Lisbon: Portuguese official homage Tuesday for Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese diplomat who during World War II helped save thousands of Nazi persecution, by placing the tomb with his name in the country’s national Pantheon.
The leading Portuguese politician and public figures attended a formal ceremony broadcast on television when the tomb was placed next to other famous figures from the Portuguese history in the Lisbon Landmark building.
Portuguese parliamentary speakers, Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, said the Sousa Mendes did Prestige to Portugal.
“People who decide to put their safety and their families are at risk for greater goodness rarely.
Sousa Mendes is one of those people,” said Ferro Rodrigues in a speech.
The ceremony marked the completion of the 80-year-old Sousa Menda trip from Portuguese civil servants who were ostracized with respectable international figures.
Perhaps the most famous 20th century Portugal diplomat, Sousa Mendes opposed his supervisor, including the Dictator Antonio Salazar, when the consul in Bordeaux, France, in 1940 he distributed a visa to many people who were afraid of being hunted by the Nazis.
Portuguese visa allows people, including Jews to escape from the Holocaust, to escape through Portugal neutral by air and sea to the United States and elsewhere.
Portuguese diplomatic services should request the Lisbon government’s special approval to provide a visa in certain categories of applicants, as this country stepped on careful neutrality, but Sousa Mendes gave a visa on its own initiative.
LEAH SILLS, Director of the Board of Sousa Menda Foundation in the United States, said he was flying for the ceremony “to be able to respect the man who saved my father and grandparents” on May 24, 1940.
“Already only a wonderful experience,” he said.
Alvaro Sousa Mendes, a grandchildren Aristides Sousa Mendes, said his family had seen ambitions fulfilled.
“This is the ceremony we asked for a long time,” he said.
“Finally he was recognized …
with the National Pantheon Honors.” Breaking the rules of getting Sousa Mendes was fired from diplomatic services, with a public shame attached to his family at that time.
He died in poverty in 1954.
A few decades later, he won recognition of his main role in saving people from the Nazis.
In 1966, Israeli National Holocaust commemoration, Yad Vashem, acknowledged Sousa Mendes as “true people among the nations.” Last year, he committed praise from Pope Francis, and last March the US Senate in the movement of respecting “humanitarian work and principled” from Sousa Mendes.
Only in the late 1980s he received recognition in Portugal, with the authorities to convey him.
In 2017, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa provided the highest honor of Portugal, Grand Cross from the Order of Liberty, at Sousa Mendes.
Last year, the Portuguese parliament chose to honor the former diplomat in the National Pantheon by placing plaque and the tomb without his body.
Sousa Mendes want to be buried in her birthplace near Viseu, in North Portugal.
Of the 19 historical figures who were confined in the National Pantheon, 12 contains the remnants of the person.