A good man in evil times

"History has long forgotten his name and his story has long gone untold. Yet the heroism of Aristides de Sousa Mendes is commemorated today with a forest in Israel. A man of individual conscience and courage as tremendous as that of Oskar Schindler - and more selfless - Sousa Mendes served in the early years of World War II as the Portuguese consul in France, where he ultimately sacrificed his diplomatic career to save the lives of thousands of Jewish refugees.". "After the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 Sousa Mendes found himself continually more restricted by the fascist policies of Portugal's prime minister. Dr. Antonio Oliviera de Salazar, who, like Franco in Spain, assumed a position of neutrality but did not wish to offend Hitler. It was Salazar's Circular 14 - denying, on the basis of race and religion, visas to the swelling number of refugees to Portugal - that prompted Sousa Mendes's first acts of disobedience in his office at the consulate. Over a period of six months in 1940, in accordance with his own conscience rather than Salazar's dictates, Sousa Mendes signed many thousands of visas that spared their recipients, ten thousand of them Jews, a terrible fate in the Nazi death camps." "While Sousa Mendes's acts of private resistance against an authoritarian bureaucracy earned him Salazar's wrath, a forced early retirement, and years of dire poverty, they also won him a place in the pantheon of truly just men."--BOOK JACKET.