Jewish community in Portugal inaugurates Holocaust Museum to remember country's role aiding refugees
A memorial to Holocaust victims in the Museu do Holocausto, the new Holocaust Museum in Porto, Portugal. Photo by Jewish Community of Porto.
PORTO, Portugal– About half of Porto`s 500-strong Jewish community crowded into the city’s new Holocaust Museum late last week for the inauguration of a center designed to remember the Jews lost in the Holocaust and the country’s role in WWII helping Jewish refugees flee the Nazis and reach the U.S., Israel and other safer regions.
The museum, the first of its type in the Iberian Peninsula and located on Rua do Campo Alegre near the city´s historic Kadoorie Synagogue, had been scheduled to open on Jan. 27, the day of the Red Army´s liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 now observed as International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorating Nazi Germany´s genocide of some 6 million Jews during WWII. That opening was postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Like the Museum of the Holocaust in Washington, D.C. and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the center here begins with the 1,000-year-old story of the civilization of Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe. It continues to the pseudo-science of racism that resulted in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and the disenfranchisement and persecution of Jews in Germany, Austria and elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe and North Africa. Through photo montages and videos, it relates the horror of the concentration and death camp system, and the fate of survivors, many of whom made their way to Israel in the postwar period. A small number of them settled in Portugal instead and their children and grandchildren today call Porto and Lisbon home.
Unique in the museum are the artifacts attesting to the more than 100,000 Jewish refugees who passed through Porto and Lisbon desperate to book passage from the neutral country to the United States. Four hundred personal files of helpless people from France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Poland who reached Porto are on display. The documents from COMASSIS (the Commission for Assistance to Refugee Jews, Porto Branch) are heartbreakingly vivid testimony to what happened as dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, whose Estado Novo (New State) authoritarian regime ruled Portugal with an iron fist from 1932 until the April 25, 1974 Carnation Revolution, doggedly pursued a policy of neutrality.
For Salazar, that policy meant allowing the sale to Germany of wolfram (tungsten) used to produce munitions and facilitating Portuguese volunteers who fought with Spanish dictator Francisco Franco´s Blue Division in the siege of Leningrad. But above all, it meant “Jews not welcome.”
An entrance to an exhibit that reproduced barracks at the Auschwitz death camps during the Holocaust. Photo by Jewish Community of Porto.
Porto´s Holocaust Museum pays tribute to the four Portuguese among the more than 28,000 Righteous Among the Nations. Father Joaquim Carreira, the rector of the Pontifical Portuguese College in the Vatican, hid Jews in Rome after the Nazis occupied the city in 1943. Carlos Sampaio Garrido, the Portuguese Ambassador in Budapest, similarly saved Jews after the German occupation of Hungary in 1944. Jose Brito-Mendes and his French wife Marie-Louise protected their Jewish neighbors in Nazi-occupied Paris beginning in 1940.
Arguably the best-known of these heroes was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Portugal´s Consul-General in Bourdeaux, France, who in 1940 against Foreign Affairs Ministry orders issued transit visas to some 30,000 people – one third of them Jews – enabling them to enter Spain and reach Portugal.
For Hugo Vaz, the Porto-born curator of the city´s Holocaust Museum and its nearby sister institution the Jewish Museum, the twin centers are about combating ignorance.
“If I wear a kippa on the street, people ask me if I am the pope,” he said. While his country was ostensibly neutral during WWII, “Portugal was part of that history. 100,000 Jews passed through escaping the Nazis. We need to explore that. People are not aware of that.”
As part of that educational initiative, the center is planning a symposium on Sept. 20 for university professors and representatives of other Holocaust museums.
"Thousands of tourists are expected in the summer and circa 10,000 (local students from schools throughout the year,” said Josef Lassmann, member of the Jewish Community in Porto, in a news release.
Porto´s Museum of the Holocaust is open Monday through Friday between 2:30 and 5:30 p.m. Admission is free until June.
Gil Zohar was born in Toronto, Canada and moved to Jerusalem, Israel in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine, and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.