The Aristides de Sousa Mendes Museum, in Cabanas de Viriato, received a special visit this week. An American Holocaust survivor was one of the refugees who managed to escape German troops during World War II, thanks to a Portuguese visa.
One of the refugees who fled the persecution of German troops during World War II, thanks to a Portuguese visa, this week visited the . The museum opened a year ago and has now joined four more survivors’ names to the long list of people directly and indirectly saved by the Portuguese consul, who one day dared to challenge Salazar.
Mireille Szajko is 87 years old. He returns to Portugal, from where, just two years old, he left for the American dream, leaving behind the persecution in a seizure in seizure with World War II.
The memories are, of course, few, but the documents kept by the mother show that the visit to the Aristides de Sousa Mendes Museum, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, has a lot of symbolism.
The story tells that the Portuguese consul saved about 30,000 people from the war, a number that no one can define for sure, because only in the case of the Szajko family has now joined four more names to the mural.
Mireille fEz Life in America, but did not forget Europe. It is now officially the first refugee played by Aristides’s firmness to visit the house where the Portuguese consul was born.
The Portuguese visa was signed by Emile Gisssot, at the Portuguese embassy in Toulouse, in 1940. Aristides de Sousa Mendes was already, by this time, in Lisbon, where he returned by express order of Salazar, to prevent the Bordeaux Consul from continuing to pass visas to those who fled the war.
But the order of the diplomat continued to be fulfilled by many of the employees of the different consulates, with respect to Aristides de Sousa Mendes.
This guided tour of the museum was part of the American project that brought to Portugal 20 educators to know the history of the old consul.
