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Unsung Savior: Salvadoran Diplomat in Nazi Europe Lent His Nation's Protection to Hungarian Jews

[ Washington Post] David Montgomery - When Hitler began applying the final solution to the last major Jewish community in Europe, there suddenly appeared in Budapest thousands of Salvadorans who happened to be Jewish. To have been on the side of the angels at one of the darkest moments in history, when other countries stood by, is something a small, relatively poor, geopolitically minor nation can be proud of. Col. Jose Arturo Castellanos, Salvadoran General Consul in Geneva, started a small-scale distribution of Salvadoran visas (against the wishes of Castellanos's own government). This had mushroomed by mid-1944 into the mass production of nationality certificates. The Nazis, strangely legalistic and bureaucratic in their own way, seemed willing to accept the proposition that foreign citizens, even Jews, could be exempt from anti-Jewish edicts. Typists in Geneva churned out the Salvadoran papers, shipping them via couriers into Budapest. When photos or biographical information were unavailable, they sent pre-signed papers for Jews to fill in themselves. The Salvadoran government asked the Swiss, as neutral representatives in Budapest, to protect the new Salvadoran citizens. In international safe houses - such as the famous Glass House, a former glass factory - the Swiss harbored thousands of Jews who possessed Salvadoran papers. The Swedish Wallenberg's parallel effort was underway in Budapest at this time. David Kranzler, in The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz, estimated that, since each document could cover a family, 30,000 or more Jews could have been covered by the papers.
2008-07-18 01:00:00
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