Diplomat Heroes of the Holocaust
Paldiel is director of the Righteous Among the Nations Department at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Institute in Israel, his book recounting how 28 diplomats in China, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland, Brazil, the Netherlands, Turkey, Italy, Yugoslavia, Japan, and Germany risked everything to save the lives of thousands of Jews. He submits that when acting on their own, diplomats faced two choices: either to disobey instructions from their superiors that forbade them to issue visas or other documents that would protect the bearer against persecution or to reinterpret the instructions in such a way as to make it appear as if they were carrying out their country's immigration policy even though they were turning it upside down. Either way, diplomats faced the possibility of serious consequences to themselves. Among them were Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved many Hungarian Jews, and Chiune Sugihara, a diplomat and spy at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania, who saved as many as 10,000 Jews from deportation. The others are less known, but Paldiel now has rescued them from oblivion.George CohenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved