The Foreign Affairs Minister, at the presentation.
The Diplomat. 12/02/2016
The historian and political expert José Antonio Lisbona includes in his work “Más allá del deber: La respuesta humanitaria del Servicio Exterior frente al Holocausto” (Beyond duty: the humanitarian response of the Foreign Service facing the Holocaust), the intervention of 18 Spanish diplomats who were able to save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust of the Nazi Germany.
On Wednesday, during the book presentation at the Santa Cruz Palace, the Foreign Minister, José Manuel García-Margallo, praised the work carried out by the civil servants of the Spanish Foreign Service, who, risking their lives and leaving aside the instructions received from Franco’s Government, prevented 8,000 Jews, most of them Sephardim, from being victims of deportation and the Nazi extermination.
The minister said that they are “an example of which Spain can be especially proud” and he added that, in the middle of the dark, “there were a few glimmers of light”, which were the righteous among the nations, “those who, by risking their own safety and lives, were not indifferent to the suffering of other human lives”, he stated.
Margallo and the Israeli Ambassador presented the book by historian José Antonio Lisbona
The event was attended by Israel’s Ambassador to Madrid, Daniel Kutner, as well as by relatives of those being honoured in the book, of those Jews who could save their lives, and representatives of the Jewish communities in Spain.
The book, which is the result of a thorough research, is the continuation of the exhibition inaugurated at the Santa Cruz Palace, in November 2014, in which a plaque in memory of the 18 diplomats and civil servants of Foreign Affairs was unveiled. Among them are Ángel Sanz Briz, also known as ‘Budapest’s angel’, or Bernardo Rolland y de Miota, consul general of Spain to Paris, who, in October 1940, opposed to the application of anti-Semitic regulations of the German military administration on Spanish citizens of Jewish origin and was able to repatriate 126 people to Spain, among them Daniel Carasso, former owner of Danone.
The list is completed by Antonio Zuloaga Dethomas, son of the Basque painter Ignacio Zuloaga and press attaché at Paris Embassy and Vichy, José Rojas y Moreno, Miguel Ángel Muguiro, Sebastián Romero Rodrigales, Father Ireneo Typaldos, Manuel Gómez Barzanallana, Julio Palencia, Eduardo Gasset, Alfonso Fiscowich, Eduardo Propper, Alejandro Pons, José Ruiz Santaella (along with Carmen Schrader), Luis Martínez Merello, Fernando Canthal, Jorge (Giorgio) Perlasca y Santos Montero (Samuel Skornicki).
