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Judy Cohen: My name is Judy Cohen. I'm the director of the Photo Archive, which is the
graphic database for the Museum.
This is a truly incredible collection. It's in some ways thousands of collections, because
it's a collection of well over a thousand documents and each document tells a unique
story.
They were donated to us by Enrico Mandel-Mantello, who is the son of a Jewish rescuer, George
Mandel-Mantello. His father passed away probably about fifteen years ago and just about five
years ago, the widow of his father's lawyer called him up and said, "We discovered a suitcase
with documents that your father created." And we met with Mantello several times after
this discovery and he then decided to donate the originals to the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum.
The collection consists for the most part in over a thousand Salvadoran citizenship
papers that were created by Mantello during the war between 1942 and 1944. The second
half of the collection are other documents, the most famous of which is the Auschwitz
Protocol.
He was not only a diplomat, but he himself was a survivor. He was a Hungarian Jew who
made his way to Switzerland and got what was actually a created title of being the first
secretary to the Consul General in El Salvador, by virtue of his friendship with the Consul
General, Colonel Jose Arturo Castellanos. And as soon as Mantello obtained this position
he used it to start his own rescue operation, not only in his native country of Hungary,
Romania--it was Hungarian-occupied Romania--but throughout Europe.
Mantello came to Switzerland in the summer of '42 and very soon afterwards some other
Jewish refugees came to him and said, "Would you give us some money?" And he said, "I'm
happy to give you money. What do you need it for?" And they said, "Well, we understand
that if you have enough money you can purchase South American certificates and we want to
send life-saving certificates back to our relatives who are still under Nazi control."
And Mantello was really offended that people were charging prohibitive amounts of money
for papers that had the potential to save human lives. So, fairly soon after that, we're
still talking 1942, he began issuing the first certificates.
Mantello created way too many certificates for one person to do them alone, so he hired
college students, in Switzerland, in Geneva, and they typed out each certificate individually.
After he created them, he then had a notarized Photostat made with lots of official stamps,
and he sent the notarized Photostats back to Nazi-occupied countries, either by diplomatic
pouch, by regular Swiss mail, which was still operative, sometimes by courier and he kept
the originals for security reasons with him in Switzerland, which is how we were able
to obtain the originals sixty-five years later.
The spread of the certificates affords to historians a unique opportunity to see what
was possible in different countries. In Belgium, we know of lots of people who were spared
deportation because of their certificates. In the Netherlands, we saw something different.
People with certificates were still deported, but they were deported not to Sobibor or Auschwitz,
which is where almost all the Dutch Jews went, but to a special camp in Bergen-Belsen that
was for foreign nationals. This isnít the part of Bergen-Belsen where Anne Frank went,
but it was a special one with much better conditions--people could wear their own clothes--because
these were foreign nationals that were being held for possible prisoner exchange. And really
the most amazing part of this at all, that we discovered from other documents in the
Museum's collection, is that two people with Mantello certificates from the Netherlands
were sent to Bergen-Belsen, were actually taken out of Bergen-Belsen, sent to Switzerland
and later to North Africa for an exchange with German prisoners. And this is January
1945, so, this is a remarkable story--how the certificates actually pulled people out
of the camps.
This certificated jumped out at me immediately when I saw it because I recognized the faces
and I recognized the names: it's Vivette and Julien Samuel, who themselves are great heroes
of the Holocaust. They're a Jewish couple in France who were head of the OSE; the OSE
was the organization that was saving Jewish children. And, we have their photos in the
Photo Archive. We recognized the face. They got married during the war, so we know that
this certificate--the information is very recent, because the certificate was issued
only about a year after they got married. And I'm also intrigued by the idea of it being
a case of rescuers looking for rescue themselves. They were doing incredible work--hiding Jewish
children in Jewish children's homes and bringing them to safety in other hiding places. And
here's a case of say, how is it that they had the confidence to do what they were doing
and it's interesting to know that they had in fact a Salvadoran certificate.
