Aristides de Sousa Mendes: the man who braved 'consequences' to save thousands from Nazis

On Sunday 19 July, Portugal marked 141 years since the birth of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the diplomat who saved over 30,000 from Nazi persecution in WWII. A museum there is dedicated to his life and legacy. He was "someone who changed the course of history during the darkest episode in humankind's past". That is how Luís Medeiros, a curator at the Aristides de Sousa Mendes Museum, recalls for Euronews the man he describes as "one of the greatest figures in the country's cultural history", for the role he played in saving tens of thousands of lives during the Holocaust. Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese diplomat born on 19 July 1885, is a name that cannot be ignored whenever the period of the Second World War is discussed, a conflict fought between 1939 and 1945 that resulted in the deaths of around 40 million civilians. Many of these victims, in fact, perished in concentration and extermination camps set up by the Nazi regime, driven by expansionist ambitions underpinned, among other things, by a supposed "supremacy of the Aryan race". This ideology led Jews, as well as people from other minorities, to be persecuted for years by the authorities of the Third Reich. According to the United Nations (source in Portuguese), approximately six million Jews and half a million Roma and Sinti were killed across Europe in the context of the Holocaust. As Luís Medeiros, one of the staff at the museum founded in Portugal two years ago to "preserve the memory, courage and legacy of Aristides de Sousa Mendes", points out, the diplomat is still remembered today for having been "responsible for one of the largest individual rescue operations of Holocaust refugees", an act that saved roughly 30,000 lives. It is estimated that there are "around 750,000" descendants of the people Aristides de Sousa Mendes helped more than eight decades ago, the outcome of an initiative that cost him his job and severely undermined his family's means of subsistence. The story and legacy of Aristides de Sousa Mendes "At the height of the Holocaust, when Nazi troops invaded France in the summer of 1940, Aristides was consul in the city of Bordeaux, in the south of France", Luís Medeiros tells Euronews, speaking of a territory that "for a time remained free even after the invasion" by the Nazi army. Bordeaux therefore became "a city where thousands of people fleeing" different parts of Europe gathered, trying to "escape the regime" led by Adolf Hitler. The city consequently became "the stage for a mass tragedy" and for "a collective despair, which Aristides also witnessed". Faced with "what was happening in the streets of the city", the Portuguese diplomat decided to do "what his conscience told him". And that meant, notes the Aristides de Sousa Mendes Museum curator, "going against the higher orders of Salazar", the head of Portugal's dictatorial government, who at that time opted for a stance of neutrality during the conflict, maintaining trade relations with both sides. By then, the then President of the Council "had already issued the famous Circular no. 14, which forbade all consular posts from issuing visas without the express authorisation of the Ministry". But the consul defied António de Oliveira Salazar's directive. He decided "to do what was right and grant those people the transit visas they needed to cross the French-Spanish and Spanish-Portuguese borders and reach freedom". This was only possible, Medeiros adds, thanks to "the help of other people, because [Aristides] did not work alone". Supporting the diplomat in this initiative were "consular staff" as well as "his children". But, given all the documented facts, it is possible to elevate him to the status of "moral author of this rescue". A decision with "serious" consequences However, the consul's initiative was not well received by Portugal's highest authorities. "The consequences were extremely serious." Aristides was subjected to disciplinary proceedings once the Portuguese authorities, and in this case the Estado Novo regime, discovered what he had done. By going against superior orders, he became the target of a process that stripped him of his duties immediately, stresses Luís Medeiros. In addition, his salary was also "gradually withdrawn", turning "what had been the life of a family with a socio-economic status above average for the time" into a situation of "complete economic decline". In fact, "it was not only Aristides who suffered from this punishment", recalls the curator at the museum founded in his honour. "The entire Sousa Mendes family was placed on a kind of PIDE blacklist" – PIDE being the political police of Portugal's dictatorship – "and was therefore completely pushed aside and ostracised, unable even to find work. They were 'undesirable people' for the Salazar regime." "For 14 years Aristides continued to live in this decline", ultimately "dying in poverty, unable to afford a home or support a family with 15 children". And even after his death, Luís Medeiros continues, it took a lengthy "process to restore Aristides's good name in Portugal", before the significance of his actions was properly recognised. That process culminated "in 2021, when he was finally granted the nation's highest honours", with his remains being transferred to the National Pantheon as one of the "distinguished figures who help shape our identity as a people", or in other words, one of the "great Portuguese". And despite all the progress made over the decades towards greater recognition of this Portuguese diplomat's actions, the museum that honours him believes there is still "a huge gap when it comes to the history curriculum in the national education system". "We find it inconceivable that when ninth- and twelfth-year pupils study the Second World War and talk about that event [...], they do not mention the name of a Portuguese who was so important on the side of good during such a dark period in history. We are therefore in talks [with the Ministry of Education and with the Directorate-General for Education] to make it compulsory to teach the name of Aristides, and everything he did, as part of that curriculum," says Luís Medeiros. "Schindler is as prominent as he is because he had a Hollywood script" The name of Aristides de Sousa Mendes is often put alongside that of