Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese diplomat and hero who singlehandedly saved tens of thousands of lives of people fleeing the Nazi persecution in 1940. On October 19, 2021, Sousa Mendes was laid to rest in the National Pantheon in Lisbon, Portugal. He was proudly Portuguese and had a deep love of country, family, and the arts. He served as the Portuguese consulate general in Bordeaux, France, in 1940. When Hitler launched his invasion of France on May 10, 1940, millions of people suddenly found themselves in imminent danger from Nazi attack. Thousands sought visas in the consulate in Bordeaux trying to escape. In June of 1940, Sousa Mendes issued an estimated 30,000 visas, including to roughly 10,000 Jews fleeing for their lives with their families, despite the Salazar regime having forbidden their diplomats in Portugal from issuing such visas to refugees. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer cited Sousa Mendes' actions as perhaps the largest rescue action by a single individual during the Holocaust. As a punishment for disobeying the mandates of his country's Salazar regime, Sousa Mendes was stripped of his job, denied a pension, and pushed into poverty. His home was repossessed, and he suffered two strokes before passing away in 1954. ``I may have erred,'' he wrote, ``but if so, I did it unintentionally, having followed the voice of my conscience, which . . .…”