- Person
- George Mantello
- Lived
- 1901–1992
- Field
- Holocaust rescue
- From
- Hungarian-Romanian
The story
George Mantello was born György Mandl on 11 December 1901 to Orthodox Jewish parents in Lekence, a village in Transylvania, then part of Hungary. His grandfather was a rabbi and his father owned a mill. Between the wars he became a businessman, and through his work he befriended José Arturo Castellanos, El Salvador's consul. As Hungary and Romania allied with Nazi Germany, Jews in the region came under growing threat.
In 1942 Castellanos, now consul general in Geneva, brought him to the safety of Switzerland and gave him the title of First Secretary at the Salvadoran consulate. It was then that he added the surname Mantello. Castellanos had already asked his own government in 1939 for permission to help Europe's Jews, and had been refused.
When Jews asked Mantello for money to buy Latin American protective papers being sold on the black market, he was offended that anyone would profit from their desperation. With Castellanos's approval he instead began issuing free certificates of Salvadoran citizenship, typed by hired students and covered with official stamps. They were sent across Nazi-occupied Europe by diplomatic pouch, ordinary Swiss mail and underground couriers. A German officer faced with such a paper risked trouble if he mistreated a citizen of a neutral country. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum calls it the largest Holocaust rescue most people have never heard of, and its research found that 90 percent of certificate holders in Belgium survived, where nearly half of all Belgian Jews were murdered.
In March 1944 Germany occupied Hungary. Mantello sent the Romanian diplomat Florian Manoliu with papers for his family, but the Jews of his parents' town had already been deported to Auschwitz. In Budapest, Manoliu obtained copies of the Auschwitz reports by escaped prisoners and an account of the deportation of Hungarian Jews, and he gave them to Mantello in Geneva on 21 June 1944.
Unlike many who received such reports, Mantello publicised them within a day. With the Swiss pastor Paul Vogt he set off sermons, street protests and a Swiss press campaign of more than 400 headlines, defying censorship. World leaders warned Hungary's regent, Miklós Horthy, who ordered the mass transports to Auschwitz stopped in July 1944. The pause allowed Raoul Wallenberg and Carl Lutz to protect many of Budapest's remaining Jews. Mantello later received an honorary doctorate from Yeshiva University.
Why it matters
Mantello's papers and his press campaign helped save thousands of Jews and forced the world to confront what was happening at Auschwitz.
About George Mantello
Transylvanian Jewish businessman who, as a Salvadoran diplomat in Geneva, issued protective citizenship papers to Jews and broke the news of Auschwitz to the Swiss public in 1944.
Sources
- Thousands of False Identities United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- George Mantello Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.