Call to honour El Salvador's rescuer of Jews after war role rediscovered

José Castellanos

He was El Salvador's equivalent of Oskar Schindler, a man who was given a chance to do something about the Holocaust - and took it.

Now, six decades after José Castellanos helped to save 25,000 Jews by granting bogus nationality certificates, the story of the central American nation's consul general to Switzerland during the second world war has been rediscovered.

"The memory of our father is out of the desk, out of the drawers and on the table again," Frieda Garcia, one of the diplomat's daughters, told a news conference at El Salvador's embassy in Washington this week, amid calls for Castellanos to be honoured posthumously by Israel.

Castellanos, an army colonel, served as a diplomat in Liverpool and Hamburg before being posted to Geneva in 1942 where he befriended a Romanian Jew, Gyorgy Mandl. To protect Mandl he appointed him to the fictitious post of first secretary and amended his name to the more Latino-sounding George Mandel-Mantello.

The two men set about issuing blank nationality certificates for Jews in German-occupied central Europe, especially Hungary. To make them seem more authentic the documents, signed by Mantello, were stamped by other consulates in Geneva before being spirited over the border to grateful recipients who filled in their details.

The so-called "freedom papers" afforded protection against deportation to Nazi extermination camps and gave meaning to the name El Salvador, which means The Saviour. Many of the documents were sent to Budapest where Carl Lutz, the Swiss vice-consul, provided sanctuary to thousands of Jews at an abandoned glass factory known as his "Glass House".

Neither Castellanos nor Mandl had the authority to issue the documents, and El Salvador had sided with the allies against Germany, but the papers offered some protection from Nazi round-ups. It did not matter that few recipients would ever travel to their supposed homeland, a tiny country of rainforest and Pacific coast 6,000 miles away, wedged between Guatemala and Honduras, and that possibly few had even heard of it before.

Castellanos and Mandl persuaded suspicious Swiss and Hungarian officials that the documents were genuine and that there was indeed a sizeable Salvadorean diaspora in this corner of Europe. The initiative evoked the efforts of Raul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, and Schindler, a German industrialist, who separately risked their lives and fortunes to save thousands of Jews.

After the war Castellanos lived a quiet life and played down his role, said Garcia. "He said whoever was in his place would have done the same. For him it was not heroic nor spectacular."

The writer Leon Uris tracked down the retired diplomat in 1972 and Castellanos gave a brief radio interview in 1976 but otherwise he remained anonymous and his contribution went unrecognised. He died in 1977, three years after Schindler's equally low-key passing.

Until now Latin America's best known role in the Nazi genocide was the "rat lines" which spirited wanted war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann to Argentina and Klaus Barbie to Bolivia. Castellanos's story has been brought to light by a new documentary film called The Glass House, directed and produced by Brad and Leonor Marlowe, and a campaign in El Salvador by the foreign ministry and the country's small Jewish community.

"This is the story of a man with great courage who stood up against a system," Ricardo Moran Ferracuti, a Salvadorian official, told the Cox News Service. The campaign has urged Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum to confer the title Righteous Gentile on Castellanos.

Guardian