Aristides de Sousa Mendesthe AuroraINFP

In mid-June 1940, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Portugal's consul in Bordeaux, went to bed and stayed there for three days. He was 54.

Outside, France was falling. Bordeaux was full of refugees, many of them Jews running from the Nazis, and a Portuguese visa could get them out. Sousa Mendes was the man who could sign one, and he was not allowed to. Since November 1939 an order from Salazar's government, Circular 14, had required consuls to ask Lisbon before giving visas to people like these.

He was no rebel. He came from provincial gentry, had fourteen children and needed his salary. He had bent the rule once, in November 1939, for a single professor. He was reprimanded, and he stepped back into line.

Then he met a rabbi, Chaim Kruger, who had fled Belgium with his wife and five children. Sousa Mendes offered the family visas. Kruger turned them down. Others needed help too, he said, and he would not leave them behind.

The rabbi had handed the consul his own dilemma in its plainest form. Could the rule itself be kept?

On 13 June the ministry's answer came back to the requests he had sent: visas refused. He wrote to his brother-in-law, and he took to his bed.

Auroras often decide this way. A demand piles up against the thing they hold sacred, and the body stops before the mind has found its words. From outside it looks like collapse. Inside, something is being settled that cannot be settled any faster.

When he got up, he knew. By one account he told the people around him, “I am going to issue a visa to anyone who asks for it.”

The consulate became a workshop. His secretary worked beside him, and so did his sons. Refugees who had come for a visa stayed to stamp the next ones. He signed day and night, and his signature wore down from his full name to Sousa Mendes, and then to a single word: Mendes.

Lisbon ordered him to stop. He kept signing. On 24 June he was recalled. Nobody knows exactly how many people his visas carried into Spain and on to Portugal, but the foundation that bears his name has traced thousands of them.

He paid slowly. A disciplinary hearing forced him out of the service, and his large family lost its comfort and its security. He died in Lisbon on 3 April 1954, aged 68, still poor. In 1966 Yad Vashem named him one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

The people who loved him might have read those three days in bed as a breakdown, and in part they were. They were also where the hardest work was done. Once he stood up, the rest took only a pen, and in the end a single word.