81 years ago, he organized what is arguably the largest exfiltration operation for people threatened with arrest by the Nazis, from Bordeaux in France. It was in June 1940, in the midst of a debacle against the German army, Aristides de Sousa Mendes was 55 years old, he was Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. And from June 17 to 24, it issued around 30,000 visas, including 10,000 for citizens of Jewish faith, to allow them to leave France and legally reach Lisbon, the last port in Europe still providing a link to the Americas.
The previous days, the dictator Salazar had however instructed his consuls and ambassadors to restrict visas, to refuse them to stateless persons, to Russians, to Jews expelled from their country of origin, or to political opponents of all nationalities. But after several days of watching entire families huddle together under the windows of his consulate, Aristides de Sousa Mendes decides to let everyone in. Men, women and children, artists, intellectuals, religious crowd in the corridors of the building, sleeping on chairs or on the floor, and without eating, for fear of losing their place in the queue.
But on June 24, the number of refugees crossing the Franco-Spanish border towards Portugal was so large that the consul was summoned, dismissed from his post, brought to a disciplinary council for disobedience and passport forgery, then laid off. . Placardized. Aristides de Sousa Mendes died in 1954, in Lisbon. And his story is forgotten.
Twelve years later, in 1966, the Yad Vashem Memorial honors him with the title of Righteous Among the Nations. And in Portugal, it was not until 1986 that he was awarded the Order of Liberty.
Why so long? Because Salazar wanted to erase the memory of Sousa Mendes, and then, after the fall of the regime, Sousa Medes paid for the fact that before 1940, he was among those who had supported the military dictatorship. This is all the complexity of life: believing in change, then becoming disillusioned, and finally disobeying. Tuesday morning, at the Pantheon, it is therefore also this path, this resistance that Portugal honored, and in front of the descendants of the rescued refugees, President Marcelo Rebelo declared: “The country bows before the legal personality of Aristides Sousa Mende“. In other words, faced with the choice of disobedience.