Aristides de Sousa Mendes - June 17-July 8: The French-Portuguese Exodus

June 17-July 8: The French-Portuguese Exodus

Working feverishly with Rabbi Kruger, the two remaining Sousa Mendes sons and their mother, and a few refugees, the consul formed an assembly line that processed visas all through that day and well into the night. They made whatever changes were necessary to the usual procedure: the consul signing with just his surname, not registering the visas or collecting fees, and stamping visas on pieces of paper. The sense of urgency was heightened even more when Marshal Philippe Pétain announced that day that France would sign a peace agreement with Germany. The assembly line kept working all through the following day. A delegate of the House of Habsburg, after having to wait his turn in the seemingly endless line, left with 19 visas for the imperial family of the Archduke, who later returned in person to obtain an additional stack of visas for Austrian refugees.

On into June 19, the assembly line marched on through stacks and stacks of visas, even as the city was bombed by German planes. At this point, Sousa Mendes rushed to the consulate at Bayonne, near the Spanish border where his visas were being honored for the crowds rushing out of the country. Finding that consulate overwhelmed, he took over responsibility from his subordinate there, Consul Machado, and set up a second assembly line to process thousands more exit documents. (Machado reported this behavior to Portugal's ambassador to Spain, Pedro Teotónio Pereira, whose maternal grandfather was German, who favored Germany and worried that accepting those unacceptable to Hitler would ruin Portugal's relationship with Franco; Teotónio Pereira promptly set out for the French border.)

Sousa Mendes continued on to Hendaye to assist there, thus narrowly missing two cablegrams from Lisbon sent June 22 to Bordeaux and Bayonne ordering him to stop even as France's armistice with Germany became official. In an article for a religious magazine in 1996, his son John Paul de Abranches told the story:

"As his diplomatic car reached the French border town of Hendaye, my father encountered a large group of stranded refugees for whom he had previously issued visas. Those people had been turned away because the Portuguese government had phoned the guards, commanding, 'Do not honor Mendes's signature on visas.'"

"Ordering his driver to slow down, Father waved the group to follow him to a border checkpoint that had no telephones. In the official black limousine with its diplomatic license tags, Father led those refugees across the border toward freedom."

Sousa Mendes traveled to the border at Irun on June 23, where he personally raised the gate to allow disputed passages into Spain to occur. It was at this point that Ambassador Teotónio Pereira arrived at Irun, declared Sousa Mendes mentally incompetent and invalidated all further visas. An Associated Press story the next day reported that some 10,000 persons attempting to cross over into Spain were excluded because authorities no longer granted recognition to their visas.

As Sousa Mendes continued the flow of visas, Salazar sent a telegram on June 24 recalling him to Portugal, an order he received upon returning to Bordeaux on June 26 but followed only slowly, not arriving in Portugal until July 8. Along the way he issued Portuguese passports to refugees now trapped in occupied France, saving them by preventing their deportation to concentration camps.