Research reveals heroes’ actions

February 28, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

NEW YORK (AP) — It took Ina Polak 35 years to discover the dusty piece of paper that probably saved her and her family in Bergen- Belsen concentration camp.

It wasn’t until she was cleaning her mother’s New York City apartment after her death in 1980 that she discovered the document listing her, her sister and parents. It was a Salvadoran citizenship certificate.

“My first reaction was ‘Oh, now I understand!’” said Polak, who is 87.

She and her family were Dutch Jews, with nothing to connect them with the distant Central American country of El Salvador. Yet the certificate dated 1944 became their lifeline, thanks to a man named George Mantello.

Mantello, a Jew born in what is now Romania, was one of a handful of diplomats who during World War II saved thousands of Jews and others on the run from the Nazis by giving them visas or citizenships, often without their governments’ knowledge.

They were men such as Hiram Bingham IV, a U.S. consular official in Marseille, France, who issued visas and other travel documents that are credited with helping to rescue about 2,000 people; or Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese envoy in Lithuania, thought to have saved 3,500; or Dr. Feng Shan Ho, the Chinese consul in Vienna whose visas got 18,000 Jews to safety in Shanghai.

Best known of all is Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden, whose efforts probably contributed to saving 90,000 Jewish lives in Hungary before he vanished in what became an abiding mystery of the Holocaust.

Now the work of Mantello is getting fresh attention as scholars dig into newly released files and piece together the lives he saved by gaming the diplomatic bureaucracy during the Holocaust — the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators in World War II.

Working as first secretary in the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva, Switzerland, Mantello used a network of contacts to issue papers to Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe between 1942 and 1944 —up to 10,000 documents, according to his son, Enrico Mantello.

The same figure is given by the late historian David Kranzler in his 2000 book about the diplomat called “The Man who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz.” The book also describes Mantello’s critical role in publicizing the so-called Auschwitz Protocol, a description of the Nazis’ biggest death camp by two escaped inmates.

It is not determined how many lives were saved by Mantello’s documents — “definitely, hundreds,” says Mordecai Paldiel, a Holocaust studies professor at Yeshiva University in New York. A letter from Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat who worked with Mantello, speaks of “thousands” saved.

Without the Salvadoran certificate, Polak and her family would likely have been worked to death in Bergen-Belsen or sent to other camps or the salt mines. Instead they were moved to a small camp enclosure full of Jews with Latin American documents and finally put on a train out of Bergen- Belsen along with 2,400 people and were rescued by U.S. troops in April 1945.

“Back then,” Polak said, if a German official “saw a paper, and if it had the right stamp on it and the signature, then it was legal. People with these papers were eligible, in the Germans’ eyes, to be sent to a neutral country, to a better camp.”

Mantello sent out notarized copies of the certificates and kept the originals, more than 1,000 of which were found in a suitcase in a Geneva basement in 2005 and donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., by his son three years later.

Now museum researchers are trying to trace recipients of the certificates to get an idea of how many of them actually saved lives and learn the full scope of Mantello’s rescue efforts. The citizenship certificates can be viewed on the museum Web site, http://bit.ly/at7GjV .

Judith Cohen, director of photo archives, says she has discovered how two Dutch families were released from Bergen-Belsen in January 1945 thanks to the documents, sent first to Switzerland and then to North Africa to be exchanged for German prisoners.

“We know that Salvadoran certificates actually helped pull someone out of the concentration camp and send them to freedom,” said Cohen.

In a speech last year, she noted that “even when the rescue attempts were unsuccessful, the mere existence of the certificates proves that people cared for others and tried to extend help to friends under occupation to a greater extent than is commonly acknowledged.”

And the areas targeted by the rescuers helps fill in another blank in Holocaust history by indicating “who knew what when” about what was going on under the Nazi thumb, she said.

After the war, Polak, who lives in Eastchester, New York, married a fellow survivor, Jaap Polak. She believes that maybe her father’s friends gave Mantello the name of her family.

Her father, Abraham Soep, was a diamond manufacturer in Amsterdam and probably received the citizenship certificate while the family was in a Dutch transit Nazi camp before being sent to Bergen- Belsen (the same camp where another girl from Holland, the diarist Anne Frank, perished).

Citizenship papers entitled their holders to sometimes wear their own clothes instead of prison uniforms and to live in a separate section of Bergen-Belsen.

The difference was critical, said Paul Shapiro, director of the Washington museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. “Remember that if you were in the wrong part of the camp, you were dead.”

The Germans, for their part, had a use for Jewish prisoners with such documents — to trade for German nationals held in Latin America or the U.S.