How diplomat's paperwork saved lives in Holocaust

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100227/ap_on_re_us/us_holocaust_diplomats

How diplomat's paperwork saved lives in Holocaust
By CLAUDIA TORRENS and RANDY HERSCHAFT

NEW YORK – It took Ina Polak 35 years to discover the dusty piece of paper that probably saved her and her family in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It wasn't until she was cleaning her mother's New York City apartment following her death in 1980 that she discovered the document listing her, her sister and parents. It was a Salvadoran citizenship certificate. "My first reaction was 'Oh, now I understand!'" said Polak, who is 87.

She and her family were Dutch Jews, with nothing to connect them with the distant Central American country of El Salvador. Yet the certificate dated 1944 became their lifeline, thanks to a man named George Mantello. Mantello, a Jew born in what is now Romania, was one of a handful of diplomats who during World War II saved thousands of Jews and others on the run from the Nazis by giving them visas or citizenships, often without their governments' knowledge.

They were men such as Hiram Bingham IV, a U.S. consular official in Marseille, France who issued visas and other travel documents that are credited with helping to rescue about 2,000 people; or Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese envoy in Lithuania, thought to have saved 3,500; or Dr. Feng Shan Ho, the Chinese consul in Vienna whose visas got 18,000 Jews to safety in Shanghai. Best known of all is Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden, whose efforts probably contributed to saving 90,000 Jewish lives in Hungary before he vanished in what became an abiding mystery of the Holocaust.

Now the work of Mantello is getting fresh attention as scholars dig into newly released files and piece together the lives he saved by gaming the diplomatic bureaucracy during the Holocaust — the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators in World War II. Working as first secretary in the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva, Switzerland, Mantello used a network of contacts to issue papers to Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe between 1942 and 1944 _up to 10,000 documents, according to his son, Enrico Mantello... Among those to whom he sent citizenship papers were his parents in what then was Hungary, but they arrived one or two days too late, and his mother and father, along with the rest of the Jews in their town, were sent to Auschwitz and murdered. "It is a horrible, sad irony," said Judith Cohen, the (Holocaust Memorial) museum researcher. "The certificates were saving people all over Europe, and despite his efforts he was unable to save his own parents."