PORTUGAL'S SCHINDLER

Like Oskar Schindler, Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes helped save, at great personal risk, thousands from the Nazi regime

-  Chanan Tigay

It was the second week of June 1940, and Aristides de Sousa Mendes would not come out of his room. Portugal's consul general in Bordeaux, in southwest France, Sousa Mendes lived in a large flat overlooking the Garonne River with his wife and several of their 14 children-all of whom were becoming increasingly concerned.

An aristocrat and bon vivant, Sousa Mendes deeply loved his family. He loved wine. He loved Portugal and wrote a book extolling it as a "land of dreams and poetry." He loved belting out popular French tunes, especially Rina Ketty's 'J'attendrai, a tender love song that in the shifting context of war was becoming an anthem for peace. And Sousa Mendes loved his mistress, who was five months pregnant with his 15th child.

He usually found something to laugh about even in the worst of times. But now, faced with the most consequential decision of his life, he had shut down. He refused to leave his room even to eat. "Here the situation is horrible," the 54-year-old diplomat wrote to his brother-in-law, "and I am in bed with a severe nervous breakdown."

THE SEEDS OF Sousa Mendes's collapse were planted on 10 May 1940, when Hitler launched his invasion of France and the Low Countries. Within weeks, millions of civilians were driven from their homes, desperate to outpace the advancing German army. A representative of the Red Cross in Paris called it the "greatest civilian refugee problem in French history."

Exhausted drivers lost control of their vehicles. Women harnessed themselves to carts built for horses, dragging children and goats. "Dog owners killed their pets so they would not have to feed them," recalled MarieMadeleine Fourcade, a leader of the French Resistance. "Weeping women pushed old people who had been squashed into prams."