Oskar Schindler, a German citizen who became known for saving several hundred Jews from Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War by employing them at the industrial enamel factory he ran in Kraków, Poland. The businessman also bribed and coerced officers of the SS, the armed wing of the totalitarian dictatorship, in order to guarantee the safety of his workers. However, Luís Medeiros tells Euronews that Schindler only "has the prominence he has because he had a Hollywood script", thereby gaining "international" visibility. In fact, "Aristides has not yet had that Hollywood script, but the scale of his rescue operation was far greater than Schindler's" in terms of the "number" of lives he managed to save. While Schindler is credited with saving around 1,200 Jews from deportation to complexes such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, where more than a million people lost their lives, estimates suggest that Aristides de Sousa Mendes managed to spare more than 30,000 people from Nazi persecution in 1940. Consequently, the data indicate that "those rescued have multiplied", with the number of their descendants potentially reaching "around 750,000", notes Luís Medeiros, on the basis of approximate calculations. But besides this consul, other Portuguese names deserve to be remembered for, like him, not having feared possible personal and professional consequences and thus helping to preserve many human lives. These include Carlos Sampaio Garrido and Alberto Teixeira Branquinho, also diplomats, Father Joaquim Carreira, as well as José Brito Mendes, a Portuguese-French citizen. These were, in fact, "other Portuguese with roles abroad" who "made a difference, during that period, in rescuing or protecting refugees from the Second World War", although their actions did not reach "the same scale" as those of Aristides, recalls Luís Medeiros. A museum that seeks to keep the consul's "example" alive To ensure the story and legacy of Aristides de Sousa Mendes are not forgotten, the Portuguese municipality of Carregal do Sal opened, two years ago, the museum that bears the diplomat's name and is housed in Casa do Passal (source in Portuguese), in Cabanas de Viriato, "which belonged to Aristides for 45 years". This cultural space was deliberately inaugurated on 19 July 2024, to coincide with the 139th anniversary of the diplomat's birth. It offers "an exhibition route through nine rooms", in which "the more personal side of Aristides" is portrayed, reminding visitors that "there is a man behind the hero". It tells "the story of Aristides before and after" the pivotal year of 1940, as well as that of "a family that ends up losing everything because of this conscientious decision he took", explains Luís Medeiros to Euronews. Since its inauguration in the summer of 2024, the Aristides de Sousa Mendes Museum has received a total of 54,000 visitors, six thousand of whom were pupils "from schools from north to south" of the country, who came as part of their educational projects, the museum curator adds. And exactly two years after its inauguration – as had already happened in 2025 – the Aristides de Sousa Mendes Museum was once again the setting, on Sunday, for a commemorative ceremony, in which the main "highlight", stresses Luís Medeiros, was the inauguration of the Doutora Maria Barroso Documentation Centre on the top floor of Casa do Passal. This new space is now "open to the public for scholars, researchers and readers". The chosen name is a tribute to former Portuguese first lady Maria Barroso, wife of Mário Soares, who served both as prime minister and president of the Republic. As Luís Medeiros recalls, Maria Barroso was a "figure who, in her time, embraced this cause with great determination", who joined the board of the Aristides de Sousa Mendes Foundation and who is unquestionably central to this years-long struggle for recognition of his name. Maria Barroso went on to serve as president of the foundation, created in 2000. Among many initiatives, she was behind the posthumous decoration of Sousa Mendes with the Grand Cross of the Order of Christ, awarded in 1995 by the then head of state, Mário Soares. The museum also seeks to draw "parallels" with the present However, adds the curator of this cultural space, "the exhibition route" also, over the nine rooms of the museum, "progressively converges towards the present", with a narrative that aims to draw "parallels" between the past and contemporary times. "We constantly draw that comparison so that we understand that history is cyclical, that humankind has learnt little and that we really all have to try to fight to prevent a similar scenario from happening again", he says, referring to the dark period of the Holocaust. A "mandatory mission" the museum seeks to fulfil because, in Luís Medeiros's view, it is "important to recall this example [of Aristides de Sousa Mendes] in the current state of the world". This is because, he believes, we are today facing "a society increasingly detached from the human values that should guide us" and witnessing a context "in which we do not look at others as equal to ourselves, which is what Aristides did". Today, he concludes, "we look at those who are most vulnerable and again try to blame them for society's problems; that is the discourse we hear today. Just as it was that same discourse that led to the establishment of the authoritarian regime that killed 40 million people", he continues, referring to the Nazi dictatorship. A reality that must not be forgotten, particularly "at a time when the world is witnessing many migratory flows, an excessive number of refugees, who do not come only from armed conflicts". They are driven instead by "a series of events" of different kinds, "that force many people to move in search of places where they can be safe", which is what Second World War refugees were also seeking, adds Luís Medeiros. He further stresses that the actions of the then Portuguese consul in Bordeaux remind us that "we can all make a difference in society", especially for those who "are simply seeking a place to live in peace, which is something we take for granted every day". Aristides was therefore an "example of what it means to be human" and of reaching out a hand to those in need, concludes the museum curator. He was also someone who left his mark on history through his "conscientious choice" in favour of "good".