PORTO, Portugal – Notwithstanding COVID-19 regulations, about half of Porto’s 500-strong Jewish community crowded into the Holocaust Museum here on Thursday, May 13, for the inauguration of the center, located on Rua do Campo Alegre near the city’s historic Kadoorie Synagogue.
The museum, the first of its kind in the Iberian Peninsula, had been scheduled to open on January 27, the date of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, now observed as International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorating Nazi Germany’s genocide of some 6,000,000 Jews during WWII. That opening was postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Like the Museum of the Holocaust in Washington, DC 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 through 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, videos and a model of a barracks at Auschwitz, 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 but a small number of whom settled in Portugal and whose children and grandchildren today call Porto and Lisbon home.
Unique in the museum here are the artifacts attesting to the 50,000 Jewish refugees who passed through Porto and Lisbon desperate to book passage from the neutral country to the United States. Among those who fled south were the artist Marc Chagall and Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who reestablished the Chabad Lubavitch Hassidic sect in Brooklyn. Four hundred personal files of helpless people from France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Poland and Luxembourg 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.”
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, a construction worker in Paris, and his French wife, Marie-Louise, protected their Jewish neighbors during the Nazi-occupation 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 kippah 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, 50,000 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 September 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, a member of the Jewish Community in Porto, in a news release.
Porto´s Museum of the Holocaust is open Monday through Friday between 2:30p.m.-5:30 p.m. Admission is free until June.
Tumultuous travel
If truth is the first casualty of war, then freedom of travel is the second.
I learned this lesson while in Portugal on assignment as Hamas sent barrages of rockets to Israel to kill civilians, to which the IDF responded with pinpoint bombardments of terrorist assets. While no rockets struck Ben-Gurion Airport, the specter of a mass casualty event involving a civil plane spooked Europe’s airlines.
Preparing to fly back from Porto to Tel Aviv via Amsterdam last Thursday, I received an innocuous SMS from Air France that my flight had been rescheduled for the next day.
That led to a torrent of cancellations on a host of airlines that continued day after day. On Sunday I was checked in at Porto Airport, had bought a bottle of whiskey at Duty Free for attitude adjustment, and made my way to the front of the line armed with my boarding pass. At the proverbial last moment an airline employee pulled me aside to inform me that my connecting flight from Zurich to Tel Aviv had been canceled.
The cascade of cancellations continued. Given a voucher for a hotel and dinner in Porto, I waited with the other Israelis in limbo.
With the rerouting to Amsterdam to catch an El Al plane home for Shavuot, it seemed my days as a wandering Jew were over.
Alas Porto Airport was fogged in. After sitting on the tarmac for an hour, we were asked to disembark. Some 90 minutes later, the jet took off for Amsterdam – too late to catch the connecting flight. Another day, another voucher. Each day I had to return to the transit desk at Schiphol Airport to get a new printout. Protocol does not permit these documents to be sent via the Internet or fax.
One might think that three nights marooned in Amsterdam during Shavuot – two days outside Israel – could be well spent, either at the city’s historic Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, or at temples of pot like The Bulldog or The Milky Way. But the Netherlands is in the grip of the dreadful COVID-19 plague. To illustrate this, hotel guests eat their meals in their room. The water fountains at Schiphol Airport have been turned off, and the food courts taped off to prevent anyone from lounging there. The whiskey is long gone, I never did get to sample Dutch marijuana, and I have remained stuck in my hotel room, tethered to my cellphone, watching Hamas’s rockets indiscriminately land in Ashkelon, Ashdod and Lod. As the IDF’s precision-guided munitions topple towers in Gaza, I wonder if my flight will be canceled again on Wednesday, and when travel will resume, and the truth be told. – G.Z.
Written at the Hotel Van der Valk, Amsterdam, this past Tuesday.