust Museum, among others. There is a monument in his home town that the local populace has always kept clean and repaired.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Mendes.html
