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José Castellanos, the Schindler from El Salvador

the consul rescued 20,000-40,000 Jews from mass murder

The Schindler from El Salvador. So was called José Arturo Castellanos, consul general in neutral Geneva from 1942 to 1945. 
Born in 1893 in the Republic of El Salvador, the colonel and diplomat successfully stepped in to rescue an unknown number of Jews - from 20,000 to 40,000, from Nazi extermination. 

At the beginning of his mandate as consul to Geneva, he was approached by György Mandl, Jewish businessman of Rumanian descent, who begged him to protect him ad his family. Castellanos did not hesitate to help him: he provided him with Salvadorean documents and then he appointed him first secretary in his consulate, a post that had not existed before. 

Mandl, who took on the more Latin name of Mantello, was though very worried about the thousands Jews who were in the same situation. Thus he suggested the consul to distribute more Salvadorean passports, who would give the possessors also the right to received protection from the International Red Cross and the Swiss consulate to Budapest. Castellanos accepted this, although such a deed could put his own diplomatic career at risk. General Maximiliano Hernàndes Martìnez, Salvadorean President, was thus a supporter of Nazism.  
The trick made it possible to him to rescue thousands lives in Bulgaria, Czechoslowakya, Hungary, Poland and Romania from Nazi persecutions and death camps.
For his rescue deed, Castellanos was awarded the title of Righteous among the nations by Yad Vashem in 2010. This was owed in particular to the testimony of Yitzhak Meir, a professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University who survived the Holocaust thanks to the consul's deed. 

15 April 2013

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