By Karen McDonough, JTA
PASSOVER EDITION 5776
On the surface, it seems unlikely that an American composer — let alone a Southern Baptist from Alabama — would write a musical treatment about a largely unknown Holocaust hero.
But for musical composer Neely Bruce, creating an oratorio depicting the life of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese diplomat who rescued thousands of Jews from the Nazis during World War II, was a dive into history, politics and musical exploration.
Bruce, who was raised a Southern Baptist, considered converting to Judaism after a cousin married a Jew and he was further exposed to the culture and theology. Though he didnt, his strong interest in Judaism remained.
What pulled him to the project, though, was the political back story. ”This wasn’t just one man doing a good thing. He was defying his government, which was not on the right side of history,” Bruce told JNS. Some of Bruce’s previous work includes a Bill of Rights musical and a bubonic plague rock opera.
Righteous Among the Nations
New York City’s Center for Jewish History is hosting a Sousa Mendes exhibition, ”Portugal, The Last Hope: Sousa Mendes’ Visas for Freedom,” from April 7-Sept. 9, 2016.
It’s likely that many who visit will learn about this unsung Holocaust hero for the first time, despite his recognition by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, the highest Israeli honor given to non-Jews who stood up to Nazi genocide.
Sousa Mendes was Catholic, but a descendant of conversos Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity some 500 years earlier during the Spanish Inquisition. He was the Portuguese consul stationed in Bordeaux, France, with his wife and 12 children at the outbreak of WW II. With Hitlers invasion of France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands in May, 1940, thousands of Jewish refugees were forced to flee south. Their last hope was Portugal.
That June, Sousa Mendes issued thousands of lifesaving visas to Jewish and non-Jewish refugees against his governments Circular 14 directive, which made it illegal for Holocaust refugees to pass through Portugal. For his heroic act, Sousa Mendes was harshly punished by his government.
His story is the subject of the documentary film ”Disobedience: The Sousa Mendes Story,” a book written by one of his sons and Bruce’s oratorio, ”Circular 14: The Apotheosis of Aristides,” which recently premiered at Los Angeles American Jewish University.
Sousa Mendes Foundation President Olivia Mattis, a PhD musicologist and Bruce’s colleague, commissioned the oratorio marking the 50th anniversary of the Righteous designation.
”[Presenting history through music] is an effective way to capture audiences who might not otherwise have heard the story,” Mattis told JNS.
Escaping the Nazis
Daniel Matuzewitz was seven years old in Brussels when the Nazis invaded in 1940. His family left by train while his father, who was in the leather business, stayed behind to pay off his debts. The family planned to meet in Paris, but when that city was bombed on June 3, the ensuing chaos made meeting up difficult.
Eventually, the family reunited and took a train to Bordeaux, France, where Daniel’s father met Rabbi Chaim Kruger, a Polish Jew who migrated to Brussels in the 1920s. He, too, was trying to flee with his wife and five children. Kruger told the Matuzewitzes to go to the Portuguese Consulate for the required visa to leave.
Only a month earlier in Bordeaux, Kruger met Sousa Mendes, who gave the rabbi and his family safe refuge inside the consuls personal living quarters, and the two forged a friendship.
By the time the Matuzewitzes got to the Consulate, thousands of refugees amassed outside, spilling over into a makeshift tent city in the nearby Parc des Quinconces. The refugees needed three visas a French exit visa, a destination visa (the Portuguese visa Sousa Mendes provided) and a Spanish transit visa to pass through that country.
Sousa Mendes was faced with the moral dilemma of obeying his country’s law or helping desperate refugees destined for death.
In a June 13, 1940 letter, Sousa Mendes wrote that the situation in Bordeaux was horrible, and he was in bed suffering a nervous breakdown, Mattis said. Sometime around this date, he decided to issue thousands of visas. But when the refugees got to the French/Spanish border on June 21, Spanish authorities refused them entry, creating a huge bottleneck. Sousa Mendes arrived there, and after arguing with the border guards, he lifted the gate himself allowing the people to cross.
The crossings went on until the end of June, when the border was sealed.
The Matuzewitzes then took a train to the Portuguese border. Upon arrival, Portuguese officials decided which Jews would sail to other countries and which ones had to stay, assigned to fixed residences in certain villages.
In these temporary quarters, their passports were taken, they were issued identification cards and they were barred from leaving. Eventually, by 1942, all of the refugees got passage out.
Among the lucky ones, the Matuzewitzes were permitted to sail to Brazil, where they stayed for a year before arriving in the US in 1941. Upon entering, their family name was Americanized and shortened to Mattis.
Severely punished
While researching Sousa Mendes story for his oratorio, Bruce learned the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, in power at that time, had a personal vendetta against Sousa Mendes and condemned him harsher than the Portuguese legal system.
The diplomat was fined $10,000, a relatively minor punishment, for violating Circular 14. But Salazar stripped him of his job and his social stature, and he was prevented from earning a living to support his children, who were eventually sent to live with various Catholic families in North America. (Sousa Mendes had 14 children, two of whom died young, with his first wife, and a 15th child with his second wife after the war.) The family estate and their possessions were taken, and he died penniless in 1954. His last wish was for his children to clear his name.
Many of those children ended up in the US, including his son, Sebastian, who wrote his fathers plight in the 1951 book, Flight Through Hell which presents the story as fiction to protect his father from further persecution.
A few years later, his daughter, Joana, started a vigorous letter-writing campaign to clear her fathers name. She appealed to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who ordered 20 trees planted in Israel in Sousa Mendes memory in 1962.
In 1966, he was posthumously awarded the Righteous honor by Yad Vashem. His descendants then turned toward their homeland, where further clearing the Sousa Mendes name meant Portuguese government intervention.
His son, John Paul Abranches, petitioned Lisbon to reopen the case and honor his father as a hero. With help from northern Californias Jewish community, where Abranches lived, and several Jewish US congressmen, the Portuguese parliament exonerated Sousa Mendes in 1988 and ordered reparations for the family.
The descendants, who never received the money directly, used the funds to start the Portuguese foundation, Fundaçao Aristides de Sousa Mendes, to reacquire their ancestral home to create a permanent memorial.
Reconnecting with the past
In 2010, Mattis father, Daniel, was watching French-language TV when he randomly caught the documentary on Sousa Mendes, recognizing him as the man who saved his family, the Matuzewitzes, 70 years earlier. He was shocked to learn the diplomat suffered and lost everything.
Equally stunned was his daughter, Olivia, who started searching for Sousa Mendes descendants and connected with several of his children on Facebook.
”I never knew he was punished and exiled for saving people like my dad and his family,” she said. ”It stopped me dead in my tracks.”
She realized that partnering with family members to form the US-based Sousa Mendes Foundation could help preserve this part of Holocaust history.
A grant allowed the foundation to document the visa recipients personal stories, which are mostly still held within families and not part of written Holocaust remembrance.
In its effort to preserve Holocaust history, the foundation website allows visitors to search for visa recipients by name, country, ship or the Portuguese region where they lived.
Fundraising efforts include plans to help make the Sousa Mendes ancestral home in Cabanas de Viriato, Portugal, into a museum.
The foundation also funded a traveling artifacts exhibit, the oratorio and a graphic novel for youngsters to learn about Sousa Mendes actions.
”It’s incumbent on the entire Jewish community,” said Mattis, “to remember those who saved our lives.”