This certificate was issued to the Fisch family. The Fisches lived in Budapest; they had two
sons. The older son was a university student in Switzerland and he's the one who requested
the certificate and sent it back. Recognized the faces immediately as well as the names
because we have some wonderful photographs that were donated by the younger son, Robert
Fisch. And he told me the following story about the certificate. His father unfortunately
didn't survive. The certificate arrived... The reason being, that his mother was very,
very worried and she asked to hold the certificate on... in her presence. At one point the father
had to go out. He went out; left the mother at home and the father was picked upóhe was
without the certificate. The mother afterwards went into hiding with the certificate. The
younger son, Robert, was already in a Hungarian labor battalion. So, the certificate was used
to save the mother. And what's also interesting about it is his older brother Paul, in addition
to donating another document--this is the brother who was in Switzerland--donated a
different copy of the Auschwitz Protocol because he was also involved in Mantello's operation.
In late December 1943, he succeeds in bringing his son out of Budapest. His wife stays behind
because her parents don't want to leave. She's with her parents. His son comes out--it's
difficult, but again, people thought that Hungary was a relative safe haven. Hungary
was allied with Germany, which meant that though it was anti-Semitic and there were
anti-Semitic laws and Jews had to go to labor battalions, they weren't being deported to
concentration camps.
Just a couple months after his son gets out of Hungary, comes to Switzerland in March
of 1944, Germany invades Hungary... and immediately the calculation changes. And at this point
Mantello realizes that it's not just saving other Jews, but it's his own immediate family
that's at risk. Because he was so desperate to save his family, rather than just issue
them a certificate that would go by courier that may or may not arrive, he asked a Romanian
diplomat, who was actually an anti-Fascist Romanian diplomat, by the name of Florian
Manoliu, to personally hand-deliver the certificates to his parents and his extended family in
Bistritza. Manoliu goes; he's held up at the border by the Germans, he has some difficulty.
He makes his way to Bistritza; he arrives two days after the entire Jewish community
had been deported to Auschwitz. He gets there and finds out that there's no one left to
save. From there, his next stop was Budapest where he also went at the request of Mantello.
And he went to the Swiss consulate and he's taken to meet with Miklos Kraus. Miklos Kraus
gives him this condensed copy of the Auschwitz Protocol.
There're two parts to it. One is, describing city by city, which towns in Hungary were
now "judenrein"--had no Jews left in them anymore--and also a detailed operation of
how the killings were going on in Auschwitz. So, together with a copy of the Protocol and
the news of what had gone on in Bistritz, Manoliu comes back to Switzerland and meets
with Mantello. So, Mantello finds out late at night--he arrives in the middle of the
night--the two pieces of news: one is that your parents have been deported to Auschwitz;
two, Auschwitz is a giant killing center where already, according to the document, 1,700,000
Jews had been murdered. At this point, Mantello became even more of a haunted man. Other people
had copies of the Auschwitz Protocol but they were worrying was it politically correct to
distribute it, what would be the ramifications, would people believe it? Mantello thought
he had nothing to lose.
He also knew that as a Hungarian Jew he had limited credibility. So, what he did is he
went to the heads of the Protestant clergy in Switzerland. He showed them a copy--he
had the students who were working with him translate it into a number of languages. The
Swiss Clergy got the copy and immediately started giving sermons in all the churches
throughout Switzerland. There were articles appearing in all the Swiss press. At this
point, it was picked up overseas and about a week later, the first article about Auschwitz
appears in the New York Times. And it cites as its source--"We have a totally reliable
source"--and mentions, the Swiss clergy. And so, for the first time, the greater world
knew what was going on.
Enrico Mandel-Mantello: So, I thought that the best thing would be for my father's memory
to leave, to give them to the Holocaust Museum. And offering access to everyone to these documents
and on the Web site and with all the modern means, now it's not putting documents in an
archive where they disappear and collect dust, but they become alive. And, so this is why
it was very important, and also, there was a sentimental side to this because I lost
my grandparents in Auschwitz, I lost almost all my family and I sort of wanted a resting
place for them and I think the two things coincide: the people that my father saved
and the family that we lost. So, if they're resting in the same museum, I mean thatís
sort of a great consolation for me.
Judy Cohen: The collection has taught us an enormous amount about rescue, but it also
has raised a lot of questions. One of the questions is: why were the same documents
recognized by the Nazis in one country and not in another? More basic question is, how
many people actually survived who received the documents? And so, with this in mind,
I'd hope that if anybody recognizes a relative, or themselves, in one the certificates that
they contact me at the Museum so that we can use the document as a way of telling their
story and of amplifying the rescue mission of George Mandel-Mantello.